Find out more: Does the way you speak give away how much you earn?Ĭheng’s findings are certainly consistent with Pemberton’s hypothesis that greater gender equality explains the long-term vocal shift in those Australian women – a pattern that has now been recorded in Sweden, the US and Canada.“They were rated by others as being more domineering and more willing to impose their will over others, and as a function of that, they were able to gather more influence and make decisions on the group’s behalf.” “It signals to others that their intention is to be ready to fight and protect their resources – to assert their status.” And the same connotations were apparent for the humans who had lowered their voices too. And while most of us may not go to such great lengths, recent research shows that we all spontaneously adapt the pitch of our voices to signal our perceived social rank.Īs Cheng points out, it’s a common tactic in nature, with many other primates – from rhesus macaques to our closest relatives, chimpanzees – lowering their vocal pitch during altercations.
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Instead, the researchers speculated that the transformation reflects the rise of women to more prominent roles in society, leading them to adopt a deeper tone to project authority and dominance in the workplace.įormer UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher employed a professional speech coach to help her to sound more authoritative, deliberately dropping the pitch of her voice by a massive 60 Hz. Yet the drop in pitch remained even when the team excluded those women from their sample. The team also considered the fact that members of the more recent group from the 1990s were using the contraceptive pill, which could have led to hormonal changes that could have altered the vocal chords. The researchers had carefully selected their samples to control for any potential demographic factors: the women were all university students and none of them smoked. That’s a significant, audible difference. The team found that the “fundamental frequency” had dropped by 23 Hz over five decades – from an average of 229 Hz (roughly an A# below middle C) to 206 Hz (roughly a G#). The researchers compared archival recordings of women talking in 1945 with more recent recordings taken in the early 1990s.
Cecilia Pemberton at the University of South Australia studied the voices of two groups of Australian women aged 18–25 years.
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