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Stop telling women how they should talk

"If you say 'like' one more time, I'm gonna lose my shit."

These were the words uttered to me through gritted teeth as I sat in green plastic patio furniture on a humid summer night a few years back. The words dried on my tongue; I lost my train of thought. Moments before, I'd been embroiled in a heated debate about millennials and social media, as was my wont. My opponent was an older male journalist and, though he objected to the central thesis of my argument, he chose not to engage with my salient points. Instead he opted to attack something intensely personal: the way I speak. 

I came away from that interaction feeling a level of anger that I couldn't quite put into words. I felt ridiculed, undermined, and — worst of all — newly self-conscious about a vocal tick of which I'd been erstwhile blissfully unaware.

I'm not alone. Women are criticised every day for the way they speak. And since terms like upspeak and vocal fry first entered the popular lexicon a few years ago, it's only gotten worse. The buzzwords — which once described non-gender-specific speech patterns — have become yet another weapon used to silence women who dare to voice opinions. 

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They are "easy ways to tell women to shut up," says Jessica Bennett — gender editor at The New York Times and author of Feminist Fight Club.

Women are constantly being told that their voices sound too high-pitched, too "Valley Girl," too shrill. Women are told they apologise too much, that they use too many discourse markers — "like," "ya know," "I mean"— and that they're exhibiting vocal fry and upspeak. Vocal fry means dropping your voice to its lowest natural register, which makes your vocal folds vibrate to produce a creaking sound. Upspeak or uptalk denotes ending a sentence with a rising-pitch intonation, which can sound like you're asking a question. 

Once we had the words to define the perceived problem, critics couldn't stop using them to belittle women. But the kicker is, in some cases, these behaviours are just as prevalent in men. 

Women in broadcasting frequently find themselves on the receiving end of invective about the way they speak. 

After a recent radio interview, Bennett received a tweet from a man telling her to "stop with the vocal fry."

Annie Oh, a host of the Who The F**k Is Gossip Girl podcast, which aims to help a guy who's never seen the drama understand its many scandals years after it went off air, was criticised for her use of the word "like" in an email from a listener. Oh says reading that email for the first time was "shitty," particularly as half of the "essay-long" missive was dedicated to decrying how she speaks. 

"Considering it's a free podcast, not advertised, this person went out of their way to find and listen to our podcast," she says. "Dude, you can just stop listening to it."

In an episode of This American Life (TAL), host Ira Glass addressed the emails being sent to the show's female members of staff —  they're "some of the angriest emails" the show gets. Glass read aloud one email that referred to Chana Joffe-Walt's purported vocal fry: "The voice of Chana Joffe-Walt is just too much to bear and I turn off any episode she's on." Some of the words used to describe the voices of TAL's female employees: "unbearable," "annoyingly adolescent," "beyond annoying," "excruciating," "detracts from the credibility of the journalist." 

When journalist Jessica Grose was co-hosting Slate's DoubleX Gabfest podcast, she also received emails criticising her for her upspeak. She was told she sounded like "a Valley Girl and a faux socialite," and one interviewee said she "sounded like his granddaughter." 

Women face a "double bind" when it comes to their voices, Bennett says. "Because our natural style of speech, which tends to be more flexible, experimental, and higher pitched, is not the style of speech that is typically associated with leadership," says Bennett. "In fact, research has found that it's perceived as insecure, less competent, and sometimes even less trustworthy." 

Because of this, women employ tactics like vocal fry to make their voices sound deeper and more like those traditionally associated with leadership.

"So in effect, we’re combatting the inflection by trying to deepen our voices, but then arriving at a vocal fry register. Can’t win, right?" writes Bennett in Feminist Fight Club. In a nutshell, you're damned if you do sound like a woman, and, well, you're damned if you don't. 

The internet is littered with utility posts instructing women how they can ditch these speech patterns to sound more professional, more confident, more capable. 

But the same isn't true for men.

"Men do many of these things just as much (if not more) than women, but it’s women whose voices are constantly being policed," Erez Levon, reader in sociolinguistics at Queen Mary University of London, told Mashable. Not only have men been the biggest exhibitors of vocal fry, the speech affect was actually started by men, as Levon points out: "Vocal fry was actually associated with men’s speech, and particularly posh men (if you listen to upper-class British men speaking, you’ll hear it all over the place)."

So, if men exhibit vocal fry too, why aren't they getting any stick for it? NYU linguistics professor Lisa Davidson, says because men's voices tend to be lower in pitch, it's harder to discern when they're exhibiting vocal fry. Because women's voices tend to be higher, "it’s really noticeable when a woman is changing from her normal voice to creaky voice, because of the pitch change."

Uptalk is no different. A 2013 study busted the myth that this speech trend is exclusive to young women. "Men don’t think they do it, but they do," said Amanda Ritchart, co-author of the project, said at the time. In a 2016 paper published in the Journal of Sociolinguistics, Levon found that both women and men in London exhibit uptalk, with men using it slightly more than women. He also noted that upspeak is more often employed by young white speakers in London — "older people and black and Asian speakers in London don’t really use uptalk nearly as much." 

When it comes to filler words, researchers are divided. An analysis of the gender differences in use of discourse markers in televised interviews found that women did not use these words more frequently than men in their speech. But a study of 200 people by the University of Texas found that female speakers were more likely to use the discourse marker "like." 

Levon says these behaviours aren't gender specific, but rather "generation specific." He says the emergence of vocal fry and uptalk over the past two decades can be linked to "changes in the structures of society," and "women’s greater access to the labour market." As society has changed over the years, so too have women's voices. A study by the University of South Australia compared archival recordings of women's voices taken in 1945 with recordings made in the 1990s. It was found that the "fundamental frequency" of women's voices "dropped by 23 Hz" over 50 years. Per the BBC, researchers suspect the significant deepening of women's voices reflects "the rise of women to more prominent roles in society" which has prompted them to "adopt a deeper tone to project authority and dominance in the workplace."

Women's voices and positions in society have changed over the years, but this persistent criticism of the female voice suggests that something is lagging behind: our perception of women. 

"I think if women had been in power for all of time, we'd be having this conversation about men's voices," says Bennett. 

Sadly, that isn't the case. So, what can we do to move our perceptions forward? Acknowledging that there are fundamental linguistic differences in the way men, women, and non-binary people speak will help us accept that there isn't just one homogenous, correct way to speak. Being open-minded and receptive to linguistic trends will serve every one of us well. 

Next time you find yourself feeling irritated by the way a woman speaks: ask yourself whether it's truly the voice you find annoying — or rather the person it belongs to or the opinions they are expressing. 

What really needs to change isn't women's voices, but how we think about women and their voices. 

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