Bias against women's voices

Family voices and personal histories

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0:52Hello. My mother used to read to me. Sometime around the age of seven or eight, I think. I was in bed. My mother was sitting on the chair by my bed and she got to the end of the chapter and I said, you've got a very sing-song voice. I was trying to say something about the fact that when she read, the way she read sentences seemed to have a tune and the tune was mostly the same for all the sentences, a kind of tum-ti-tum, ti-tum-ti-tum-ti-tum, where her voice went down at the end of every sentence. I can remember that when I said this with that

1:25explanation, my mother was actually offended. She said quite sharply, oh well, if you don't like the way I read, I won't read to you anymore. And I said, no, I like it. I was just saying. Looking back on it, I think my mother was very sensitive about how she spoke and how others perceived the way she spoke. She'd grown up in Bethnal Green in East London and the voices around her spoke with an East London accent. So I think as a small girl, she would have sounded cockney, as her parents did with Yiddish inflections and pronunciations. But by the

1:56time she left grammar school at the age of 16, she had moved to what is now called Standard Southern British. But as I say, she was sensitive to what people said or what she imagined they might say about her voice. That was, I think, because she moved from being a primary school teacher to being a teacher trainer and then to being an academic who had to give lectures on language in primary education. She was worried about whether she sounded authoritative enough. I know that because she made jokes about men she knew who she thought seemed to get a hearing

2:28on account of their voices and not on account of their knowledge or research. In fact, she made jokes about the Rosen men. That was my father, my brother and me getting that hearing at home and her hardly getting a word in. What's more, I'm a bit reluctant to admit my brother and I used to do impressions of our mother, where we imitated her as if she was permanently talking in an unfinished monologue. No sentence, fully resolved, as a musician might say. It just stayed in the air.

2:59Bit like this. Look at you. You don't see me going about like that. You could get yourself a jacket and look at your hair. You walk about looking like a slump and change your socks. You've got socks. Just change your socks. It's not that my mother really did talk like that. The point is, that's how I, as a teenage boy, perceived it as being like that. And that's what we're talking about today.

Perceptions of women's speech

3:21What are women's voices like and how are they perceived? My guest today is Jane Setter, Professor of Phonetics at the University of Reading, who's written about voice quality, pitch and gender discrimination. Jane, welcome to the programme. Hello, it's lovely to be here. And does that story of me and my mother sound familiar to you? Yes, it does. I remember being a child and we'd quote our mums in these awful voices, actually, as well, putting on a voice. If you go out with wet hair, you'll catch a cold. And we'd never do that with our dads. And I actually recall saying to one of my friends,

3:54she doesn't actually sound like that. And after I realised that, I stopped doing it, putting on the voice. That didn't mean I stopped saying, if you've got wet hair, you'll catch a cold. But I stopped putting on the funny voice. And I think I realised that it was disrespectful in a way. Do you think that was one of the reasons why you got interested in the sound of language? Because there you are as quite a young girl, possibly about the same age as me, I guess. And you're tuning in, aren't you? Which is, not everybody does that. I think there are a number of reasons for it. So my dad always used to pick me up on the way

4:25I spoke. If I sounded too fan-it, too regional, then he'd pick me up on that. So that's fan-it where? Fan-it in Kent. Margate, Ramsgate, that sort of area like that. Lots of people from London moved down that way. And my dad was very keen that I shouldn't be disadvantaged by the way that I spoke, which was something that he'd decided to do for himself when he was a child, because he was born in London and had to change the way he spoke to get a better job,

4:55much like Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. And so he was always talking to me about that. And I think that generally made me aware of how people's voices sounded and also how my voice sounded and then thinking about things like that. And that's really what got me interested in the whole area. So what do you think was going on there with me and my mother, my brother, and our attitude to my mum's way of speaking? The sound of it? Yeah, generally, I think mothers are in this kind of nagging role. There's a cultural thing about the

5:30women being the ones that nag you to do things. So, you know, saying, get yourself a jacket, look better, put socks on, change your socks, that kind of thing. Don't go out with wet hair, this sort of thing. So gender roles, the way it pans out in families? Yeah, yeah, gender roles, exactly. And this stereotypical sort of gender role, the advice giving, I mean, it's caregiving, but it's kind of incessant caregiving with a voice which is not necessarily very positive, if you like. You kind of have this notion that if women are nagging,

6:04they're using a particular kind of naggy sounding voice. And it is cultural. And we don't get that sort of thing for men's voices. And was I diminishing my mother by doing that, do you think? I mean, there was a professional woman. To some extent, yes, I think you were. But all of you would have been if you were all talking about your mothers like that. It's complex. It's also kind of fond. It's very strange. So you're familiar with how this person speaks. And you're able to kind of mimic their patterns because you know them

6:38very well. So on the one hand, it seems like you're fondly making fun of somebody, but actually it can be quite damaging. Now, you're a phonetician. Can you give us a sense of exactly what that means? As a phonetician, I research the science of speech. We're interested in the production of speech and the perception of speech and how that can be measured impressionistically. So by listening and acoustically by using computer programmes. I've recently become more interested in how people

7:09use their voice to represent them as speakers. I wrote about that in my book, Your Voice Speaks volumes, which considered public and performance voices, gender and sexuality, accents, how stereotypes are perpetuated by the media, and so on. And then for the chapter I co-authored in the Oxford Handbook of Language and Prejudice, I wanted to dig down more into how women's voices,

7:39both cisgender and transgender, are researched and described and how they're represented in the media. My focus was more on the public engagement side of things rather than the research side. So my colleagues, Joe and Amalia, wrote more about the research specifically in that chapter. But I'm interested in, you know, what people are saying about it on platforms like YouTube, for example, or in newspapers, how they describe voices, particularly women's voices, which seem to come under a lot of criticism.

8:11So if I make the statement, men's and women's voices are different. There we are. I'll put it out there. Is that true some of the time, all of the time, or is the statement itself framed wrongly, do you think? In the times that we're now living, I would say it's framed wrongly. However, there is certainly the perception that men's and women's voices are different, at least some of the time. And there's overlap. And there are elements which researchers have found are more likely to be typical of a woman's way of speaking

8:44or more typical of a man's way of speaking. So there are some differences. But with the range of different sorts of genders and sexualities and so on now, I think it's more so the case that it's kind of framing the statement wrongly, because there's so much more we need to take into account when we're looking at this issue. Let's look at some of the modern ways in which women's voices have been characterised.

Upspeak and creaky voice

9:12Let's go through one or two of them. So can we start with upspeak, uptalk, sometimes known as valley talk? So where we pitch up at the end of the sentence. What is this and where does it come from? Well, valley speak or valley talk is a particular kind of variety from an area of Southern California. And that's stereotypically associated with upper middle class adolescent or younger adult females who like things like hanging out at the mall.

9:42It was being parodied by Frank Zappa and his daughter Moon Unit in the early 80s. So it must have been around since the late 70s at least. And yet some people said that it had come from neighbours. I remember them blaming the Australian soap and saying, oh, well, Antipodeans do that upspeak naturally. And somehow or other, that got into the mix as well. Yeah, but there's a difference. So valley speak, it encompasses this rising at the end, but it also has other linguistic features. So there are accent features associated with it and lexical features associated with it.

10:16So, for example, I think they're blamed for using the word like, you know, I was like this and they were like that. And, you know, I'm like this. So I think that was part of what came out of valley speak. So, yes, it did. It was supposed to have this rise at the end as well. But absolutely, when we got Australian soaps in the 1980s, a lot of speakers are doing this kind of thing at all. And I'm not going to emulate vowel speak because it really isn't an accent that I can do particularly.

10:47But with Uptalk, we're looking at statements that go up in the end. That's it. You did it. Yeah, that was quite good. Yes. Yeah. So it has to kind of go up at the end. I listen to a lot of blues music. Yeah. So that's, yeah, I listen to a lot of music. But, you know, you can do that anyway. If it's indicating that you've not finished, you may use that kind of rise. So I'm sitting here at the moment with Michael Rosen and we're just about to make a programme. So, you know, you would use it anyway. The idea is with Uptalk that you do it and I'm just about to make a programme with Michael Rosen. And you'd still go up and that would be the end of the conversation.

11:19So where my accent, for example, so I'm Southern Standard British English largely. In my accent, I would go down at the end of that. Younger speakers, and it's not all younger speakers and it's not necessarily all women either. You find that you've got this pattern where people go up at the end and it can sound sort of uncertain to people who don't use the pattern. Yeah. One of my male offspring does it quite a lot. Yes. Yeah. But on the perception front, by people in the popular media drawing attention to it, is it a kind of put down?

11:50You see, because there's the difference between what you're measuring and looking at as a phonetician and then the perception. So do you think sometimes it's implying that women who speak like that are not serious or even stupid? I think it is. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's implying that they don't know what they mean and they're not sure about something. What the listener understands by it is that impression of the meaning of the utterance. But actually, what the speaker is doing doesn't mean that if you're in that speaker community that uses that.

12:23When more people are using it, it becomes less stigmatised. But at the moment, we're not there yet. Now, what about another feature? I think some people call this fry or creaking. I'm not sure I can quite do this. But anyway, it's in speech and people do it on their vowels, don't they? So tell us a bit about fry. So as a phonetician, I'd call it creaky voice. But yes, it is also known as vocal fry. And that is the term that you tend to get on YouTube when people are criticising it. It was actually common in old-fashioned male received pronunciation years ago.

12:57That's right. I might go there. I did a little bit of fry there, didn't I? Yes. Yeah. So what is it? Instead of Gower Street, you might have Gar Street. Gar Street. That sort of thing. Yes. Yeah. So research has shown that certain groups of educated, upwardly mobile, professionally oriented women seem to be doing this to add gravitas to their voice by basically lowering the pitch. So the lower you get down with the pitch, the more creak you're going to get.

13:28So this is creaky voice. I do use it. It does happen if I get to the end of something and I've gone particularly low or if I'm tired. You know, I might get home and say, oh, man, I need a G&T or something like that, you know. So it's a physical sort of thing you can do. But what we're finding is that women are doing it from a sociolinguistic perspective. It seems to be a thing that women have adopted as a group phenomenon to indicate that they

13:59are professionally oriented and so on. So that they should be taken more seriously. Exactly. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. According to the research, it's to do with wanting to add gravitas, wanting to be taken more seriously. And if your pitch is lower, then generally we find that people are taken more seriously if they have a lower pitch with less range, less movement in it. And so the lowest you can get is really if you're doing creak. That's the lowest I'm going to get with my with my voice.

14:30Other research indicates it's perceived negatively by listeners with at least one article recommending that women avoid it altogether because it will damage their job prospects. Really? Mm hmm. Good Lord. So this brings up the question of agency, actually. The linguist M.A.K. Halliday was keen on saying that our ways of speaking involve choice, though he was, I think, mostly referring to choice of grammar and syntax and words, vocabulary.

15:00But can it also be applied to intonation and pronunciation? I wonder. So can we say, would this be true to say, women and girls choose to speak with up talk and fries? Is there an element? Do we have to say they're choosing to do it? And then I suppose the follow up to that is, well, why would they do it even if people are are mocking it and looking down on it? It indicates that the speaker realises they are making those choices. And I don't think they always do realise they're making those choices. People are probably doing it because their peers do it.

15:34And it indicates social belonging if you do it as well. So I belong to this group.

Volume and cultural stereotypes

15:40And then what about volume? How are women perceived to speak? Are they perceived to speak more or less loudly than men? And then we'll think in a minute whether you can measure that. You can measure it, but it's quite hard to do. But we do have perceptions about whether people speak more loudly than others or whether different languages are louder than others. But what about, say, a situation on a bus? So I sometimes sit on the top of the bus and there are boys and there are girls coming home from school and the boys are talking and the girls are talking.

16:13Could I make a statement that the boys are talking louder than the girls or vice versa? The girls are louder than the boys because they tend to be in separate groups. I really don't know in answer to that question because the boys can bellow and the girls can screech. Notice my two words I've got there. Is one more loud than the other? If somebody is using a higher pitch, it just generally stands out more. It comes through, we say, don't we? Yes, it's something that you sort of focus on if people are doing that. And, you know, babies can have this really high-pitched screech and you're like,

16:45oh, my goodness, that's so high. But there might be somebody speaking equally loudly but at a different pitch level. And they might not sound as loud because the frequency is different. So it's a combination of all of these things, the intensity and the frequency and so on. So if you were going to actually measure that phonetically, you would have to do so in a really controlled sort of environment. It's difficult. It's not impossible, but difficult to collect natural speech and be able to say sensible things

17:17about how loud it is because people would be different distances from the microphone and so on. In terms of cultural expectations, for women's voices, socially, it may depend on the role a woman is cast in. So if they're screeching, as I just said, as a word that you used, then that is perceived as being a loud kind of sound. Even back to classical times, it was considered better if women did not speak at all.

17:49So a quieter voice would be preferable coming from a woman socially, physically and metaphorically. A quieter voice is preferable to a louder one. But there's the stereotype of certain types of women, for example, cackling loudly. And cackle, it was originally used to describe the noises made by geese and other farmyard fowl. So we're likening women to having voices that sound like geese and chickens squawking and that sort of thing.

18:21Yes. Well, screech, I guess, is connected to seagulls and other animals. So we're likening women's voices to that. And if somebody's cackling, then it's loud normally. So if we think about, I don't know, stereotypically, the three witches in the play that we're not going to mention, that sort of thing, there's this kind of idea that they're going to be making these sort of cackling noises. Double, double, toil and trouble. Exactly. Toil and boil. Yes. Yeah. So it's interesting, actually, this sort of bit diverging from that a bit.

18:52The English-speaking union has a performing Shakespeare competition. And one of the students, and these are school students, came on and she did this wonderful thing where she performed all three witches. And she gave them each different voices. And it was wonderful. So there was a sort of a calm one and a girlish one and a cackly one. And it was really interesting the way that she did that and how she performed it. Anyway, that's a kind of aside. Well, it's interesting that you say that because obviously actors can take on these different voices in connection with the witches in this aforementioned unnamed play.

19:26You give different characters. If you make them cackly, as I stereotypically did just then, then there's somewhere or another they're not really serious or that they're just dangerous loonies or something. Yes, absolutely. Whereas if you say fire burn and cauldron bubble, if you say it like that, there's more menace to it. You can, if I sink my voice down. And also, of course, they're full of wisdom, which if you cackle it, it sort of denies their wisdom. What they predict actually pans out, doesn't it, after all.

19:58September's always busy. Whole Foods Market can help. Their September Stock Up event makes it easy to load your pantry and freezer with flavourful, nourishing food. Even better, there are hundreds of sales. Get dinner going with canned soups and veggies. Lean on frozen pizzas, pastas and seafood everyone loves. Their build-your-own-family meals feeds four for just $35. Stock up at Whole Foods Market. Get more with BBC Podcasts wherever you listen. Be the first to listen to your favourite shows like Evil Genius, Good Bad Billionaire and You're Dead to Me

20:33with a subscription to BBC Podcasts Premium on Apple Podcasts. You can also enjoy a range of our podcasts ad-free with an Amazon Music subscription. I'll see you next time. Bye. Bye.

21:13Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Margaret Thatcher and authority

21:41What about Margaret Thatcher? Let's talk about Margaret Thatcher's voice. Before Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party, she had vocal lessons, which, among other things, resulted in her average pitch becoming lower, less range in her pitch, and also her voice became more breathy. So before that, in 1973, for example, when she was an MP,

22:13I think she was the education spokesperson for the Conservative Party. Clive James, who was an Australian writer and critic and newspaper man, he famously described her voice as sounding like a cat sliding down a blackboard. So this is just another way to put a woman down. Whether or not she sounds like that, it was, I mean, he probably didn't agree with her policies either, and this was just another way of saying this is somebody we should disregard because they sound so awful. So she sounded shrill, and that's considered unpleasant,

22:45and it's not a vote winner for high office. So there have been studies that have done that have shown if you listen to lower male voices and higher male voices saying, please vote for me, the ones with the lower pitch get more votes than the ones with the higher pitch. Well, yes, and women's voices, they found also that if women lowered their voices slightly, they were more likely to get the vote than if they had higher pitched voices. So people expect politicians, people who are in charge of the country,

23:17to have authoritative voices, and an authoritative voice sounds calm and safe. So do you remember there was a case of Elizabeth Holmes, who was the CEO of a company called, I think it was Theranos, and they made all sorts of claims about what their products could do, and she ended up in prison, I think, for it. But it was noted by the media that her voice had changed. So if you listen to her early on, I would say just listening to her early on,

23:50she had a fairly low average pitch for a woman anyway, but it really dropped quite distinctively. And there were some who said, no, we've done measurements of this and we don't think it's the case. But then later, she did actually admit that she'd done that and she said she did it to sound more authoritative. This is something called the frequency code, which was proposed by a phonetician and phonologist called John O'Hala. If a voice is low, then you automatically assume that somebody is large, and if a voice is high, we think about high pitches, you know, birds and so on.

24:24If we think of those things as being small, so we make those associations. And this is something that Mrs Thatcher did, but she was also quite breathy as well. She became quite breathy. Actually, bias against women's voices is one way misogyny shows itself. So the Open University's five-step guide helps you recognise and deal with misogyny in schools. Well, to find out more about this, you can visit the BBC Radio 4 Word of Mouth programme page and follow the links to the Open University.

Breathy voice and baby talk

24:54So let's talk about this breathy thing. What is it? Is there a lot of it about? Do women do it more than men? So breathy voice, this is breathy voice. And it's supposed to sound quite sexy.

25:13Stereotypical housewife-y sort of woman, again. If your husband gets home from a hard day at work, you might say, don't worry, darling, come in and I'll make you a cup of tea and you can relax. And it's this whole kind of sexy, nurturing thing that, again, we stereotypically associate with women's voices. Let me just see if I can do it and say, well, it's a man's thing. So would you like a cup of tea?

25:43No, that just sounds nauseating, actually. That was really rather horrible, wasn't it? Yeah, it's possible for men to do it, but they don't tend to. So the studies that have looked at this in terms of it being to do with being sexy and confining women to that sort of role, they normally take a kind of an evolutionary perspective when they're looking at this. And there was one study, for example, that looked at whether men could make their voices sound sexy. And they got men and women, so cisgender, heterosexual men and women,

26:17to say one to ten, read the numbers one to ten or speak the numbers one to ten in a normal voice. And then they got them to do it in a dominant, confident, intelligent and sexy voice. And they gave them a steer about what each of those things meant. And they found that although everybody could make themselves sound more dominant, confident and intelligent, the men tended to be able to do this more so than the women when it was rated by listeners. And only the women were able to make themselves sound more sexy.

26:47And what they were generally doing was lowering their pitch and becoming breathy like this. They were generally doing that. And in fact, the men's voices were regarded as being less sexy when they tried to make them sound sexy. Yes, well, that happened to me, didn't it? Yes, it just sounded daft. Yes, so these studies that look at it from a kind of evolutionary perspective are basically saying that women with a breathy voice, people, again, have a picture, an image of somebody with a breathy voice looking sexy and looking attractive and also looking healthy

27:19and being the kind of person that men would want to have a relationship with because they would be nurturing and caring. And if they're healthy, they'd be able to bear children and look after the home. So we're talking about advantages in courtship, basically. Yeah, advantages in courtship, yes. Right. And, of course, the most famous breathy thing that I can think of is Marilyn Monroe singing, it was Happy Birthday, wasn't it, to President Kennedy? Yeah, I sometimes do this for my students.

27:49Not that I'm very good at it. Please do. No, so it was kind of, Happy Birthday, Mr. President. So you could hear all this kind of smile and the breathiness and so on. And the delay on it while she breathed, I think. Yes. So it was Mr. President. The President, yes. Yes. Yes. And that sounds very sexy, I suppose. I mean, the thing is with breathy voice. But someone might just think it's somebody with a cold. I mean, it's very, very subjective, isn't it? Yes. And yet, socially, we perceive that, partly because of Marilyn Monroe

28:22and her iconography, if you like. I mean, people have breathy voice if they've run up the stairs. Exactly. So, you know, you might get to the stairs and go, oh, hi, here, give me a moment. And when commentators stuff a microphone in front of someone who's just won the 100 metres and they're going, oh, it's one of the best things I've ever done. We don't think that, you know, they're portraying sexiness, do we? No, no. So, yeah. Let's try another one now. Baby sexy talk. So kind of baby talk. Yeah. So sexy baby voice. It's been described as, by Lieberman, I think,

28:54described it as a combination of all the things that people don't like about women's voices. So it tends to be high pitch. It tends to have rising intonation, high rising terminals, and it tends to have creak in it as well. So all of these sorts of things together, also quite nasal sounding. I suppose the question is, is it perceived as unserious? That's our theme today, that somebody like that is sexy but unserious and we don't think a professional woman, let's say. Using this kind of voice, it diminishes a woman

29:26to a non-threatening childlike figure. And I think it was Margaret Atwood who said that men are most worried about women laughing at them and women are most worried about men killing them potentially. So using this kind of voice, it diminishes you to a childlike non-threatening figure. And something that Jo actually suggested in the chapter that we wrote together is that it's protecting the woman from certain kinds of men. They feel they have to put this sort of voice on. And, yeah, so we're looking at this kind of uptalk

30:00and creak and breathiness and how these are used to pigeonhole women. There's a whole other range of things out there that people do with their voices. Well, Jane Setter, thanks very much indeed. Thank you.

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