We see similar outcomes with height. I’ve always wondered how much the gender gap in income—if any—was driven by differences in height. Are people negatively biasing women because they are women or are they biasing against shorter people in general? Meg Whitman was 6’1”. Marissa Meyer is 5’8”. Sheryl Sandberg is 5’8”, Elizabeth Holmes is 5’7” Indra Nooyi is 5’9”.
I’ve always been taller than average. In school, in a class of ~30 students, I was probably in the tallest 3-4 students.
After joining a large company with a certain cachet of exclusivity, I was surprised to notice that I feel about of average height when walking around the company’s campus.
Almost the same in my experience or when with Scandinavians. Although a Brit friend of mine gives me a feeling of smallness being an entire foot taller (7'5"). He's easily one of the tallest people (though unranked) in the world.
There's plenty of data to show taller people get paid more, but interestingly - females are punished for being heavy, and earn more if they are thinner [1]. Males however actually make more money as they weigh more given their height (this could be muscle, fat, or just 'big bone / girth' I recall).
Worth noting that Angela Ahrendts, former VP of Marketing at Apple is 6 foot 4 - that's like the top 99.999th percentile in terms of height. Consider what it means that the highest ranking female at the company was probably also the tallest.
When I look at the (male and female) C*O and EVP of my company I would say height definitely plays a big role. The women are around 5'8" or taller and the males are > 6ft. there are exceptions but in a lot of meetings I have seen the highest ranking is the tallest or one of them.
It isn't, there is an enormous body of evidence demonstrating that the gender pay gap is driven by overt sexism and institutional barriers. This evidence is far more compelling than speculation about height.
I’m very sceptical of this explanation. Sexism probably still plays a role, but not nearly as big a role as population-level average differences in personality/interests.
This is strongly stated but that doesn’t really cut it. Height discrimination is well-known and documented. I’m sure there are many short people of all genders here who have experienced it. It’s one of few physical characteristics that American society still openly accepts making fun of. I think it’s serious enough that it really does need to be explicitly accounted for in any study of gender pay gaps.
>> there is an enormous body of evidence demonstrating
>> that the gender pay gap is driven by overt sexism
>> and institutional barriers
Now, let's not make things up. Every time this question is seriously examined, it turns out that whatever "pay gap" there is is because women, on average, choose to not negotiate their pay, to work in less demanding jobs than men, and to work less in general. I'm not aware of a single rigorous study that links pay differences to "overt sexism" or anything of that sort.
However voice pitch is highly social and situational... it could still all be correlated. Someone who feels confident and feels like they "won" might subconsciously lower their voice in other interactions.
To give another example, men tend to subconsciously lower their voices when talking to a woman they find attractive. There's a lot of other things going on than just the physiology.
I enjoyed imaging the abstract being read aloud by Elizabeth Holmes with her clownish deep voice she worked to portray in the later stages of her fraudulent career. It's funny how these perceptions and findings sometimes line up.
Yes, Elizabeth Holmes was a fraud. But choosing to lower your voice to have a more commanding presence does not seem fraudulent not particularly "cartoonish" to me. Regardless of ones feelings towards Margaret Thatcher's policies, Thatcher was most definitely not fraudulent, and her lowering her voice was almost a virtual necessity in her political era.
I think part of the problem is that Holmes's voice sounded artificial. To be effective, generally speaking, you would imagine the voice couldn't sound like you were trying to speak with a deep voice. (But surely studies have been done on this. Does it matter?)
But I agree with you. I've always "dressed up" in work situations, for example, because people respond more positively to me when I look sharp.
I think it witheringly stupid that people would assess my competence based on something so tangential, but if they are going to have a prejudice, why shouldn't I make it a prejudice in my favor (by dressing well instead of whatever I want to wear)?
Short men should be wearing hidden heel shoes, too. Those inches are worth a lot more money than the shoes are. Etc.
This isn't particularly convincing, given that it's such a small and skewed sample and the effect is so small. The average CEO in this sample operates a firm of 8B and makes 8M - the effect they found was 30M for firm size and 19K for annual comp for each percentage decrease in pitch. It's quite likely that merely adding, say, Steve Jobs or Michael Bloomberg into the sample would've been enough to reverse the effect. Also, what would be much more interesting is if CEOs as a group were substantially different from the general population in this regard - but they are saying the median CEO wasn't at all extraordinary.
To the extent that there is an effect, I think the causality may be the other way - voice pitch isn't an immutable characteristic of each speaker but situational. One well-known effect is that people tend to speak with a higher pitch when talking to relatively high status people and a lower pitch when talking to relatively low status people. It seems quite possible that CEOs of larger companies perceive wall street analysts and investors as lower status than CEOs of smaller companies do, causing this discrepancy. It seems far more plausible than lower-pitched men being CEOs of disproportionately larger firms, without the same effect holding up across the entire professional spectrum.
> To identify a set of executives for analysis, we start with a list of male CEOs from the Standard & Poor’s 1500 stock index analyzed by Engelberg, Gao & Parsons (in press). We restrict attention to only male CEOs because of the sexually dimorphic nature of voice pitch (Titze, 1994) and the poor representation of female CEOs among S&P 1500 firms (Bertrand & Hallock, 2001).
> We intersect the Engelberg et al. (in press) observations with the Mayew & Venkatachalam (2012) CEO speech corpus, which is derived from publicly broadcast telephonic earnings conference calls archived in the Thomson Reuters StreetEvents database (www.streetevents.com).
> The median sample CEO is 56 years old, operates a firm with $2.427 billion in assets, and is paid $3.692 million annually.
> A test of mediation using the product of coefficients method for large samples following Preacher & Hayes (2008) confirms firm size mediates the
effects of voice pitch (Z=3.15, p=0.002).
The paper states that a lower voice is perceived (by everyone else) to be a better leader. Sounds reasonable enough, I guess. The statistics then show that the lower the voice, the better the compensation of the CEO and the larger the firm the CEO runs, with a strong correlation. This is where I scratch my head a bit.
A couple of thoughts for why this may be, all guesses, really:
1) Listed companies on the S&P 1500 are mostly very mature and the CEOs may not do much of the value creation. Other people (CTO, COO, CFO, etc) might be doing most of the value creation with the CEO holding the company together. (This is in contrast to many tech companies - Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, etc - who are strategically involved in the company. It is their strategic directional leadership that they bring in that people trust, rather than how they make you feel when they talk)
2) In mature markets that aren't tech related, innovation is not a strong factor of growth, it's usually intangibles like connections, communication, convincing people, alignment, deals, etc. Having a "leader voice" can have a strong impact to get buy in from everyone, internal and external.
3) There may very well be a physiological link between a lower voice and strong leadership qualities, rather than just the perception of it, who knows? Or people who have a lower voice get innate advantages in leadership due to people trusting them more and them having an easier time because of that, kind of like a flywheel effect.
4) The statistics may be wrong. This doesn't seem to be the case with how they designed it.
This is intriguing -- I would guess that a successful strategy would be to short stocks with high growth that have a CEO with "evolutionarily advantageous" traits (height, attractiveness, depth of voice) ... and go long stocks with high growth that have CEO's lacking these characteristics:
The company with the "suave" CEO is likely building revenue as a result of sales and people charisma rather than core innovation.
I remember reading another article that CEO who looks stressed and anxious on their video call with shareholders perform better than ones who look regular. Definitely an interesting subject.
Readit News
After joining a large company with a certain cachet of exclusivity, I was surprised to notice that I feel about of average height when walking around the company’s campus.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/the-fin...
Worth noting that Angela Ahrendts, former VP of Marketing at Apple is 6 foot 4 - that's like the top 99.999th percentile in terms of height. Consider what it means that the highest ranking female at the company was probably also the tallest.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/skinny-women-make-more-money...
Maybe one day an intelligent AI can tell us how our bodys work so we can stop the guessing game.
Some interesting papers: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761774171...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019188691...
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ijop.12529
In fact, recently Google did a study of its own, and found out that at least at Google more _men_ tend to be underpaid: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/technology/google-gender-...
-women not negotiating what they are actually worth in terms of pay -women taking less risks and less demanding jobs after having children.
I've read that at most a couple percent of the earnings gap is due to gender, and most is due to number of hours worked, chosen profession, etc.
The "winner effect" is a known phenomenon when people succeed in competition their body starts to produce more testosterone (for men).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winner_and_loser_effects
However voice pitch is highly social and situational... it could still all be correlated. Someone who feels confident and feels like they "won" might subconsciously lower their voice in other interactions.
To give another example, men tend to subconsciously lower their voices when talking to a woman they find attractive. There's a lot of other things going on than just the physiology.
Calling BS on that. Doubt you looked that up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4LbafuDmI4
But I agree with you. I've always "dressed up" in work situations, for example, because people respond more positively to me when I look sharp.
I think it witheringly stupid that people would assess my competence based on something so tangential, but if they are going to have a prejudice, why shouldn't I make it a prejudice in my favor (by dressing well instead of whatever I want to wear)?
Short men should be wearing hidden heel shoes, too. Those inches are worth a lot more money than the shoes are. Etc.
To the extent that there is an effect, I think the causality may be the other way - voice pitch isn't an immutable characteristic of each speaker but situational. One well-known effect is that people tend to speak with a higher pitch when talking to relatively high status people and a lower pitch when talking to relatively low status people. It seems quite possible that CEOs of larger companies perceive wall street analysts and investors as lower status than CEOs of smaller companies do, causing this discrepancy. It seems far more plausible than lower-pitched men being CEOs of disproportionately larger firms, without the same effect holding up across the entire professional spectrum.
> We intersect the Engelberg et al. (in press) observations with the Mayew & Venkatachalam (2012) CEO speech corpus, which is derived from publicly broadcast telephonic earnings conference calls archived in the Thomson Reuters StreetEvents database (www.streetevents.com).
> The median sample CEO is 56 years old, operates a firm with $2.427 billion in assets, and is paid $3.692 million annually.
> A test of mediation using the product of coefficients method for large samples following Preacher & Hayes (2008) confirms firm size mediates the effects of voice pitch (Z=3.15, p=0.002).
The paper states that a lower voice is perceived (by everyone else) to be a better leader. Sounds reasonable enough, I guess. The statistics then show that the lower the voice, the better the compensation of the CEO and the larger the firm the CEO runs, with a strong correlation. This is where I scratch my head a bit.
A couple of thoughts for why this may be, all guesses, really:
1) Listed companies on the S&P 1500 are mostly very mature and the CEOs may not do much of the value creation. Other people (CTO, COO, CFO, etc) might be doing most of the value creation with the CEO holding the company together. (This is in contrast to many tech companies - Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, etc - who are strategically involved in the company. It is their strategic directional leadership that they bring in that people trust, rather than how they make you feel when they talk)
2) In mature markets that aren't tech related, innovation is not a strong factor of growth, it's usually intangibles like connections, communication, convincing people, alignment, deals, etc. Having a "leader voice" can have a strong impact to get buy in from everyone, internal and external.
3) There may very well be a physiological link between a lower voice and strong leadership qualities, rather than just the perception of it, who knows? Or people who have a lower voice get innate advantages in leadership due to people trusting them more and them having an easier time because of that, kind of like a flywheel effect.
4) The statistics may be wrong. This doesn't seem to be the case with how they designed it.
The company with the "suave" CEO is likely building revenue as a result of sales and people charisma rather than core innovation.
Yes, because tall people can't have good products too...?