The Walrus

Are You Even Listening?

The bias against women’s voices

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I months of 2008, as her public pro le 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 rst need to recognize that the voice is changeable. People tend not to think about how much the voice changes to re ect 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 s and found that those with lower voices were more likely to run larger rms — 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 s.) 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.

Women’s voices are scrutinize­d to an almost comical degree in the political sphere. Margaret Thatcher trained with a vocal coach from the Royal National Theatre to help rid her voice of its “shrill” tone. Her voice dropped a remarkable forty-six hertz, though it was not enough to shield her from being nicknamed “Attila the Hen” by members of the British Parliament. During Hillary Clinton’s political campaigns, her voice was derided by pundits as “screechy,” “nagging,” and capable of making “angels cry” — a type of criticism her male counterpar­ts did not have to worry about. For Stintz, the coaching was simple pragmatism: “I learned that if I have something important to say, I better learn how to say it.”

Stintz’s e orts to win the public over back red in an ironic fashion: media coverage of her vocal coaching cast it as a petty expense, a waste of taxpayer money. (She paid for it out of her council budget.) For Stintz, it was a lesson in the way women are scrutinize­d for being proactive about their careers. “It was a little disproport­ionate,” she says, citing large sums that her colleagues spent on language classes and barbecues, which garnered less attention. The backlash she faced for spending money on vocal lessons wasn’t about the “frivolous” expense at all, she says — it was a rejection of her ambition.

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