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Comment by Raphmedia | Hacker News Reader

Help me understand this test that they did.

So, they have taken a group of homosexuals, without any history of leadership, and asked a group to rate how they would do as CEO based on voice only. The group answered based on sound alone that those individuals were not CEO material.

Well, I wouldn't pass as a CEO either and I don't have a, I quote, "‘gay- sounding’ voice".

The leaders I have know -- both male and female -- had huge charismatic voices. They had presence. They spoke in a room full of people and their voice would pick up. They would get attention right away.

How is the lack of this voice linked to discrimination against the gay community?

For this study to have any values in my eyes they would need to test actual CEOs. Actual people in leadership positions.

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They took men and women who were both gay and straight and demonstrated a bias in expected leadership ability based on perceived sexual orientation. They are not comparing charisma, the voice selected where selected specifically to have a high likelyhood of being attributed as gay or straight.

Arguing that a difference in outcome from this is because CEOs all sound charismatic and that they are able to pick up attention of a crowd better when there is a demonstrated bias between the two when the difference involved is specifically whether a voice is perceived as gay or straight implies that gay speakers are less likely to have those characteristics. Which is exactly what the paper's conclusion is, a bias against people who are perceived as gay for leadership positions based on their voice.

    We investigated this issue in four studies (overall N = 276), conducted in Italian language, 
    in which heterosexual listeners were exposed to single-sentence voice samples of gay/lesbian 
    and heterosexual speakers. In all four studies, listeners were found to make gender-typical 
    inferences about traits and preferences of heterosexual speakers, but gender-atypical inferences 
    about those of gay or lesbian speakers. Behavioral intention measures showed that listeners 
    considered lesbian and gay speakers as less suitable for a leadership position, and male 
    (but not female) listeners took distance from gay speakers. Together, this research demonstrates 
    that having a gay/lesbian rather than heterosexual-sounding voice has tangible consequences for 
    stereotyping and discrimination.

I think the sexuality bit is getting shoehorned in here, though. I'd want to see evidence that the study used charismatic, "big" voices that were judged as both straight and gay and still show that there is a bias against those perceived as gay.

Not only that but especially for CEO, hiring decisions are not made in a vacuum like this. Were the participants given mock resumes and career history? In an actual hiring process, again especially for CEO, the folks on Board responsible almost certainly would be familiar with the candidates' previous work, and probably know them already.

Being familiar with the client introduces another area of potential bias, removing that allows us to compare the specific variable being tested for.

I'm not entirely sure why the big voices thing is important. It's not like they were saying all the voices had low favourability or that what were perceived as gay voices had low favourability, they were demonstrating a difference between the two groups based on that one variable. Whether they were all high up the rankings or all low down the rankings is irrelevant, you just need them to be all within the same band. It's the difference that is what is being tested for.

> So, they have taken a group of homosexuals, without any history of leadership, and asked a group to rate how they would do as CEO based on voice only. The group answered based on sound alone that those individuals were not CEO material.

Forgive me for asking this, but the article is currently unavailable due to 503.

Did they describe at all the group who did the rating and choosing?

I would think that if the goal was to identify whether or not homosexuals are barred from senior corporate leadership positions, they'd want to test groups of people who actually evaluate people for suitability in senior corporate leadership positions. As opposed to average people who only know CEOs from television, and thus could only evaluate whether someone fits the Hollywood stereotype of what a CEO is.

"Participants were recruited online through students’ contacts at a large Italian university. In Study 1a, the final sample consisted of 81 participants (37 males, Mage = 21.89 years, SD = 3.73). This sample was obtained after excluding participants who self-identified as non-heterosexuals (n = 9) or who had reported technical problems (n = 5) from the 95 participants who had completed the survey.

In Study 2a, participants were recruited through students’ contacts using a snowball procedure and provided with the link to an online survey. The final sample consisted of 63 participants (35 males and 28 females; Mage = 26.57 years, SD = 5.59). From the initial sample of 117 participants who had access to the survey, we excluded those who identified as non-heterosexual (n = 9), reported technical problems (n = 13), failed to complete the survey (n = 15), or did not correctly recall the job vacancy (n = 17).

In Study 2b, groups of students were tested simultaneously in the same room. Each participant individually completed an online survey using headphones. The final sample consisted of 92 participants (3 males and 89 females, Mage = 19.45 years, SD = 1.39). From the initial sample of 152 participants, we excluded those who identified as non-heterosexual (n = 8), reported technical problems (n = 15), or failed to correctly recall the job vacancy (n = 23)."

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-017-0962-0

Ok, so the study actually tells us nothing about whether actual gay people are being discriminated against in employment as corporate executives. Instead, it tells us whether millenial Italians who have never had to think about employing a corporate executive, think that random gay people off the street fit their perception of who would make a good CEO.

I guess if you were going to do a first-pass to even see if people could be discriminated against for "sounding gay" it wouldn't be so bad but extrapolating any further than that seems like a big stretch.

This was my problem with the article. The study is alright, it doesn't draw any extreme conclusion.

The article's title is horrible. "Gay men and lesbian women less likely to be employed in a leadership position" ... really?

> So, they have taken a group of homosexuals, without any history of leadership

I believe the study made up backgrounds of the "candidates" to suggest they were qualified for the job, it wasn't like they just brought in someone off the street and asked a bunch of people "would you hire them as CEO"

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