This is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Women who appear in the public eye, or rather in the public ear, often are derided for the way they sound.

But how they sound is also a product of how they're heard, and technologies had a hand in that.

In an article for the New Yorker, Tina Tallinn, assistant professor of AI and the Arts at the University of Florida and a musician, noted that, quote,

women who speak publicly in challenge authority have long been dismissed as shrill or grating.

We've often heard that women's voices are no good for the radio.

When we spoke in 2019, Talon said that's been the case since the invention of radio. Right. So there was a great article published in the radio broadcast magazine in 1924,

in which one of their editors actually interviewed a number of station managers. It was a female

editor, by the way, pretty revolutionary for the time. And so she basically went through all of

these various complaints that people had. And they ranged from everything regarding audio

quality, saying that female voices or people with higher voices sounded distorted and nasal and tinny to things about their personality and their senses of humor, saying that they're just not affable, they don't manage to really connect with listeners, or they sound inauthentic and affected.

All of these criticisms have been established for nearly a century now and have associated with women in the media.

All the things that were said about Hillary Clinton when she was running.

We've heard the criticism before.

She sounds shrill, that she shouts.

She doesn't smile enough.

Like goose bumpy feel every time I hear Hillary's shrill voice rising and even higher and higher.

And Hillary, who's become very shrill, you know the word shrill? She's become shrill.

We see so much more of that now that we have more women running for president.

Rather than talking about the content of their policy proposals, we're focused on the timbre of their voices.

And, of course, voices are among the most intimate ways that we encounter people. A person's voice is like a person's face.

The voice is the sight of so much when it comes to

identity construction, not just for the person speaking, but also for the listener. And there are so

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