Are You Even Listening?

The bias against women’s voices

- Danielle Kinahan

IN THE EARLY months of 2008, as her public profile grew, Karen Stintz, then a Toronto city councillor, heard complaints familiar to many female politicians: her voice, she was told by colleagues and constituents, was “shrill,” and she was speaking too quickly for her message to register with her audience. Stintz, who would go on to make a bid for mayor in 2014, worried that her voice would hinder her—that people might only hear how she spoke instead of what she had to say — and so she sought out the services of vocal coach Lynda Spillane.

Spillane, whose voice is layered with British, Australasian, and American lilts, considers the voice to be an “instrument that most people haven’t learned to play.” In order to learn, she says, you first need to recognize that the voice is changeable. People tend not to think about how much the voice changes to reflect its social environment, but studies have shown that we adjust our pitch in accordance with our perceptions of social rank — we lower our pitch to project dominance and raise it to show submission. We associate low voices —that is, male voices — with competence and trustworthiness.

One study, published in 2013, measured the vocal pitch of 792 male CEOs and found that those with lower voices were more likely to run larger firms — a 1 percent drop in vocal pitch was associated with a 1.4 percent increase in the size of the rm managed. (Women were excluded from the study because there weren’t enough of them serving as CEOs.) This goes a long way toward explaining why women, whose voices are, on average, almost twice as high as men’s, face a particular challenge when speaking in male-dominated elds, like business and politics. The upshot: learn to speak in the low, slow tones we associate with men — and, therefore, leaders — or face a backlash.