I remember reading another article that CEO who looks stressed and anxious on their video call with shareholders perform better than ones who look regular. Definitely an interesting subject.
I enjoyed imaging the abstract being read aloud by Elizabeth Holmes with her clownish deep voice she worked to portray in the later stages of her fraudulent career. It's funny how these perceptions and findings sometimes line up.
Yes, Elizabeth Holmes was a fraud. But choosing to lower your voice to have a more commanding presence does not seem fraudulent not particularly "cartoonish" to me. Regardless of ones feelings towards Margaret Thatcher's policies, Thatcher was most definitely not fraudulent, and her lowering her voice was almost a virtual necessity in her political era.
I think part of the problem is that Holmes's voice sounded artificial. To be effective, generally speaking, you would imagine the voice couldn't sound like you were trying to speak with a deep voice. (But surely studies have been done on this. Does it matter?)
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.
Surely the effect is just as likely to flow in the complete opposite direction: male CEOs who perform better gain deeper voices, or there is a common factor affecting both; and of course, the effect is measured specifically among male CEOs.
I doubt it is anywhere near just as likely to flow in the opposite direction. It's not like masculine white males are favored just because of their voice pitch. That ideal as the ideal of power is deeply ingrained in our society.
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.
We're talking about employment here. Masculine vs. feminine has nothing to do with job performance except in maybe porn or something.
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.
> We're talking about employment here. Masculine vs. feminine has nothing to do with job performance except in maybe porn or something.
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?
This is an uncharitable interpretation of the comment about sexism & racism. I’m African American, yet the last time I took an implicit association test it showed I’m biased against African Americans. Yeah there’s a lot of conscious bias in the U.S., but we live in a culture with deep seated misogyny and racism that can effect even well meaning people.
This is a really good point. Women also show tend to show bias towards men, and gay men often show bias towards straight men. It's kind of an instinctual thing to suck up to the powerful.
I agree, however I think it's important that we do not use "implicit bias" as a cover. Implicit bias seems very vague and allows people to evade responsibility. I think there's a lot of very explicit bias (in the form of sexist attitudes, discrimination, biased hiring practices, etc) that need to be tackled. The "implicit bias" narrative (that a lot of tech CEOs are a fan of) makes me uncomfortable because it depoliticizes the issue, chalking it up so something more innately human (our biases and mistakes) rather than sexist attitudes and policies.
The U.S. president has been accused by multiple women of sexual assault. He has called women bitches, whores, fat pigs, ugly, etc. Multiple states in the south passed legislation effectively banning abortion, stripping women of their sexual and bodily autonomy. Where is there open, institutional misandry of this level?
Critiquing male power and men's sexist behavior towards women is not "misandry"
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.
Yeah, that's what I was referring to as short term - hours to a day. The linked YouTube video is a year. If a cis-man was to take a similar dose (and thus say, have double physiological T levels) they would certainly not notice their voice changing the next days.
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.
That video is a year, not (as the winner effect as I understood it) over a period of hours or days.
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)
We see similar outcomes with height. I’ve always wondered how much the gender gap in income—if any—was driven by differences in height. Are people negatively biasing women because they are women or are they biasing against shorter people in general? Meg Whitman was 6’1”. Marissa Meyer is 5’8”. Sheryl Sandberg is 5’8”, Elizabeth Holmes is 5’7” Indra Nooyi is 5’9”.
It isn't, there is an enormous body of evidence demonstrating that the gender pay gap is driven by overt sexism and institutional barriers. This evidence is far more compelling than speculation about height.
I’m very sceptical of this explanation. Sexism probably still plays a role, but not nearly as big a role as population-level average differences in personality/interests.
Even if you assume all this research is correct, why are people with certain characteristics or interests that are disproportionately associated with women get rewarded less economically? Also sexism.
Well if you read the research you would see that it actually boils down to choices people make. So that’s sort of like saying that the choices women make are de facto sexist because... they’re women?
Alternatively: Women are free to choose professions without having to concern themselves about making money.
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.
"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.
It is sexism in the other direction. Men who choses jobs that pay less get lower social status, have fewer children, smaller social support network, higher stress, and worse health. Men are punished harshly for choosing low income jobs. Women are not punished if they sacrifice high pay in favor of more personal security, more freedom in the work place, and more meaningfulness in their chosen work.
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?
This is strongly stated but that doesn’t really cut it. Height discrimination is well-known and documented. I’m sure there are many short people of all genders here who have experienced it. It’s one of few physical characteristics that American society still openly accepts making fun of. I think it’s serious enough that it really does need to be explicitly accounted for in any study of gender pay gaps.
>> there is an enormous body of evidence demonstrating
>> that the gender pay gap is driven by overt sexism
>> and institutional barriers
Now, let's not make things up. Every time this question is seriously examined, it turns out that whatever "pay gap" there is is because women, on average, choose to not negotiate their pay, to work in less demanding jobs than men, and to work less in general. I'm not aware of a single rigorous study that links pay differences to "overt sexism" or anything of that sort.
From the study you mentioned "Company officials acknowledged that it did not address whether women were hired at a lower pay grade than men with similar qualifications."
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.:
At Google your "years of experience" matter not at all. I've seen former VPs and directors elsewhere work at Google as L5 software engineers and not be able to be promoted. L3 pretty much means she didn't do well in her interview. L4 is more common for out of college hires.
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.
I agree, I believe in this day and age it is nearly impossible to discuss any possible correlation between any sort of innate/genetic differences (and often even early-learned cultural differences) and mental ability without being branded a sexist/racist etc. No matter how many caveats one offers, no matter how strongly one emphasizes that it could be one, even a tiny one, of a number of factors that account for differences in achievement, it is basically not discussable without grave risk to one's profession and reputation. I find this particularly surprising because physical performance obviously has such an enormous genetic component.
When I look at the (male and female) C*O and EVP of my company I would say height definitely plays a big role. The women are around 5'8" or taller and the males are > 6ft. there are exceptions but in a lot of meetings I have seen the highest ranking is the tallest or one of them.
I’ve always been taller than average. In school, in a class of ~30 students, I was probably in the tallest 3-4 students.
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.
Almost the same in my experience or when with Scandinavians. Although a Brit friend of mine gives me a feeling of smallness being an entire foot taller (7'5"). He's easily one of the tallest people (though unranked) in the world.
There's plenty of data to show taller people get paid more, but interestingly - females are punished for being heavy, and earn more if they are thinner [1]. Males however actually make more money as they weigh more given their height (this could be muscle, fat, or just 'big bone / girth' I recall).
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.
Another way in which rigid, patriarchal gender roles hurt men as well as women. Straight men should be far more critical of sexism and misogyny than they are. This attitude is directly tied to oppression against women in the workforce.
It's not sexist to point out that men historically have held disproportionate cultural, social, economic, and political power and continue to do so to this day.
And historically men have fought wars, guarded borders, done very dangerous jobs, and so on.
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".
Should we? Judging from its actions, feminism seems to be focused on trying to get men at the top to share their power with women. While I can support this out of a sense of fairness, I see no reason to support it purely out of self-interest. It's not like having a mix of men and women at the top will benefit me.
> To identify a set of executives for analysis, we start with a list of male CEOs from the Standard & Poor’s 1500 stock index analyzed by Engelberg, Gao & Parsons (in press). We restrict attention to only male CEOs because of the sexually dimorphic nature of voice pitch (Titze, 1994) and the poor representation of female CEOs among S&P 1500 firms (Bertrand & Hallock, 2001).
> 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.
This is intriguing -- I would guess that a successful strategy would be to short stocks with high growth that have a CEO with "evolutionarily advantageous" traits (height, attractiveness, depth of voice) ... and go long stocks with high growth that have CEO's lacking these characteristics:
The company with the "suave" CEO is likely building revenue as a result of sales and people charisma rather than core innovation.
Does pitch get lower with age? That would correlate with larger companies tending to choose more experienced CEOs.
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.
This isn't particularly convincing, given that it's such a small and skewed sample and the effect is so small. The average CEO in this sample operates a firm of 8B and makes 8M - the effect they found was 30M for firm size and 19K for annual comp for each percentage decrease in pitch. It's quite likely that merely adding, say, Steve Jobs or Michael Bloomberg into the sample would've been enough to reverse the effect. Also, what would be much more interesting is if CEOs as a group were substantially different from the general population in this regard - but they are saying the median CEO wasn't at all extraordinary.
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.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadBut 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.
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"
The "winner effect" is a known phenomenon when people succeed in competition their body starts to produce more testosterone (for men).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winner_and_loser_effects
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4LbafuDmI4
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)
[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...
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ijop.12529
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.
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...
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".
> 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.
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.