This is a fascinating article historically, but I find it hard to believe it has much relevance to how women speak or are perceived today.
I've done a lot of voice coaching, and a lot of people -- men and women -- don't speak at the pitch that is healthiest and most relaxed for their vocal apparatus. Some are higher, some are lower.
Because pitch is often very cultural and emotional. People's pitch varies when they speak different languages, or even dialects/accents. And everyone's pitch increases when they're more emotional, and decreases when they're more relaxed -- a deeper, more relaxed voice relative to your normal pitch conveys confidence and control in both men and women. Actors learn to change their pitch (and breathing, volume, resonance, etc.) to whatever is called for in the part.
I appreciate that early telephones may have clipped consonants for women, being designed for men's voices -- but if anything that's the opposite of "shrill". In any case, audio quality today is spectacular so it's certainly no longer the case.
So while pitch is a fascinating subject, I don't really find myself buying into the notion that female speech patterns are a result of pressure from male norms, whether technological or otherwise.
Men are also frequently advised to lower the tone of their voice to convey more gravitas. This is for personal interactions - nothing to do with electronic bandwidth.
Besides, electronic bandwidth these days is of necessity set up for music, and so should be ample for higher voices.
(I have noticed that VOIP is much easier for me to understand than POTS, and cell phones are the worst. Cell phone voice quality hasn't improved since I got my first cell phone in the early 90's.)
> 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.
If anyone thinks the sound of one's voice has anything to do with how seriously one ought to be taken.... listen to these bad dude's speak:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO-E7zOHHp0
What I always found interesting how children in the US sound "shrill" to my European ear, I think children have much lower voices here in Europe (Germany). Anyone else with the same perception? Or is it just in my imagination?
In related news, there was an experiment where Hillary and Trump's genders were swapped - it turned out a female Trump was more popular than the male version: https://www.inc.com/suzanne-lucas/if-donald-trump-were-a-wom...
It's a bit of a stretch to connect such ancient data on recording and playback technology - their most recent citation is from 1933! - with a drop in female voice pitch. Microphones and playback quality have come a long way (tinny phone speakers notwithstanding).
If there has been a desire to lower voice pitch to sound more authoritative/less "shrill", I suspect it's much more of a general social issue than a technological one.