Voice Pitch Predicts Labor Market Success Among Male CEOs (2012) [pdf]
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[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/the-fin...
Some interesting papers: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761774171...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019188691...
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... )
"The economy" rewards those who produce goods/services that others find valuable. It's pretty bizarre to claim that the economy itself is somehow sexist, particularly when women make many of the purchasing decisions that drive demand.
If you work 7 hrs rather than 8 you get distinct benefits. Physical health goes up. Mental health goes up. Happiness goes up. It does however have a drawback which is lower income. Women on average spends one hour less working than men. Why are men expected to work longer hours then women and severely punished if they don't?
-women not negotiating what they are actually worth in terms of pay -women taking less risks and less demanding jobs after having children.
I've read that at most a couple percent of the earnings gap is due to gender, and most is due to number of hours worked, chosen profession, etc.
>> there is an enormous body of evidence demonstrating
>> that the gender pay gap is driven by overt sexism
>> and institutional barriers
In fact, recently Google did a study of its own, and found out that at least at Google more _men_ tend to be underpaid: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/technology/google-gender-...
and
"Kelly Ellis, a former Google engineer and one of the plaintiffs in the gender-pay suit against the company, said in a legal filing that Google had hired her in 2010 as a Level 3 employee — the category for new software engineers who are recent college graduates — despite her four years of experience. Within a few weeks, a male engineer who had also graduated from college four years earlier was hired for Ms. Ellis’s team — as a Level 4 employee. That meant he received a higher salary and had more opportunities for bonuses, raises and stock compensation, according to the suit. Other men on the team whose qualifications were equal to or less than hers were also brought in at Level 4, the suit says.:
Moreover, back in 2010 Google had a system for when the "correct" hiring level is unclear. You'd be hired as a "member of technical staff" (MTS) with a given salary and stock grant, and then over the next 6-12 months prove that you deserve to be "slotted" at the level your compensation is at. If you failed to do so, your comp would remain the same, but you'd be slotted a level below and expected to earn a promo in the near future. Which means the hiring committee (none of the decisions are made directly by the interviewers or the hiring managers) was pretty certain what level was appropriate for her. Nowadays this system is not in place anymore, and if there's any doubt, down a level you go right off the bat.
It is very counterproductive to attribute one's misfortunes in life solely to traits one can't change. It could very well be that Kelly just wasn't that good at her job, many otherwise very smart people at Google are barely scraping by.
But once one starts attributing all misfortune to something like race or gender or another unchangeable trait, that kind of shuts down the feedback loop that could otherwise drive improvements in performance, and therefore, one hopes, also improvement in promotions and therefore compensation.
Maybe one day an intelligent AI can tell us how our bodys work so we can stop the guessing game.
After joining a large company with a certain cachet of exclusivity, I was surprised to notice that I feel about of average height when walking around the company’s campus.
Worth noting that Angela Ahrendts, former VP of Marketing at Apple is 6 foot 4 - that's like the top 99.999th percentile in terms of height. Consider what it means that the highest ranking female at the company was probably also the tallest.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/skinny-women-make-more-money...
The "winner effect" is a known phenomenon when people succeed in competition their body starts to produce more testosterone (for men).
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.
Calling BS on that. Doubt you looked that up.
The doses that FtM transgender are taking are higher than the normal male range, I'd estimate.
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.
I'm transgender myself, so, I actually do know about these things.
The effects are one way, also. Once your voice goes down, even if the source of testosterone is removed, it tends to remain low (which is why many transwomen struggle with it)
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.
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.
> 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.
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...?
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.
More generally, humans will basically always show bias towards those in more dominant groups, because currying favor with such people is a far better winning strategy than being nice to low-status individuals. Whether the Hutus and Tutsis, white and black, masculine male vs effeminate, etc, it always is the same.
This is just an unfortunate thing about the human brain, but we can use our reasoning ability to correct it. But first, we have to accept hat it exists.
If masculine men are preferred, then that means everyone else isn't. It's an obvious avenue for discrimination against women and LGBT people.
I'm a very masculine gay man (I'm just stating that as a fact, I'm not better than anyone else for it). I do know many more effeminate gay men. Things really are more difficult in the workplace for them especially, not jut in my experience, but empirically. I'm glad I don't have that affect because it makes my life easier, but biases like this can creep in and will always be damaging.
That seems like a baseless assertion to me, what makes you so certain that masculinity or correlated factors have no effect on job performance for male CEOs?
https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/3/7/14637626/implicit-as...
Critiquing male power and men's sexist behavior towards women is not "misandry"
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".