Quartz at Work: Male CEOs get paid more when they have deep, "manly" voices
Research by CFE's Krishnan Nair
September 2021
Boards of directors are becoming more aware of the biases that favor white, male CEOs. But new research shows it isn't just gender - or how a person looks or where they studied - that feeds into the choices of board compensation committees. A study using voice recordings uncovered yet another factor, finding that the way male CEOs sounded - and specifically their "vocal masculinity" - played a part in how much boards decided to pay them.
Researchers, led by Krishnan Nair of Northwestern University, argued that CEOs' voices are important because board members are exposed to them not only in face-to-face meetings, but over the phone and in conference calls. Evolutionary psychology, meanwhile, suggests that humans are programmed to associate deeper, more "masculine" voices with greater strength in men - and, in fact, studies have found that people are able to calibrate the physical strength of someone simply from ...
