It’s probably tendentious to say that the feminine voice is a feminist issue, but let me say it anyway. I have, I may say, a voice that spans the vocal spectrum from soft to strident — oh all right, shrill, but I never quite appreciate what a problem it is until I do the odd bit of radio. Really, I should stick to print.
Last year, I took part in a fun Radio 4 programme that sought to replicate a newspaper leader conference in a BBC radio studio. In theory, the editorial line on this particular programme is decided by the strength of argument. But it was only when the thing kicked off that I realised this was not entirely the case. What clinches the matter when it comes to winning an argument on the radio, as in life, is whether you can make your voice heard. And it was here that I realised, not for the first time, that women are never going to win when it comes to making ourselves heard; for most of us, our voices are too light, too weedy. Not to put too fine a point upon it, I found that I was mercilessly outclassed by a group of men who would always be able to cut right across me because their voices carried and mine didn’t.
Andrew Rawnsley, the notional editor, has a splendid bass voice, against which no one else’s stands a chance. The Mirror’s Kevin Maguire was heavyweight vocally; if he interrupts, well, you just give way. The other men’s timbre was slightly less assertive, though the Times’s Daniel Finkelstein can certainly make himself heard. In short, me and the other woman present, the Guardian’s Ros Taylor, didn’t have a hope of shouting anyone else down, though Ros was too well-mannered to try. The upshot was that in some of the discussion there was a distracting quacking offstage: me, trying to chip in.
This year, there was a re-run of the programme and again I took part. This time I begged the producer to put in a word for me. If it was the girls versus the boys, could he get the editor to sort of clear a space in which I could make myself heard? He did, but on this occasion it mattered less: the menfolk were less deep-pitched and we were fewer in number anyway. It made me brood, though, that vocal strength is one of those areas where you can, as a woman, no more take on most men in making yourself heard than you can take on most men in one-arm wrestling. A friend who sometimes takes part in TV debates says that her daughter does a merciless takeoff of her performance in argument: she sticks her hand up, chirping plaintively: ‘If I could just say…?’
As the Today programme presenter Sarah Montague admits, in argument, most women ‘tend to become shrill’. An awful lot of women, in a situation where they’re anxious to make their point, go up a pitch. And talk faster. I talk quicker than most people I know outside Kerry and I like to maintain it’s because my brain works faster than most. It’s not true; it’s because I’m trying to make a point in the short space in which men are drawing breath. The effect brings to mind the historic insult that men have employed against women: shrewish. Shrews have a high-pitched, interminable squeak; you get the picture. It matters, if women are to function effectively at the highest levels. One high-powered friend who works for a government minister, reflected what it was that made the women civil servants less effective. Some of them, she said, get excited when they’re worked up about something; then they raise their voices and end up sounding erratic. It just irritates the minister, she says, and has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of their contribution. It all goes to put into perspective that devastating scene in The Iron Lady where Meryl Streep practises making her voice lower, as Mrs T famously did. It’s humiliating that women should have to ape the testosterone-based characteristics of men, but she did and it worked.
And we are indeed talking about quite fundamental differences. To be specific about it, ‘the length of the vibratory portions of the vocal cords at rest is approximately 13mm for women and 16mm for men. When the vocal cords approximate for phonation, the entire glottis is closed in a male, whereas a small posterior chink is often present in a female, giving the female voice quality a slightly softer and airy tone.’ Well, that’s Anil K. Lalwani on otolaryngology for you. The difference between success and failure in getting your way in debate, then, boils down to that extra 3mm of vocal cord. Or to be a bit more down to earth, Sarah Montague points out that a light voice in either sex is a characteristic of youth, so it suggests a want of authority.
It’s one of the truisms of modern communication that what you say is less important than how you say it. And there’s many a time I’ve seen a man, usually someone in a position to sack me, look strained as I prattle on, hoping to make up in the sheer flow of words for the fact that he can’t make any of them out. One of these days, I may speak slowly and loudly, like an American, though I wouldn’t bet on it: hypnotherapy has failed me here. Meanwhile, like so many women, I have to live with the fact that I’m reliant on the courtesies of debate — viz, not butting in when someone else is talking — in order to make myself heard at all in controversy with men. This being print, I can say so without interruption.