Indeed, research has shown that women who speak with deeper voices are typically taken more seriously. As soon as you raise your voice, you’ve lost your audience.”
“If women keep their voices monitored, low, carefully articulated, you’re perceived as knowing what you’re talking about. “It’s really ingrained in the psyche of gender,” she says. “So, consciously or otherwise, women are lowering their voices to match them – to be seen as having gravitas and intelligence.” Rose notes that women have a long history of needing to control how they speak, for fear of being dismissed as “over-emotional”, because Sigmund Freud labelled women who raised their voices and spoke with a high pitch as “hysterical”. “We are still operating in a male world, especially when it comes to work, where men, who have deeper voices, have more gravitas,” says Alivia Rose, a psychotherapist and spokesperson for the UK Council for Psychotherapy. But within a few years, she was exposed as a fake: the technology she was selling didn’t work, and she was convicted last year by a jury on four counts of fraud. Her $6.5 billion company Theranos promised to detect life-threatening medical conditions such as cancer and diabetes with a few drops of blood – no big needles necessary. Among these was Phyllis Gardener, a professor at Stanford University (from where Holmes dropped out in 2004), who told ABC Radio, “When she first came to me, she didn’t have a low voice.” Many viewers of The Dropout and fans of the podcast that preceded it have combed through recordings of Holmes talking, searching for moments of change – and they do seem to find them, for example in a 2005 podcast interview with NPR and in a filmed talk with Sal Khan 10 years later.Ī deep voice helps assert dominance and project powerĪ deep voice helps assert dominance and project power, and much like Holmes’ Steve Jobs-esque black turtlenecks, the way she speaks helped to reinforce the patter she was touting. It’s awkward to watch as her mouth tenses around her vowels, her expression deadpan.įormer colleagues and acquaintances of Holmes have spoken about having noticed inconsistencies in her voice, noting that she would occasionally slip into what they believed was her natural higher pitch. In The Dropout, there is a scene where the CEO of the biotech start-up Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes (played by Amanda Seyfried), is standing in front of her bedroom mirror, repeating the words: “This is an inspiring step forward.” Every time she says it, her voice deepens, lower and lower, until she reaches the throaty baritone that we recognise as Holmes’.
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