Saturday, March 24, 2018

Vocal fry and Valley speak


HALLIE EPHRON: Way back in the 70s, there was much sturm und drang about how teenagers were ruining the English language with Valley Speak. This was the way so-called Valley Girls (as in from San Fernando, southern California) spoke, and It was about uptalk--inflecting statements upward at the end as if they were questions. ("My name is Hallie?") And adding meaningless placeholder words like "like," and "you know," and "we should, like totally..." Whatever.

Think of the movies "Clueless" and "Legally Blonde."

Valley Speak is far from gone -- as recently as 2014 the BBC was bemoaning "the unstoppable march of upward inflection."

But supplanting it is the same kind of hand-wringing about something called vocal fry. Apparently this involves speaking in a gratingly low register, something perfected by Kim Kardashian. Reading about this sent me scurrying to the Internet because (I know, this is hard to believe) I've never heard Kim K actually talk.

If you're curious, watch this.

So have you heard of vocal fry? Seriously, do people talk like this? Because it sounds pretty grody to me. I mean, seriously, like can you even understand a word she's saying?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I am very familiar with this. I LOATHE this. Yes, people talk like this,. It is... excruciating.  (That video is ridiculously edited, so Kim K is not saying full sentences.)   And in real life, you can understand it perfectly. Often, even announcers on NPR speak this way.

I think it is supposed to sound sexy and cool.  But, again, it is excruciating.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I had no idea until I started playing YouTube videos! It's horrible!!!! (How many exclamation marks am I allowed?) And now that I've heard it, I know I'm going to notice it everywhere. (Thanks, Hallie...)

Why would women want to sound like they've had throat surgery? It is so NOT sexy, and not smart or sophisticated. Voice teachers everywhere must be cringing.

JENN McKINLAY: I couldn't see Kim K (I've never heard her speak, either) on YouTube but the next video popped right up  and the young woman really breaks it down, pointing out that vocal fry makes you sound like a frog. Ribbit. I can't imagine any conversation where I'd want to sound like a frog, but I admit I was most def a Valley Speaker back in high school, like, you know? Gag me with a spoon, I know. And now I'm torn as to which is more annoying upspeak or frying. Hmm.

RHYS BOWEN: Add me to the list who have never heard Kim or any Kardashian speak (and never wants to either! I'm horrified how supposedly educated, influential people have all adopted former Valley Girl inflections and meaningless filler like "Y'know" . I've just listened to the You Tube. All I can say is "OMG. Like Totally Disgusting!"

INGRID THOFT: This is horrible.  I avoid all things Kardashian, but I took one for the team and watched some YouTube videos demonstrating vocal fry.  I think I find the uptalk phenomenon even more annoying because it makes the speaker sound so dumb.  Also, I just saw this week in an "Ask Amy" column that vocal fry can damage your vocal cords.  Does that mean the Kardashians may eventually go quiet? 

HALLIE: Oh my, we can only hope. That would be the silver lining.

And it turns out that it's not just women who fry. TIME reported in November: "Women aren’t the only ones who use vocal fry. In a forthcoming study of 18- to 22-year-olds, researchers at Centenary College of Louisiana found that young men not only fry, but they do so more than young women. 'Our data showed that men spend about 25% of their time speaking using fry, while women use it about 10% of the time,' says Jessica Alexander, an assistant professor of psychology at the college."

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I don't know about "vocal fry," but as the mother of a 17-year-old, I can tell you the upward inflection, the everything-is-a-question, and peppering paragraphs with "like" and "you know" are alive and well and living at your local high school.

The thing I can't understand is...where does it go? I don't hear adults talking like that. My mother made sure I lost those annoying verbal tics by answering, 

"No, I don't know,"
Every. Time. I. Said, "You know?"

That will clear your language up real fast, but she can't be doing that for EVERY American teen.

HALLIE: Yes, the eternal question: Where is Julia's mother when we need her?!

So I confess I wasn't aware of "vocal fry" until I read Ask Amy last week in the Washington Post. Now I hear it everywhere.

I've even tried to fry but I. Can. Not.


Are you noticing it now? (Sorry.)

57 comments:

  1. I must admit that I’d been blissfully unaware of “vocal fry.” Why anyone would intentionally try to make themselves sound like a croaking frog is beyond me. In the video clip, I found Kim to be virtually unintelligible. I haven’t noticed it, but now I expect I’ll hear it somewhere . . . .

    “Like,” “You know,” and “Umm” are the most annoying sentence-fillers. It makes me cringe every time I hear someone peppering their conversations with those meaningless words. Uptalk, while annoying, seems to be the least cringeworthy of the ubiquitous speech trends . . . .

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    1. And for someone with a partial hearing loss, that low register can be hard to decipher.

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  2. I[ve been aware of both trends for a long time (my dusty doctorate in linguistics makes me hyperaware of speech patterns). You don't need to listen to Kim K to hear it. I can't produce it on demand, either, Hallie. But Julia, plenty of adults do upspeak and pepper their sentences with "like." I don't hear fry persisting as long. And yes, I don't like to hear these things - but hey, language is always changing.

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    1. Inflection! It matters if you say it with an uptick or not
      Seriously (with an uptick at the end) - indicates doubt
      Seriously (with a downtick at the end) - certainty
      Wondering how do linguists handle indicating that kind of nuance? In writing we'd call it subtext.

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  3. My teenage grandchildren use verbal uptick and fillers, neither of which bother me. I do jump all over the "Me and him went to the movie" both for replacing nouns with pronouns and for putting the speaker first. Eyes roll, but they do catch themselves -- at least while I'm around.

    Vocal fry would drive me bonkers, but I haven't been subjected to that (yet).

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    1. Uptick/uptalk!
      Me and him (and yet does the correct "I and he went to the movies" (I know, should be I went to the movies with him... still...)

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  4. Argh, when will those tacky people go away from our pop culture scene?

    Oh, sorry. I got distracted. NPR had a piece about vocal fry sometime in the last year, possibly the last six months, so I knew what it was. It sounds lazy, doesn't it? As though the person can't be bothered to open their mouth all the way, or too drugged to do so, maybe. And it gives the impression of a low IQ, as far as I'm concerned.

    One of my daughters used to pepper her speech with "like", but as a professional woman she found it detracted from her demeanor and made her less credible, and she has worked hard to eradicate it from the way she presents herself. It helps that most of her friends are in the same situation. Smart women, all of them, who lift one another up. Isn't that lovely?

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  5. I’ve never heard of vocal fry but I must speak up in defense of y’know. It’s annoying, yes, but it’s been around for a long time, especially in the NY/NJ area. I heard it all the time from all ages growing up in the Borscht Belt in the 1950s and 1960s and didn’t lose the habit myself until I went off to college in New England.

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    1. I always thought Jersey girls were first cousins to Valley Girls.

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  6. Sorry, this is one I will not take for the team. I've been known to turn off the radio--the tv--whatever device I'm listening to if an irritating voice comes on. And have been known to use those sound-dampening headphones on occasion.

    Youngest nephew writes his own songs and sings--when he first started, he did a lot of imitation of his favorite singers--my response (and his brother's): use your normal voice--it sounds natural and it sounds like YOU. Just don't get me started on faKeness personified--why are the K's even famous? I'd do an eyeroll here, but it would so massive it would make my brain flip over....

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  7. Well, I have a personal moratorium on all things Kardashian. But I think I've heard vocal fry elsewhere and yeah, don't get it at all.

    The Girl cringes when she hears her peers with all the "like," "you, know," etc. She isn't particularly fond of things like "totes adobs" either. She says it's not really hard to speak like a normal person in full sentences, people should try it.

    The Boy isn't as vocal, but he doesn't get it either (although he will occasionally describe something as "lit").

    And don't get them started on all the text slang (things like "c u l8r"). "You have a full keyboard. USE IT!"

    Mary/Liz

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    1. I do think "c u l8r" is a holdover from the days when we were just starting to text and hadn't mastered thumbing it or being able to dictate messages. A topic for another day.

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  8. I attended a writer's workshop last summer populated by under-thirty NYC agents who made every statement a question. I found it incredibly annoying. Give me a plummy New Yawk "So doll, watcha got?" any day.

    After fifteen years in Atlanta, I could recognize variations in southern speech (Atlanta, coastal Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, North and South Carolina). After ten years in Cincinnati, I can differentiate Midwestern speech habits. Unique to Cincinnati: instead of "I beg your pardon or excuse me?" it's "please?" for the German "bitte."

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    1. My favorite are the Canadian accents.

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    2. Same here, Hallie. I can tell a western Canadian by the way they swallow their "Rs", as in "dollar". It helped to work with three women from the same area in BC.

      Margaret, I'm from Hamilton, just up the road, as you know, and have German roots. We said "please", too. Until I started traveling to NYC for business in the mid-70's, I had no idea that was weird!

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  9. I wonder if Joan Rivers started it... she had the growly way of delivering her punch lines.

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  10. I don't think I have ever heard it, and I hope to avoid it in "real life." And I am off to the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament where Will Shortz speaks very clearly.

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  11. I've sounded like that for the last week and not by choice! That's the voice I get whenever I get a bad cold -- I can't wait until it's gone. The uptick drives me crazy but I don't encounter it too often. I agree with Jim about "me and him" and its variations. That's something I hear or read (usually on Facebook) far too often.

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    1. I've been coughing but not rasping. Hope it's over soon.

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  12. I think kids looking for jobs might be abetting Julia's mom in tamping down the Valley Speak after a certain age. I know that not making every sentence sound like a question is part of the coaching that they sometimes get.

    We had a speaker at the Delaware Valley SinC monthly meeting, talking about the archaeological aspects investigating whether H.H. Holmes's grave actually contained the gentleman. The presentation was fascinating, but I found her constant uplift pretty distracting.

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  13. I had heard of vocal fry before, but was never sure exactly what it meant, so I appreciated the link. And now that I've heard it, I realize that it is what I have complained about from my 28-year-old nephew since he hit his teen years. Mouth barely moves when he speaks, everything is in a low register, and phrases just trail off downward at the end. I really love this young man and care about what he's saying, but often find myself wanting to box his ears and tell him to quit mumbling!!!

    On a somewhat related note, has anyone else noticed that most young female broadcasters have adopted a very nasal tone? I feel like someone, somewhere, must be telling them this is a "professional" sound, but I really hate it. It has become so common that recently on the evening local news I heard a young woman NOT speaking that way and commented on it to my husband.

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    1. Nasal tone from female broadcasters? Hank, what do you think?

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  14. There are things I don't need to increase my knowledge about. This seems to be one. :^0

    OTOH (oops!!) I was initially excited when I saw the opening pic on today's post.... Clueless! Yay! Today we're going to talk about modern takes on classic lit and how well they work.

    Darn.

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    1. What a good idea! It's being done a lot these days. And Jane Austen's work, multiple times. I side note... noticed that they're trying to make a play out of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD but the Harper Lee estate is suing because they're changing the story.

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  15. This was news to me and I hope I don't start hearing talk like those examples.

    Now a voice I always liked was that of June Allyson, especially in the Glenn Miller Story. Not sure how to describe it.

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    1. June Allyson! She did have such a distinctive voice (if you don't remember https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZzfxrJlzqI) And it is alto, lower register... made me wonder if she smoked. Everyone did in those days. And she was married to Dick Powell who smoked and died of lung cancer.

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  16. I haven't been aware of vocal fry, but then my TV watching tends to be old Britcoms. What can I say? The uptick annoys me. I was putting it down to my curmudgeonly age. Evidently most of you agree that it sounds like dated Valley Girl! The thing that is annoying me the most at present is people interjecting "right right right" into every other sentence of a conversation. All that sounds like to me is that they want the speaker to move along and finish talking. So rude. This is a phenomenon I'm noting in most age groups, not limited to young people.

    Texting in brief symbols doesn't bother me at all, although I don't do it myself as I can type as fast as I can talk. But understanding rofl or stfu or cu l8tr is v ez. It just takes me longer to decide what the short form is than it does to type the whole word.

    PS, I have a friend who has developed spasmodic dysphonia -- think Diane Rehm. Her voice is much like the vocal fry. Sad that.

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    1. PPS I have a sister in law, well educated, well read, mother of three upspeak daughters, and she has caught the disease, too, like. Now THAT is annoying.

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    2. The first thing I thought when I listened to Kim K, was why does she want to sound like Diane Rehm?

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    3. Ann, I have dysphonia, and also sound like Diane Rehm!

      Mine is part of essential tremors. Is that something your friend also has?

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    4. Not sure Karen. She thinks it has something to do with chemo she had last year for lymphoma.

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  17. Long ago (late 80s) I worked for a financial planning company. The president talked about how women tend to end sentences on a higher note that makes it sound like a question instead of a statement. I worked hard on not doing that. The "vocal fry" is new to me though. It hurts my throat to even think about!

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    1. Those were the days when we ladies were advised to dress for the job, too. (Ah, remembering my suits... and not fondly) I think the vocal ticks makes a person sound immature and under-educated. In the financial planning business, not a good thing.

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  18. Egad! I couldn't even llisten the whole minute, then I realized that one of my sisters speaks just like that. I always thought she just had allergies or had just woken up ~

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  19. I noticed it on the radio, mostly NPR, several years ago, and initially thought "that poor girl is forcing herself to go to work despite having a sore throat." (I haven't noticed it in males.Yet.) I agree that it's annoying. I must have heard the same NPR segment that Karen referred to. If I remember correctly, most of the "fry" speakers interviewed were surprised that their speaking voices were annoying and mostly commented "but this is me! I don't know how to talk any other way." Apparently, NPR receives a lot of negative mail about vocal fry, but most of the people interviewed for the segment dismiss it with "it's just old people who don't like it!" Ahem. I'm on the phone for a good part of the day at work, and I hear this style from many people. It's so hard not to tell the caller at the end of the call "I hope you feel better soon!"

    DebRo

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  20. Your list of Valley Speak movies should have included FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH.

    I don't like the vocal fry either, but fortunately don't hear it much. What I do hear frequently, in interview situations, is the person answering the question starts with "Right". Where did that come from??

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    1. Sean Penn! Loved that movie. Probably also The Breakfast Club and anything else with Molly Ringwald in it and Ferris Bueller's Day off...

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    2. That Ferris. He's a righteous dude.

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  21. On a side note... I hope you are taking time to see what the amazing teens in this country are doing, standing up against gun violence and saying enough is enough. It gives me more than a little hope.

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    1. I am so proud of them, Hallie, and heartbroken that it's necessary for them to do this. The high schools in my town allowed the kids to observe the 14th of March. If I had kids in the school system, I would have been there to walk alongside them.

      DebRo

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    2. It is amazing. Big march here today too. And yesterday two plane loads of Congress persons were here for the funereal of our Louise Slaughter. Plus Hillary. It’s been quite a week. Louise’s daughters are marching in DC today. What a tribute

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    3. Hallie, I'm so proud of these young people. They give us hope, which is sorely needed in today's world. And the children are truly leading us.

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  22. I lasted about 10 seconds listening to Kim. Vocal fry? How annoying. Maybe it's a communist plot just coming to the surface. I guess I'm fortunate in that no one I hang out with sounds like that. I am concerned about Agent Scully (Gillian Anderson). Anyone else notice how hoarse her voice is these days?

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  23. As a 36-year-old, can I be the dissenter here? I grew up with this speech pattern, and it is very hard to control. I understand the annoyance, but do we have to disregard people who use it? It's like any other accent...

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    1. Of course you can! And "valley speak" is something of a regional thing. And it bothers me less than vocal fry which I interpret, wrongly perhaps, as an affectation that sounds grating.

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  24. I always enjoy reading along with these threads without commenting but this one has struck a nerve! I think we have to be careful about falling down the rabbit hole of policing women's voices. Vocal fry may happen in both genders but it largely women that receive complaints and criticism for using it. Google 'policing women's voices' and you will find some great articles discussing this phenomenon. Like policing a women's body, policing their voice is more about your own assumptions and hangups and less about her as a person. As a woman who was a teen in the 1990's and early 2000's I am familiar with and have used some of these speech patterns (largely fillers). I also have a naturally high, nasal voice (I've been told many times I sound like baby doll) so I understand the hurt and discomfort a women (person) may feel when this is brought to their attention. While I may have the power to alter my voice, I shouldn't be shamed into it because it doesn't appeal to the listener.

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    1. Thinking about this.... going to Google now. Because I'm not in favor of shaming anyone. (Though I do like to kvetch.)

      But I do think voice (tone, word choice...), like appearance, is something you can (often, depending on the cause) modify to suit your own goals. People modify how they sound depending on the situation. At the microphone speaking to a crowd I sound very different than on my phone to customer service at United Airlines versus on my phone to my granddaughter, or with friends, or watching a ball game. There was an NPR program awhile back (Ira Glass). a woman talking about her own high squeaky voice.

      Here's an interesting piece exploring the very objection you're raising: https://www.thecut.com/2016/07/female-voice-anxiety-c-v-r.html
      And speaking your piece, however you sound, should never be muffled by self-conscious silence.

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  25. I had not heard the term "vocal fry" until reading today's post. I had heard Kim K's voice before, but I thought it was just a lazy way of talking, like her saying, "It's so exhausting for me to speak, but I will try." You have to imagine that in the vocal fry voice. I just think it's a lazy, whinny way of speaking, and I can't believe that someone would deliberately try to sound like that. Now I'll be listening for it more though, to see who thinks it's a desirable sound.

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  26. Never heard of vocal fry either. A little boy asked Kim K. why she is famous and she said she did not know why. As I recall, her mother was married to Bruce Jenner, the Olympian athlete.

    This phenomeon (sp?) reminds me of when I was a kid, reading movie magazines. I saw a photo of Jackie Kennedy Onassis in a movie magazine. I was puzzled because I had not seen Jackie in any movies or in a tv show. I asked my Mom if Jackie was an actress. She said that she was married to President John F. Kennedy. That was when I learned about our American President John F. Kennedy, who died many years before I was born.

    I read everything. Once in a while I glimpse the Bravo channel while channel surfing, trying to find a PBS channel. LOL . There are many reality tv shows nowadays.

    Clueless the movie is based on Emma, a novel by Jane Austen.

    I'm unique in my generation that I write language the way I read the language. Perhaps because I lost my hearing so early in life and I cannot hear how people speak the language. Now that I have two cochlear implants, I hear words and I notice that some people drop syllables when speaking.

    Diana

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    1. How interesting, Diana... I've heard that people with certain kinds of hearing loss (difficulty hearing lower registers) have particular difficulty hearing when people speak in vocal fry.

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    2. Hallie, how interesting. And is it possible to lipread someone who speaks in vocal fry? I found it easier to lipread people from the South, though some people told me their accents were difficult to decipher.

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  27. Oh, Julia, you just called forth one of my favorite memories. Our dad was a bit of a grammar stickler, and a bit of a tease. (An excruciating combination for his children, at times.) When any of us would make the mistake of saying, in trying to recount someone's part of a conversation, "...Then Paul went---" Dad would jump in. "Jackie! Did you hear that? Jon left right in the middle of the story! He missed the best part! He just left!" We would sigh and clarify and try again. "Then Jon said..." and it would all proceed smoothly until we forgot and used the verb "go" or "went" in place of "said". Our younger brother was the worst at this, and he would be so frustrated in trying to get his story out that I thought he was going to explode like a firecracker. But he learned, and joined the Grammar Police, as did we all.

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  28. I'm glad that there are a couple of dissenters here, but one thing that hasn't been touched on is that the way one speaks is in no way an indication of one's intelligence. I've read several people comment that people who speak a certain way "sound so stupid." On what basis?

    Accents, dialect, vernacular, AAVE, slang, etc are in no way a measure of (or a strike against) one's intelligence. It's especially telling that the biggest "offenders" of "proper" English tend to be young people, people of color, people of a certain socio-economic background, and/or women.

    I know none of you had that intention when you made those comments. But you need to be aware of the message you're sending when you say that. Here's a good article on the topic: http://www.forharriet.com/2016/05/smarter-than-that-on-assumptions-made.html

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