
Voice Pitch Predicts Labor Market Success Among Male CEOs (2012) [pdf] - mpweiher
https://scprod2-lb.mccombs.utexas.edu/~/media/Files/MSB/Departments/Accounting/Centennial/MPV_PSYCI_07262012.pdf
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rdlecler1
We see similar outcomes with height. I’ve always wondered how much the gender
gap in income—if any—was driven by differences in height. Are people
negatively biasing women because they are women or are they biasing against
shorter people in general? Meg Whitman was 6’1”. Marissa Meyer is 5’8”. Sheryl
Sandberg is 5’8”, Elizabeth Holmes is 5’7” Indra Nooyi is 5’9”.

~~~
door5
It isn't, there is an enormous body of evidence demonstrating that the gender
pay gap is driven by overt sexism and institutional barriers. This evidence is
far more compelling than speculation about height.

~~~
cal5k
I’m very sceptical of this explanation. Sexism probably still plays a role,
but not nearly as big a role as population-level average differences in
personality/interests.

Some interesting papers:
[https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761774171...](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797617741719?journalCode=pssa&)

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019188691...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886917305962?via%3Dihub)

[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ijop.12529](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ijop.12529)

~~~
door5
Even if you assume all this research is correct, why are people with certain
characteristics or interests that are disproportionately associated with women
get rewarded less economically? Also sexism.

~~~
cal5k
Well if you _read_ the research you would see that it actually boils down to
choices people make. So that’s sort of like saying that the choices women make
are de facto sexist because... they’re women?

~~~
door5
No, I'm saying the economy rewards the choices men make. Women get paid less
because employers pay less in female-dominated fields.

~~~
mpweiher
Alternatively: Women are free to choose professions without having to concern
themselves about making money.

Evidence:

1\. Women make these choices _more_ in richer and more egalitarian societies.
Your explanation makes the opposite prediction and is therefore contradicted
by the data.

2\. Women care a _lot_ more about how much a prospective partner earns.

2a. This is not due to women being "unable" to support a partner because they
get paid less: the preference gets _stronger_ the more a woman earns, not
weaker.

3\. Women care a lot more about predictable work, part-time work and no
overtime, all of which depress earnings. (see
[https://scholar.harvard.edu/bolotnyy/publications/why-do-
wom...](https://scholar.harvard.edu/bolotnyy/publications/why-do-women-earn-
less-men-evidence-bus-and-train-operators-job-market-paper) )

------
alexandercrohde
I didn't read the whole article, but my first question is if they controlled
for direction of effect.

The "winner effect" is a known phenomenon when people succeed in competition
their body starts to produce more testosterone (for men).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winner_and_loser_effects](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winner_and_loser_effects)

~~~
JimboOmega
Short term testosterone would have little effect.

However voice pitch is highly social and situational... it could still all be
correlated. Someone who feels confident and feels like they "won" might
subconsciously lower their voice in other interactions.

To give another example, men tend to subconsciously lower their voices when
talking to a woman they find attractive. There's a lot of other things going
on than just the physiology.

~~~
alexandercrohde
>> Short term testosterone would have little effect.

Calling BS on that. Doubt you looked that up.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4LbafuDmI4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4LbafuDmI4)

~~~
55555
The effect the article refers to probably lasts hours to a day.

The doses that FtM transgender are taking are higher than the normal male
range, I'd estimate.

~~~
JimboOmega
Yeah, that's what I was referring to as short term - hours to a day. The
linked YouTube video is a year. If a cis-man was to take a similar dose (and
thus say, have double physiological T levels) they would certainly not notice
their voice changing the next days.

Most transgender medicine protocols target physiological levels of the
hormones for the desired gender. It gets a bit more complicated with
transwomen, because women have a tremendous range of variation during each
cycle (never mind pregnancy), and because high estrogen levels can suppress
testosterone on their own (so you don't need a separate medication to do
that)... so there are different schools of thought as to the best way to do
it.

Targeting physiological levels is done mostly because that seems like a good
idea a priori. One of the joys of being transgender is being part of an
ongoing science experiment.

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crsv
I enjoyed imaging the abstract being read aloud by Elizabeth Holmes with her
clownish deep voice she worked to portray in the later stages of her
fraudulent career. It's funny how these perceptions and findings sometimes
line up.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
Yes, Elizabeth Holmes was a fraud. But choosing to lower your voice to have a
more commanding presence does not seem fraudulent not particularly
"cartoonish" to me. Regardless of ones feelings towards Margaret Thatcher's
policies, Thatcher was most definitely _not_ fraudulent, and her lowering her
voice was almost a virtual necessity in her political era.

~~~
EnderViaAnsible
I think part of the problem is that Holmes's voice sounded artificial. To be
effective, generally speaking, you would imagine the voice couldn't sound like
you were trying to speak with a deep voice. (But surely studies have been done
on this. Does it matter?)

But I agree with you. I've always "dressed up" in work situations, for
example, because people respond more positively to me when I look sharp.

I think it witheringly stupid that people would assess my competence based on
something so tangential, but if they are going to have a prejudice, why
shouldn't I make it a prejudice in my favor (by dressing well instead of
whatever I want to wear)?

Short men should be wearing hidden heel shoes, too. Those inches are worth a
lot more money than the shoes are. Etc.

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candybar
This isn't particularly convincing, given that it's such a small and skewed
sample and the effect is so small. The average CEO in this sample operates a
firm of 8B and makes 8M - the effect they found was 30M for firm size and 19K
for annual comp for each percentage decrease in pitch. It's quite likely that
merely adding, say, Steve Jobs or Michael Bloomberg into the sample would've
been enough to reverse the effect. Also, what would be much more interesting
is if CEOs as a group were substantially different from the general population
in this regard - but they are saying the median CEO wasn't at all
extraordinary.

To the extent that there is an effect, I think the causality may be the other
way - voice pitch isn't an immutable characteristic of each speaker but
situational. One well-known effect is that people tend to speak with a higher
pitch when talking to relatively high status people and a lower pitch when
talking to relatively low status people. It seems quite possible that CEOs of
larger companies perceive wall street analysts and investors as lower status
than CEOs of smaller companies do, causing this discrepancy. It seems far more
plausible than lower-pitched men being CEOs of disproportionately larger
firms, without the same effect holding up across the entire professional
spectrum.

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spyckie2
> To identify a set of executives for analysis, we start with a list of male
> CEOs from the Standard & Poor’s 1500 stock index analyzed by Engelberg, Gao
> & Parsons (in press). We restrict attention to only male CEOs because of the
> sexually dimorphic nature of voice pitch (Titze, 1994) and the poor
> representation of female CEOs among S&P 1500 firms (Bertrand & Hallock,
> 2001).

> We intersect the Engelberg et al. (in press) observations with the Mayew &
> Venkatachalam (2012) CEO speech corpus, which is derived from publicly
> broadcast telephonic earnings conference calls archived in the Thomson
> Reuters StreetEvents database (www.streetevents.com).

> The median sample CEO is 56 years old, operates a firm with $2.427 billion
> in assets, and is paid $3.692 million annually.

> A test of mediation using the product of coefficients method for large
> samples following Preacher & Hayes (2008) confirms firm size mediates the
> effects of voice pitch (Z=3.15, p=0.002).

The paper states that a lower voice is perceived (by everyone else) to be a
better leader. Sounds reasonable enough, I guess. The statistics then show
that the lower the voice, the better the compensation of the CEO and the
larger the firm the CEO runs, with a strong correlation. This is where I
scratch my head a bit.

A couple of thoughts for why this may be, all guesses, really:

1) Listed companies on the S&P 1500 are mostly very mature and the CEOs may
not do much of the value creation. Other people (CTO, COO, CFO, etc) might be
doing most of the value creation with the CEO holding the company together.
(This is in contrast to many tech companies - Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Steve
Jobs, Elon Musk, etc - who are strategically involved in the company. It is
their strategic directional leadership that they bring in that people trust,
rather than how they make you feel when they talk)

2) In mature markets that aren't tech related, innovation is not a strong
factor of growth, it's usually intangibles like connections, communication,
convincing people, alignment, deals, etc. Having a "leader voice" can have a
strong impact to get buy in from everyone, internal and external.

3) There may very well be a physiological link between a lower voice and
strong leadership qualities, rather than just the perception of it, who knows?
Or people who have a lower voice get innate advantages in leadership due to
people trusting them more and them having an easier time because of that, kind
of like a flywheel effect.

4) The statistics may be wrong. This doesn't seem to be the case with how they
designed it.

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stanfordkid
This is intriguing -- I would guess that a successful strategy would be to
short stocks with high growth that have a CEO with "evolutionarily
advantageous" traits (height, attractiveness, depth of voice) ... and go long
stocks with high growth that have CEO's lacking these characteristics:

The company with the "suave" CEO is likely building revenue as a result of
sales and people charisma rather than core innovation.

~~~
Zenbit_UX
>The company with the "suave" CEO is likely building revenue as a result of
sales and people charisma rather than core innovation.

Yes, because tall people can't have good products too...?

~~~
balfirevic
No, that is not implied in the parent comment.

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hartator
I remember reading another article that CEO who looks stressed and anxious on
their video call with shareholders perform better than ones who look regular.
Definitely an interesting subject.

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adamwong246
A quick google search shows thyroplasty to be a great investment!

~~~
rangersanger
seems like gore-tex is all over hacker news this week. From corneas to
voiceboxes.

~~~
darkpuma
I mean, gore-tex (ePTFE) has been used for medical implants for decades.

------
1k
Does pitch get lower with age? That would correlate with larger companies
tending to choose more experienced CEOs.

That aside, there are other forms of biases, like people preferring better
_looking_ leaders (based on socially perceived ideals on height, color,
religion, hereditary status) and so too will they prefer better sounding CEOs.

~~~
smudgymcscmudge
Here’s to hoping 58 is the age where my voice changes and I get a high power
executive position.

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peteretep
I would buy a voice-training app for this

~~~
objektif
Whats a good one?

~~~
peteretep
Apologies: I meant, if one existed and someone recommended, I would like to
purchase it

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Animats
Can you run voice filters with Skype for interviews?

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lenticular
Subconscious gender/racial biases, which absolutely everyone has, are so
devilish because they take conscious effort to overcome.

~~~
door5
There's a ton of overt misogyny and sexism in the U.S., nothing "subconscious"
about it.

~~~
jdavis703
This is an uncharitable interpretation of the comment about sexism & racism.
I’m African American, yet the last time I took an implicit association test it
showed I’m biased against African Americans. Yeah there’s a lot of conscious
bias in the U.S., but we live in a culture with deep seated misogyny and
racism that can effect even well meaning people.

~~~
markrages
Implicit bias tests are not valid at the individual level.

[https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/3/7/14637626/implicit-
as...](https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/3/7/14637626/implicit-association-
test-racism)

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door5
Another way in which rigid, patriarchal gender roles hurt men as well as
women. Straight men should be far more critical of sexism and misogyny than
they are. This attitude is directly tied to oppression against women in the
workforce.

~~~
LanceH
That's a rather sexist statement telling men what they should be thinking.

~~~
door5
It's not sexist to point out that men historically have held disproportionate
cultural, social, economic, and political power and continue to do so to this
day.

~~~
epicureanideal
And historically men have fought wars, guarded borders, done very dangerous
jobs, and so on.

Most men have not held power. A top 1% of men held power, and 99% of men did
dirty and dangerous jobs at the bottom of the hierarchy, and worked worse than
animals to try to provide for and protect their families.

Men give up seats on lifeboats for women, yada yada yada. Trying to frame this
whole thing as "men vs women" is ridiculous, because men are so incredibly in
favor of sacrificing themselves for women. Clearly other issues are involved
than some "pure evil sexism".

~~~
door5
I didn't frame it as men vs. women. I framed it as challenging patriarchy,
which is a system and ideology of male dominance and control.

