No matter a woman’s delivery, cultures through the ages and the world share a tradition of informing female politicians, news anchors, business leaders, and other women who venture to speak in public that they need to please pipe down. In the early twentieth century, a survey of talk radio listeners reported that 100 out of 101 respondents preferred male hosts’ voices over women’s, lamenting that the women’s voices were “shrill” (just like Clinton’s ninety years later) and that their voices demonstrated “too much” personality. A 2016 report from Time magazine found that in ancient Greece, female outspokenness was associated with “prostitution, madness, witchcraft, and androgyny.” During the Middle Ages, there was a special English word for women who dared to speak in public: they were labeled scolds, meaning women unable to keep their “negative” or “insubordinate” words to themselves.
In 2016 linguist Nic Subtirelu took an empirical gander at the current media’s use of the words shrill, shriek, and screech to describe public figures’ voices and found that commentators are 2.17 to 3.14 times likelier to characterize a woman using this language than a man. These words, as well as bossy, grating, caterwauling, and abrasive, technically may target the volume or timbre of one’s voice, but linguists know the criticism goes deeper than that. Biases against the voices of powerful women are, again, actually related not to the quality of the voice itself but instead to our impressions of gender and authority at large. “For historical and social reasons, the ‘unmarked’ or default voice of authority is a male voice,” says Cameron. “Criticism of female politicians’ voices is essentially a way of tapping into the still widely held belief that women do not have the authority to lead.”
Admittedly, even I find myself responding more positively, with more reverence I suppose, whenever I hear a deep male voice (it’s half the reason I tune into Roman Mars’s richly narrated architecture podcast, 99% Invisible. And don’t even get me started on the iconic audio stylings of Morgan Freeman). Researchers have determined that one of the reasons we tend to connect men’s voices with authority is that we connect low pitch with authority.
Pitch is unique as a vocal quality, because unlike volume, tone, or even a person’s native language, it is perhaps the only thing about one’s speech that is determined (or at least influenced) by physiology. On average, men’s vocal folds tend to be a few millimeters longer than women’s. Linguists have found that low pitch is something we associate with larger physical size* (compare the bark of a German shepherd with that of a Chihuahua) as well as dominance and capability (picture news anchor Walter Cronkite). A 2012 study using digitally altered recordings of men’s and women’s voices saying, “I urge you to vote for me this November,” revealed that listeners preferred the deeper versions—evidence that we’re more likely to blindly heed the urgings of a low-pitched statement, regardless of who might be saying it. It is for this reason that men—or anyone, for that matter—often actively lower their pitch (sometimes consciously, sometimes not) when they wish to appear more authoritative.
High pitch, by contrast, is a key marker of smaller size (again, the Chihuahua), immaturity (like the voice of a child), and excessive emotion (squeals of joy, excitement, fear). As Cameron says, “Saying that a woman’s voice is ‘shrill’ is also a code for ‘she’s not in control.’”
This is ultimately why Britain’s first woman prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, took vocal lessons to learn how to lower her pitch while speaking in public. She hoped this would earn her the sort of respect that the digitally manipulated recordings of women’s voices in 2012 did. To say the least, not everybody was so fond of the result. But Thatcher’s pitch, like Clinton’s “shrillness,” was not really the main issue: that she was a woman in charge in the first place was significantly more of a problem.
Criticisms of women’s voices don’t end when the speakers sound more traditionally feminine either. A 1995 New York Times story told of a group of elevator operators at a department store in Japan who, as a part of their job, trained to raise their pitch in order to sound “cuter,” more “girlish,” and more “polite.” The Times described, “European women no longer rearrange their bodies with corsets, and Chinese no longer cripple their daughters by binding their feet. But many Japanese women speak well above their natural pitch, especially in formal settings, on the phone, or when dealing with customers.” Despite all the effort, when asked about the elevator operators’ honeyed falsetto, a Tokyo interpreter responded, “Those girls are trained to be robots. With the elevator girls, you don’t see a person but a doll.”
Doll metaphors are a go-to for critics of women who fall on the more classically feminine side of the double bind. In 2016 journalist Ben Shapiro wrote an article titled “Yes, Hillary Clinton is shrill. No, it’s not sexist to say so” with the rationale that calling Clinton shrill is kosher because it’s simply “reality,” as proven by the fact that this word is not used to describe every woman in politics. “Nobody calls Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) shrill, because she’s not shrill,” Shapiro defended. “She may have lifeless eyes, a doll’s eyes, but she doesn’t shriek like a wounded seagull.” Lifeless doll eyes. But right, no, not sexist at all.
Probably the clearest illustration of the two sides of the linguistic double bind presented itself in 2008, when Hillary Clinton campaigned for president at the same time as Governor Sarah Palin, John McCain’s running mate. The juxtaposition of these two women was so extreme it was as if a gender studies professor had dreamed it up specifically for argument’s sake. As 1984’s winner of Miss Wasilla and Miss Congeniality, beauty queen Palin was a tailor-made foil to Clinton, whose very laughter, according to several male commentators, made “her sound like the Wicked Witch of the West.” The “Clinton cackle” was a phrase commonly used every time she so much as cracked a smile. (And over the years, similar witch comparisons have been made to Theresa May, Kellyanne Conway, and Senator Elizabeth Warren, who was once the subject of a terrific fake news story claiming that she regularly participated in nude pagan rituals as a college student.)
As political scientist Elvin T. Lim wrote in 2009, “There may be objective reasons for thinking Clinton to be unlikable and competent and Palin to be likable but incompetent, but it is surely more than a coincidence that the two most prominent women in American politics in 2008 so perfectly occupied the two sides of the double bind.”
If you’ve ever had a woman boss (especially one in her twenties or thirties who’s new to being in charge), you’ve likely witnessed her struggle to negotiate the double bind firsthand. I’ve often noticed it in how younger female higher-ups word their emails. An example: let’s say a manager wanted to assign a project with a tight deadline to her assistant. She could phrase her email with a straightforward tone and no-frills punctuation—“The project needs to be done by tomorrow at 3 p.m. Thanks.”—but, because we have certain expectations of how women are supposed to communicate (politely, indirectly), that might earn her a reputation as a cold bitch. On the other hand, she could pepper her email with hedges, exclamation points, and emoji—“If you could possibly have the project finished by tomorrow at 3 p.m., that’d be AMAZING. Thank you so much!!)”—but, because we have certain expectations of how bosses are supposed to communicate (bluntly, directly), that might make her seem jumpy and unfit to lead. Of course, there are plenty of male bosses who grapple with how to conduct themselves linguistically in the workplace, but, because our visions of masculine speech and authoritative speech align better, this negotiation isn’t usually as tricky for them.
Our conflicted attitudes toward powerful women sprout from many sources. Obviously, there is no one simple explanation, but Deborah Cameron suggests that our resistance to women in positions of authority, and the reason the double bind itself exists, is in part related to the messy clash of feelings we have about our own mothers. “Our main historical model for female authority is the maternal variety,” she explains, “and it’s a form of power most people are at least somewhat ambival
ent about, because we’ve all experienced the powerlessness of the child and the rebellion against maternal power which is part of growing up.”
The negative language we use to describe “domineering” women—shrew, bitch, witch, cunt—sounds not unlike the words we might have used (or at least thought about using) when our moms took away our car privileges or made us do our homework. When adults wield these words to describe female politicians, they’re implying how crazy and wrong it is when women assert their authority outside the home, just as terms like pussywhipped and henpecked imply how crazy and wrong it is when men allow them to do so.
I don’t mean to imply that the voices of powerful women are the only ones that get critiqued—men get some flack too. Over the years, linguists and commentators have dedicated plenty of effort to analyzing Trump’s speech. A 2016 Slate piece called “Trump’s Tower of Babble” cited an analysis concluding that our forty-fifth president’s “loosely woven sentences and cramped, simplistic vocabulary” placed his speech below a sixth-grade reading level (more than four reading levels behind his opponents’ talking styles). A different study found that 78 percent of Trump’s vocabulary was made up of monosyllabic words, and that his most frequently used lexical items included (in the following order) I, Trump, very, China, and money.
Those reports aren’t exactly flattering; then again, it’s not as if the folks likening Clinton’s laugh to a witch were conducting empirical studies. Not to mention, there are countless men in power besides Trump—men whose eccentric speech styles are surely worth a look (Bernie Sanders, Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, John Oliver)—who have largely escaped the careful attention paid to so many female public figures. (And when attention is paid, it’s often in the form of praise for their “passionate” delivery.)
The subject of attention leads to the fundamental reason why Clinton’s and Thatcher’s voices are as repellent to many listeners as Scarlett Johansson’s is sexy. Quite simply, it’s because female public figures are judged by their bodies, fashion, and overall sex appeal significantly more than their male colleagues. Calling Clinton “shrill” is motivated by the same thing as criticizing her “cankles”—another of the press’s favorite digs from before she made the permanent switch to pantsuits. (Who knew a two-inch section of lower-leg flesh could be so newsworthy?) I would challenge you to find a male politician who has 20,500 Google search results dedicated to his cankles, but I’ve already tried it, and it was not an efficient use of my Wednesday afternoon.
What you also won’t find, no matter how many press clippings you analyze, is language describing male authority figures’ speech using sexual metaphors; meanwhile, you will find scores of sexual comparisons for powerful women. Cameron analyzed media commentary of the 2016 UK general election and was amazed by how often women politicians (and even debate moderators) were likened to archetypal female “battle-axes,” like the austere headmistress of an all-girls’ school or the vicious nurse in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. What these figures share is that they are all “aging, usually ugly, and either totally sexless or sexually voracious, terrifying the male objects of their insatiable desire,” says Cameron.
To the contrary, we also have the velvety voices of the women from BroBible’s countdown: Scarlett Johansson, Charlize Theron, Penélope Cruz. These voices are whispery, never loud; low, never shrieking; and often peppered with the titillating lisps and long vowels of foreign tongues. And, most important, they belong to people who do not wish to be presidents or CEOs, but are instead just there for our entertainment. If these women were to run for public office, rest assured they would be slammed for not sounding authoritative enough. As proof, we can look to Welsh politician Leanne Wood, who has a soft, mellifluous timbre that Scottish Twitter pundit @AngryScotland once described as “audio chocolate”; at the same time, as Cameron recounts, her voice has been “endlessly patronized by the media.” The voices of ScarJo, Charlize, and Penélope would surely not be deemed White House appropriate either—but at least they would never, heaven forbid, come across as unfuckable.
Critiques on both sides of the double bind are a means of linguistic objectification. As long as it remains strange for women to fill positions of authority, then we can expect their clothes, bodies, voices, and gender itself to be inevitably ogled. Until then, they will be forced to walk the tightrope of the double bind, careful not to slip and fall into either the box labeled “adorable eye candy” or the one marked “abrasive scold.”
I asked Deborah Cameron for her advice on how ambitious women can navigate the double bind, how we can refocus the public’s attention from the shrillness or sexiness of a woman’s voice to what she’s actually saying. She had a pretty good idea of what doesn’t work: “It seems to me (sad irony) that women who think about it a lot and try hard to fix it (think: Clinton on the campaign trail, resisting the perception of her as aggressive by forcing herself to smile and not get angry when Trump was baiting her) are often judged even more negatively than women who don’t seem as concerned about impression management (Michelle Obama, Scotland’s Nicola Sturgeon, Angela Merkel).”
Appearing genuine feels so essential to contemporary, internet-savvy audiences. Social media and round-the-clock press have caused relatability to become more important to the average consumer than competence. While working at a digital media company in the late 2010s, I regularly heard higher-ups use the phrase “authenticity over content” to describe the evolving tastes of a Twitter and YouTube–obsessed viewership. If Margaret Thatcher and her deep, heavily trained voice were to run for office now, Twitter would no doubt have a field day scorning her phoniness. As Cameron says, “Once you start listening to the spin doctors and the life coaches and trying to come across as more this and less that, you also come across as ‘inauthentic.’” So if the pundits, trolls, and disgruntled employees are going to bust your chops either way, you might as well just be yourself.
At a time during her 2008 campaign when she was plummeting in the polls so epically that most people would have long since given up, Hillary Clinton made headlines after publicly crying on a trip to New Hampshire. It happened while she was answering an undecided voter’s question about what makes her “get out the door every day,” especially “as a woman.” At first, Clinton chuckled the question off, but then her tone shifted. “This is very personal for me. Not just political. I see what’s happening. We have to reverse it.” As she said this, her eyes welled up and her voice cracked. “Some people think elections are a game: who’s up or who’s down. It’s about our country. It’s about our kids’ futures. It’s about all of us together.”
This display of emotion was genuine, the public could tell (“I wanted to see who the real Hillary was. That was real,” another undecided voter commented), and in the weeks following the episode, Clinton’s rating went up. Obviously, it wasn’t enough to help her win the New Hampshire primary, and some commentators thought her tears were too little too late. The catch-22, of course, is that it was Hillary’s toughness and emotional resilience, the very qualities that painted her as a coldhearted shrew, that put her on that campaign trail in the first place.
There are successful women who seem to have navigated the linguistic double bind more smoothly than Clinton. According to a small poll I took among my social media followers, Senator Kamala Harris, Oprah Winfrey, TV broadcasters Diane Sawyer and Robin Roberts, and Sheryl Sandberg have all done a pretty bang-up job of striking a nice equilibrium, alongside Michelle Obama and Angela Merkel.
Even if every woman in power were to modulate her voice to perfection, managing to come across as balanced and worthy as the Winfreys of the world, it still wouldn’t solve everything. After all, our bias against how women leaders sound is structural, not individual. The real solution is a long-term one.
In one of her 2015 columns for the New York Times, Sheryl Sandberg wrote that “the long-term solution to the double bind of speaking while female” is simple: we need to pick more women to be the boss. As we’
ve already learned, adding women to workplace environments doesn’t automatically earn them more respect; sometimes, it can even have the opposite effect by intimidating their male colleagues, impelling them to behave even more dominantly. However, when women make up the active majority of higher-up positions (or all of them), that story changes. Take it from University of Texas professor Ethan Burris, who studied a credit union staff made up of 74 percent women supervisors. “Sure enough,” Sandberg reports, “when women spoke up there, they were more likely to be heard than men.” Studies also show that by and large, companies led by women over-perform. “Start-ups led by women are more likely to succeed,” Sandberg says, “innovative firms with more women in top management are more profitable; and companies with more gender diversity have more revenue, customers, market share, and profits.”
Eventually, the more normal it is for women to lead and for men to follow—the more balanced the scales become—then there will be no such thing as a woman sounding “shrill” or “abrasive,” because we will no longer automatically associate women with subservience. There will no longer be such a grotesque misalignment between what any given gender should sound like and what power should sound like. As sociolinguist Bonnie McElhinny once wrote, “The more we allow men and women into one another’s spheres and allow them to exhibit behaviors normatively understood as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine,’ the more we will denaturalize and, in fact, redefine these understandings of gender.”
While we’re hiring a bunch of women to run the world, I recommend hiring a bunch of gay people too. Because if our whack ideas about how women speak are keeping us from living our best lives, you don’t even want to know what we’re missing when it comes to the mind-blowing world of queer language.
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