The Reasons Why Women’s Voices Are Deeper Today
20th July 2019
But once you move past those accents, you’ll find another social transformation mirrored in our voices: women today speak at a deeper pitch than their mothers or grandmothers would have done, thanks to the changing power dynamics between men and women.
I rather doubt that ‘changing power dynamics’ have an effect on the pitch of people’s voices. This sounds to me like proglodyte pseudo-science; the fact that it’s from the BBC makes that supposition almost a certainty.
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.
So really it’s a voluntary change to increase dominance behavior, like wearing pants rather than a dress.
It would be interesting to run the same experiment on men to see whether the prevalence of the beta male has resulted in an average increase in the pitch of male voices.
July 21st, 2019 at 14:09
They completely ignore the part about how better nutrition and medicine mean that women are larger physically than we used to be. That leads to a larger resonance chamber and a lower pitch for the voice. Of course, that idea doesn’t allow for SJW preaching, so it must be ignored.
July 22nd, 2019 at 16:55
I was going to make the same point as Cathy, above. The larger one is, the longer the vocal cords and deeper the voice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocal_cords
We’re significantly larger than we were 100 years ago
https://elifesciences.org/articles/13410
This is the obvious explanation for the deeper voices.
July 22nd, 2019 at 18:40
That actually makes sense.