> A century of negative commentary on the female voice has had wide-ranging effects: a 1998 study of young Australian women found that the average frequency of

> A century of negative commentary on the female voice has had wide-ranging effects: a 1998 study of young Australian women found that the average frequency of female speech dropped twenty-three hertz between 1945 and 1993. Margaret Thatcher famously worked with voice coaches to hone her auditory image, dropping her voice sixty hertz between the nineteen-sixties and the nineteen-eighties. One of the most notable of the many bizarre deceptions in the Theranos saga involved Elizabeth Holmes’s deep voice; when I analyzed recordings of her speaking I found that the disparity between what is likely her real voice and her performative one is around a hundred hertz, which, in that range, is equivalent to nearly half an octave. Wow -- this is absolutely fascinating. I always dismissed Elizabeth Holmes' low voice as a weird quirk, but now I realize there's actually a pretty concrete (and sad) historical rationale to it.