Welcome to the Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace and success.

I'm Ashley Meltony.

This time, women and communication.

Women are often criticized for the sound of their voice, the language they use, the way they

apologize, and some of them are saying enough.

I think that I have decided that rather than changing myself to being taken more seriously,

I'd rather just stay who I am and make people take people like me more seriously.

But not everyone applauds that decision.

Instead of battling against it and saying,

accept me for who I am, this isn't who you are.

You weren't born using upspeak.

You weren't born putting yourself down or undermining yourself.

These are habits that we've developed over time.

Habits, she says, we can unlearn.

Coming up, women's voices and communication styles play into a perception problem.

But whose problem is it?

I live in the US, and over the past couple of years or so, women's voices have got a lot of attention

and not in a good way. There's been a lot written about the tendency to use upspeak, that's when you have

a rising intonation at the end of a sentence, and then there's vocal fry when your voice gets a bit

creaky at the end. Even though men certainly use upspeak and probably vocal fry, we don't hear nearly as much about

their communication issues. Jesse Char knows all about this. She works in tech in San Francisco.

She gave a talk last year at an industry conference. And during the talk she spoke about how she, a young woman, is perceived in part because of the way she sounds.

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