select Quantitative results

Here, we report on a subset of our results, those which Will be presented at the Linguistics Society of America's 2019 Meeting on Friday, Jan 4 at 12:45 PM

select demographic Information about respondents

For now, this section only includes social identities which we present in the graphs below; watch this space for more results later!

Gender

48% of all respondents self-identified as female (N=679)

24.7% of all respondents self-identified as male (N=350)

4.3% of all respondents self-identified as something other than female or male alone, including non-binary, trans man, trans woman, and gender non-conforming (N=61), which we coded as Other for the purposes of the graphs below

The remainder of participants were excluded from the analyses which included gender:

  • 22.8% of all respondents who left this option blank (N=323)
  • 1 respondent who wrote something bigoted about gender identity
  • 1 respondent who selected the option "I prefer not to answer"

Race/Ethnicity

60% of all respondents self-identified as white (N=834)

14.6% of all respondents self-identified as something other than white (N=230), and were coded as POC or "Person of Color" for the purposes of the graphs below.

The remainder of participants were excluded from the analyses which included race/ethnicity:

  • 24.7% of all respondents who left this option blank (N=343)
  • 1 respondent who wrote something bigoted about race
  • 6 respondents who selected the option "I prefer not to answer"

Experience of bias

Taken together, our results show clearly that the experience of bias among linguists and language researchers is not uniformly distributed, but, rather, those who occupy social identities historically underrepresented in academia are more likely to have negative experiences in professional and professional-adjacent settings.

In addition, we found that academic trajectory has an effect on how often respondents reported bias incidents, with students and senior faculty most like to respond “never”.

There are many potential explanations for this, and some of the open-ended responses indicate middle-stage researchers often realized that their experiences in graduate school were toxic after the fact.

Avoidance of spaces

There was a total of 1995 responses. The bar graph represents more than 60% of the seven most frequent responses.

Avoiding departmental social events accounted for 14.5% of the responses.

How often have you witnessed bias incidents?

If you have experienced a bias incident, did a bystander intervene?


"have you ever been told you're not a linguist or your research is not linguistics?"

There was a total of 933 responses.

42% (N = 392) said yes. 58% (N = 541) said no.