Vocal Fry May Undermine the Success of Young Women in the Labor Market: What Anderson and Colleagues (2014) Found

By Noam Shemla · 27 October 2026

By Noam Shemla · The Studies

TL;DR Yes, in this experiment. 800 US adults heard pairs of recordings of the same person, once in a normal voice and once in vocal fry, and chose between them. Normal voices were preferred on every judgement, and more strongly for women speakers on most of them. The fry was produced by coached speakers, so it may have sounded unnatural.

• Paper: Anderson, R. C., Klofstad, C. A., Mayew, W. J., & Venkatachalam, M. (2014). Vocal fry may undermine the success of young women in the labor market. PLOS ONE, 9(5), e97506.
• Speakers: Seven young women (average age 24) and seven young men (average age 26), each saying “Thank you for considering me for this opportunity”.
• Listeners: 800 adults aged 18 to 65 (400 men, 400 women), recruited online. Each heard seven pairs of voices of one sex only.
• Access: Free to read on the journal’s site. Every figure below is from the paper’s text.

Vocal fry is the low, creaky register that many people slip into at the ends of sentences. Rindy Anderson, Casey Klofstad, William Mayew and Mohan Venkatachalam asked what listeners make of it when someone is trying to get a job.1

How the experiment worked

Each speaker recorded the sentence twice: once in their normal voice and once in vocal fry, which the researchers described to them, demonstrated and let them practise. The fry versions did have a significantly lower average pitch than the normal ones.

Listeners heard both versions, in a randomised order, and for each judgement chose one of the two. They were asked which speaker sounded more educated, more competent, more trustworthy and more attractive, and which one they would hire. Each choice was scored 1 for the fry version and 0 for the normal one, so a result below .50 means the normal voice was preferred. Because every listener heard only male or only female voices, the comparison between male and female speakers is between groups of listeners.

What they found

Preference ratios for all five judgements were substantially below .50 for both sexes: listeners preferred the normal voice, at p < .001. The paper gives no exact ratios in the text.

The difference between male and female speakers is where the title comes from.

Was the dislike of fry stronger for female voices?

Women listeners judged fry more negatively than men on all five judgements, and no combination of speaker sex and listener sex changed the pattern. Older listeners were more negative about competence: F(1, 791) = 4.03, p = .045.

What this study cannot tell you

• Natural fry. The speakers were coached to produce it, and the authors say the stimuli may have sounded somewhat unnatural.
• Fry alone. The authors could not fully control the recordings, so listeners may have been reacting to differences between the pairs other than fry.
• How big it is. The differences by speaker sex are statistically reliable but small, around one percent of the variation.
• Real hiring. The task was a forced choice between two recordings of one sentence, with nothing else about the person.
• Who the speakers were. Seven women and seven men in their twenties.

What a speaker can take from it

This is a study of what listeners prefer, not of what speakers can do. It does not show that anyone should change their natural voice to suit a bias. What it does support is a reason to know your own habits: whether your sentences end in a low creak that your listeners may read as less assured.

The easiest way to find out is to listen. Record a minute with the free impromptu speaking tool, play it back, and notice whether your last words fall away into fry or land on a clear pitch. We cover the wider research on pitch and perceived leadership in Why Lower-Pitched Voices Sound Like Leaders, and the experiment on listeners’ votes in Sounds Like a Winner.

This article summarises an open-access paper, read from its full text. Every sample size, statistic and quotation of a number is the authors’ own, from the Methods and Results. The paper does not give the preference ratios in its text, so they are not given here.

Measured

• Which of two recordings of the same person, normal or in vocal fry, listeners chose on five judgements
• Differences in that choice by speaker sex, listener sex and listener age

Inferred, not measured

• That the dislike reflects fry itself: limited by the coached, imperfectly matched recordings
• That a speaker should check their own habits rather than change their voice: our view, not the paper’s

References

1. Anderson, R. C., Klofstad, C. A., Mayew, W. J., & Venkatachalam, M. (2014). Vocal fry may undermine the success of young women in the labor market. PLOS ONE, 9(5), e97506. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0097506