Job-hunting is stressful, and if you’re a woman, chances are you have a few more worries than your male counterparts. Looking hirable can often feel like the deciding factor in employment opportunities. Apparently, however, there is another vital element that should weigh heavily on young women’s minds when we seek employment: our voices.
So what exactly is wrong with how we sound? Most recently, the answer seems to be vocal fry, a speech affectation that has become increasingly common among young women. It may come as no surprise that with the surge in usage among this demographic, fry appears to have gained quite a bit of stigma. What is it, exactly?
In her YouTube video, Faith Salie explains it as “a scientific term for the way a Kardashian speaks.” She goes on to describe it more helpfully as “a low, creaky vibration produced by a fluttering of the vocal chords.”
The video is interspersed with various examples of fry. In one clip, a high-pitched, creaky-voiced twenty-something says “Hiiiii.” It’s from the film "In a World," which follows a talented voice actress struggling to find success in a heavily male-dominated field. Later in the film, the protagonist runs into the woman again and gives her a business card, saying “I’m not a vocal coach anymore but I would make an exception for you because you sound like a squeaky toy.” Here’s where things get ironic: in the Salie video, the viewer is presented with a second clip from "In a World": this time the one using fry is the protagonist. Apparently no one is safe.
Salie attributes all the media attention fry is getting to its increased usage among college-aged women, and she’s probably right. She’s “dismayed at how low it can go.” I am dismayed by how passionately she seems to hate something that I had never noticed before.
This hatred is not specific to vocal fry. It’s just the newest subject of hyper-scrutinization of young women's speech.
Upspeak (basically ending declarative sentences as questions) has long been culturally reviled as a marker of a foolish teenage girl. Upspeak and vocal fry are frequently grouped together in the media, for the simple reason that they are both speech patterns used frequently by young women.
On a recent segment of NPR’s "Fresh Air," Journalist Jessica Grose recounted some of the criticisms she received regarding her voice: “I remember one [complaint] in particular said I sounded like ‘a valley girl and a faux socialite,’ and there were a couple of comments that echoed that, and the tenor of them was pretty nasty. And before that I had never really thought about my voice, one way or the other.” In that same segment, Speech Pathologist Susan Sankin admits that “For me, and I know for a lot of people, it [upspeak and fry] appears to distract from what people are trying to say.” However, when she says “people,” it sounds like a euphemism.
Young women are criticized for speaking in tones deemed too high, and now for speaking in tones deemed too low. Maybe that’s oversimplifying it a bit, but it’s hard not to feel like we’re trapped between a rock and a hard place. If we’re going to be shamed no matter how we speak, then why even bother worrying about it? Well…
Last year, The Atlantic published the distressingly titled “Vocal Fry May Hurt Women’s Job Prospects.” It cites this PLOS ONE study, noting that participants of both genders using fry were viewed more negatively than their non-fry counterparts, “Women using fry were viewed more negatively than men doing so.” Four days later, The Washington Post published “Study: Women with creaky voices — also known as ‘vocal fry’ — deemed less hireable,” citing the same research. This is disconcerting: when faced with what can feel like trite criticism, it’s easy to disregard. When it becomes a threat to employment opportunities, however, it’s more difficult to shrug off.
Many complaints I've seen register more like thinly veiled misogyny than as legitimate criticisms -- even when they're well-intended. Naomi Wolf’s piece in The Guardian, “Young women, give up the vocal fry and reclaim your strong female voice,” is one such example. I’m not sure exactly what a “strong female voice” is supposed to sound like, but apparently it’s not how most young women speak. She voices her concern that hesitancy in speech patterns is holding us back. I found it interesting that she would take the time to devote a significant portion of her piece to hesitancy, when vocal fry—supposedly the focus of the article—is often characterized as anything but hesitant. Salie accuses its perpetrators of sounding “world weary.”
Wolf argues that young women need to work on their voices in order to be taken seriously. Reading this, I wondered: don’t we have enough to deal with already?
Erin Riley’s response, “Naomi Wolf misses the point about ‘vocal fry’. It’s just an excuse not to listen to women,” reassured me that I was not alone. Riley points out that “there is ample evidence that shows men do it too,” citing this Time article which notes that “creaky voice has historically been associated with men — and authority.” Riley refers to “Claudine Herrmann’s The Tongue Snatchers [...] It describes the two options usually available to women: to either be silent or to adopt the dominant language of men. But even when we adopt and adapt, there are always excuses not to listen.”
Vocal fry has been around for a long time, but has become common among young women so now it’s annoying, now it’s a problem, now it’s an excuse for employers to dismiss us on the basis of vocal flaps. Riley suggests that we, as a society, need to “Stop telling women how to speak. Instead, listen to them.” I would have to agree.
