What Your Voice Says About You

Especially after hearing the person piloting our commercial aircraft, we feel safe. In a deep slow-talking folksy voice, he (usually a male) tells us flight time, the weather, and maybe that it could get a bit choppy. Called pilot voice, pilots’ pitch and cadence are similar.

They remind us that your voice conveys a message.

How Voice Matters

Because of Laurence Olivier, Margaret Thatcher lowered her pitch. Taking advantage of a chance meeting with Olivier on a train from Brighton in 1979, a Thatcher advisor asked how she might eliminate her shrill sound. Olivier arranged for her to work with the speech coach from the National Theater. One voice coach says that rather than bring her pitch down, Thatcher made her voice sound lower with a new cadence and less of a smile, a mobile jaw and a relaxed diaphragm.

Like Thatcher, more women have a lower pitch. In a recent study, an Australian economist compared women’s speech in 1945 and the 1990s. Explaining why “fundamental frequency” had dropped a significant amount (23 Hz), she theorized that authority was the reason. During those 50 years, as women became increasingly powerful, they needed a voice that would project dominance.

Another study even confirmed that men CEOs with deeper voices earn more. Quantifying their results, economists concluded that a standard deviation in “vocal masculinity” elevated CEO pay by 6.6 percent. However, they also found that when there was more female influence on a compensation committee, the male voice did not matter. Furthermore, deeper voiced men tended to be chosen as CEOs in more competitive industries with fewer female board members. One reason for all of this could be that deeper voices signal strength, especially to other men.

Our Bottom Line: Human Capital

Looking closely at the capital component of our land, labor, and capital, we can say we have physical capital and human capital. Including tools and buildings, our physical capital is composed of the tangible stuff we can accumulate to increase our productivity. Similarly, defined as knowledge, we can accumulate the human capital that also boosts our ability to produce more.

So, thinking of how we sound, we can classify our voice as the human capital that makes us more productive. At this point though, I love to disprove all of the stereotypes with Reese Witherspoon as the clever, super smart, successful Harvard trained attorney that had a high voice, a little dog, and wore pink.

For many smiles, do take a look:

My sources and more: A recent Revisionist History podcast on pilot voice reminded me that it was time to return to how we sound. But then, for the summaries of the academic research, do look here  and here.