McGill study finds men use vocal fry more than women, challenging entrenched gender bias

Jeanne Brown, a graduate student at McGill University, has presented findings at the Acoustical Society of America meeting in Philadelphia that challenge the widely held belief that women use vocal fry more frequently than men. The study, which analysed 49 Canadian speakers, indicates that the use of creaky voice is actually more common in men and increases with the speaker’s age. Brown concluded that the perception of vocal fry as a female trait is a socially constructed bias, suggesting that criticism of women’s speech patterns reflects linguistic discrimination rather than empirical reality.

Vocal fry, also known as creaky voice, is the lowest of the human vocal registers, characterised by a distinctive drop in pitch and irregular vibration caused by slackened vocal cords. It typically produces an audible cracking or rattling sound at very low fundamental frequencies of around 70 Hz. While the register has been associated predominantly with young women in popular culture, with artists such as Britney Spears and Katy Perry cited as examples of its use in pop music for expressiveness, the acoustic markers are not gender-specific.

Previous research from the 2010s, including studies conducted in California, Oregon, and the Midwest, concluded that women used vocal fry significantly more often than men. One 2014 study found that women used the register four times more often than men, and other research suggested that women employing vocal fry in job interviews were perceived more negatively than men. However, Brown’s analysis of speech samples using acoustic markers such as spectral tilt and harmonics-to-noise ratios found the opposite trend in her dataset.

To understand why the stereotype persists, Brown conducted a second experiment involving 40 subjects trained to identify creaky voices. Participants listened to gender-ambiguous recordings of vocal fry and rated the degree of creak. The results showed that the primary marker for identifying vocal fry was low pitch rather than gender. Brown described this as a reverse acoustic bias, where listeners conflate low pitch with the presence of vocal fry, leading to a sociocultural bias that misidentifies the source of the sound.

Brown argued that the conflict between these findings and everyday perception highlights where the real issue lies. She stated that telling women to avoid vocal fry to protect their careers places the burden on speakers rather than challenging listeners’ biases, which causes real harm. The research suggests that the narrative around vocal fry is not grounded in how women actually sound, but rather in how society perceives and judges low-pitch speech patterns.