The Frying Game: on vocal fry and sexist feedback
Note from Casey and Julie: We originally published this piece in 2015 . . . our views on this issue continue to evolve, and we’ve updated the piece to reflect that. What hasn’t changed since then is that people are STILL talking about how women’s voices are “just so annoying.” And we’re over that conversation entirely.
Have you heard the latest ‘it’ issue to affect women in the workplace? It’s called “vocal fry”, and it’s getting a lot of press.
If you ARE a woman in the workplace, you may have read in the news or heard from your superiors that vocal fry (or upspeak, or “sexy baby voice”) is holding you back. You may have been told you need to “fix” this in order to be competitive. And if you’ve done a little investigation and learned to identify the sound of vocal fry, you may also have noticed men using it too — and wondered where those articles are.
This American Life tackled the topic. The episode begins with a horrific story of internet bullying from reporter Lindy West (which highlights another kind of attack on women’s voices in a truly heartbreaking way). In Act Two, Ira speaks with some of his female producers and fellow reporters about the kind of feedback they get from listeners about their voices and what they think about it.
Ira posits: “Listeners have always complained about young women reporting on our show. They used to complain about reporters using the word like and about upspeak, which is when you put a question mark at the end of a sentence and talk like this. But we don't get many emails like that anymore. People who don't like listening to young women on the radio have moved on to vocal fry.” Reporters responded that this kind of feedback makes them both more self-conscious of their own voices, and more critical of other women’s voices — and ashamed of both responses.
Then Ira Glass asks if they’ve ever noticed that he “fries” as well. They have not.
Neither have many listeners.
In our experience as vocal coaches — the same way that young women are disproportionately criticized for work/life balance, workplace demeanor, and even (if you can believe it) working too hard — young women are disproportionately criticized for their voices.
We want to say to you unequivocally: YOU DO NOT NEED TO BE ‘FIXED’. That being said — we also believe the hot issue of vocal fry deserves some clarification.
Vocal fry isn't a problem because it make you sound “dumb” or “annoying” or “young”. Vocal fry can be a problem when it cuts you off from your full presence, breath, power, and ability to connect.
As voice coaches, we believe wholeheartedly that everyone (not just women) can gain presence, power, and confidence by learning to use their full vocal instrument and expanding their palette of communication choices and habits. When we talk about presence and power, we don’t mean volume. We’re talking about the ability to truly connect with your audience.
We see it all the time: the moment someone really connects with their full voice, their presence becomes vibrant . . . charismatic . . . dynamic . . . engaging. It’s powerful stuff — like turning your charisma from black and white to full Technicolor. Witnessing and supporting this transformation is what keeps us passionate about what we do, and EVERYBODY has this potential already within them.
All of this backlash against vocal fry misses the point: it focuses on the style and the effect with no real understanding about what it is or why it occurs.
Let’s talk about vocal fry on a physical level: Your voice is a combination of your breath, your vocal cords, and your resonators. Breath powers the voice, the vocal cords create vibration, and the resonators are the places in our bodies that act as amplifiers. From a physical standpoint, vocal fry often happens when we don't use enough breath to fully engage and close the vocal cords — this leaves our cords vibrating together in a deeper tone, but without enough breath support to carry the sound. Essentially, it’s a breathy voice that uses tension in the cords and the throat to create volume — and it can be damaging in the long run.
But there is another equally important element to how our voices develop, and where vocal fry comes from:
We learn to speak as social animals.
The vocal patterns we develop (vocal fry, upspeak, regional dialects) come out of a power subconscious instinct to fit in. And there are two main places we see where vocal fry show up as a social adaptation.
Vocal fry as a side effect of lowering your speaking voice past your natural range. We often see women (and men with naturally higher-pitched voices) in heavily male-dominated environments, as well as women who’ve been given the feedback that their voice sounds too “girly” or immature or high-pitched, either subconsciously or purposefully lowering the tone of their voice beyond where their vocal cords support a full sound. Speaking too low in your range will absolutely result in vocal fry, because your vocal cords just aren’t designed to create that pitch.
Vocal fry creates a “laid back / cool” sound with minimal effort. Many famous faces and voices of pop culture through the 90’s and early 00’s (Britney Spears. Justin Timberlake, most of the young Disney actors — and looking back further Luke Perry, James Dean, etc.) spoke this way. Nowadays we hear it in the Kardashians and all over Tiktok videos. It’s gravelly and deep and has “cool factor”. People often associate vocal fry with 'Valley girls', but we’ve heard our fair share of men who do it too — from undergrads to young finance dudes to the CEOs of major tech companies. Vocal Fry is also the sound of Bro-ness.
So yes, in addition to a breath issue, vocal fry can also be a learned affectation formed out of a complex set of social cues. These patterns served you at some point. It’s also enormously frustrating to make an adaptation in order to be more successful (like lowering your voice so people will take you more seriously) only to be criticized for the side effect of that adaptation.
Lets be real: No one walks into a room thinking “I want to sound like (insert insulting stereotype of young woman here).” We adapt to survive and adapt to succeed.
And here's why we have to change the discussion around vocal fry, upspeak, or whatever the latest 'it vocal issue' is: because criticizing someone's voice is deeply personal. It is akin to criticizing the deepest parts of who they are. It’s saying that how you connect with the world is wrong.
Frankly, some of the “solutions” we see well-meaning supervisors put into place in order to help their team members don’t address the core issues of voice and communication. “Correcting” upspeak by practicing ending sentences on a downward inflection is rarely helpful. It puts people further into their heads and away from the presence that makes us effective communicators. And again, that artificially lowered tone at the end of a sentence often pushes women into vocal fry land. We’ve seen this happen to more than one of our clients.
Telling women that their voices suck contributes to another major problem: women not wanting to speak up in the workplace.
Our friend Josh Chenard (the head of the Acting Program at New Mexico State University) puts it beautifully: "Making anyone self-conscious about their voice is such a disturbing practice to me because it is a swipe at their humanity. I think about all the amazing sounds we produce: unabashed laughter, moans of pleasure, wails of grief . . . all of it uncluttered, authentic, and fully expressive. Our voices should operate in the same way . . . free of opinion, free of habit, free of tension, free of the limitations others have placed on us or we on ourselves. The same freedom and joy many of us take when singing in the shower or in the car is the exact joy and freedom we should allow ourselves when speaking every day."
Does this mean that we should simply strive to be “authentic,” and not think at all about how we want to come across? Is the solution to the endless discussion about the problem with women’s voices to just say “screw it” and talk however we want? Maybe. But we also believe that authenticity has room for intentionality, and that learning how to use your voice can start from a place of joy and play, not “fixing what’s broken.”
It’s about opening up the range of choices you have available to you, and recognizing that your voice is a key component in how you present yourself. Through our years of training in acting and voice, we’ve learned that acting training does not turn you into someone else, it actually helps you embrace more of who you are. It’s the same with vocal training — there is no one way we want our clients to sound. It’s the full range of the authentic instrument we want to give you access to, so you can make the choice.
There is no perfect example of communication, and many vocal “mistakes” or “bad habits” actually become a celebrity’s trademark (looking at you, Ira, as well as Terry Gross, Kristen Chenoweth, Fran Drescher, Janis Joplin, the list goes on).
We also know a number of women who have a ‘valley girl sound’ who are extremely successful: among them, a woman who runs a multimillion-dollar restaurant in Manhattan and manages 35 employees on a daily basis, and a very successful casting director who finds more youthful speech actually makes her more accessible to her clients.
Many women come to us asking how they can better fit the model that already exists, and that can be an effective place to start. But what about the possibility of creating a new model — one that fits with your communication core values? What new paradigm of leadership do you want to see? How do you want to use your power?
You don’t need to sound like someone else.
In the complex conversation about women in the workplace, it's tempting to place blame — to look for easy "culprits" that explain why the world works the way it does. All of these articles (“THIS is what is wrong with how woman act in the workplace”) contain perhaps just enough of a tiny grain of truth that they stab into our soft places. They get under our skin. Vocal fry, upspeak, who you SHOULD sound like, how you SHOULD act . . . but there is so much at stake here! We need nuance and creativity and collaboration in this conversation. We need to work both from the ground up and the top down to support the growth and success of smart, talented, creative, fierce young women.
Lindy West sent this tweet out after the TAL piece aired:
Yes, Lindy — we agree. (Especially about cheese.)
But accessing your full power and presence? That’s worth caring about. And fighting for.
Public speaking, failure, public speaking coaches, public speaking coaching, authenticity, Vital Voice Training, Casey Erin Clark, Julie Fogh, communication specialists