For her research project on the 'Phonetics and Phonology' module, second-year Psychology with Linguistics undergraduate Evie Cody investigated the relationship between voice and sexuality in gay women, and the idea of a 'lesbian voice'.

What is a 'Gay Voice'?

If I asked you to think about the 'stereotypical' voice of a gay man, you might think of the voice of a particular gay man in pop culture, like RuPaul Charles, Gok Wan or Eric Effiong (from Netflix’s Sex Education). Alternatively, you might think of certain distinguishing features like higher pitch, more pitch range/ variation (using both higher and lower sounds in speech) or less breathiness in their voices. These characteristics have been studied extensively in homosexual men, trying to determine whether their voices genuinely sound different in these ways, and research has suggested that a so-called ‘gay voice’ is very uncommon in actuality, being more of a stereotyped perception than a scientific fact.

In contrast, less research has been done on the same phenomenon in women. If I asked you to think of a stereotypical lesbian voice, what characteristics would you think of as making their voices sound different to heterosexual women’s?

About My Project

This project was undertaken as a part of my 'Phonetics and Phonology' module. Phonetics looks at the science of speech sounds (how these are produced etc.) and Phonology is more about how these sounds are represented (in our language systems and our minds). The assignment was to ‘Propose and test a hypothesis about phonetic or phonological data that you have collected and examined.’ This could either be done as a production study (involving recording participants’ speech sounds and analysing features of them) or a perception study (in which participants would have been played sounds and had to answer questions about them). With such a broad question, it gave me scope to investigate an area of personal interest, and I chose to do this as a production study so that I could investigate whether lesbians’ voices actually differ, not simply whether they are perceived to be different.

So, my aim was to try and uncover which features, if any, actually differ in the voices of gay and straight women. Previous studies in this area have highlighted that average pitch (how high or low a person’s voice sounds) and pitch range (the difference between the highest and the lowest their voice sounds) might vary in these women. However, the results have been conflicting, with some studies suggesting that gay women had lower pitched voices and a reduced pitch range, and some suggesting that these features do not differ between the voices of gay and straight women at all.

To study this, I recruited two homosexual and two heterosexual women and recorded them speaking. I asked them all to give brief descriptions of the weather in England currently (obviously not a very interesting topic, so that their speech sounded more natural – like it would in normal conversation). I then analysed these recordings, using software (called PRAAT) to measure their average pitch and pitch ranges at multiple points of their speech. For each person, I calculated an overall average of their pitch and pitch ranges, so that I could compare these across the two groups of sexualities.

What Did I Find?

This study revealed that the average pitch of these women did not differ significantly. Essentially, this means that the gay and straight women sounded very similar in terms of how high/ low their voices were. In fact, the average pitch was much more impacted by where the women were from than their sexuality. One of the heterosexual women was from Inner London, and her voice sounded lower than the other women (both heterosexual and homosexual), who were from other areas close to, but not actually in, London.

In contrast, the pitch range of the women’s voices did differ between the women according to their sexualities. The homosexual women, on average, had smaller/lower pitch ranges than the heterosexual women. This means that their pitch was more constant (their voices did not go up as high or down as low as they were talking, it was more even).

What Does This Mean?

Stereotypes of gay women may cause you to have a certain preconception of how they may act, dress or behave. Commonly, people think that lesbians are more masculine than straight women. For example, celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres, Ruby Rose or Raven-Symoné may come to mind when thinking of famous lesbians, all of whom adopt a more ‘masculine’ style. This stereotype obviously does not hold as an accurate generalisation for all gay women, with common groupings like ‘femme’ (feminine lesbian women) and ‘butch’ (masculine lesbian women) showing distinctions and differences in presentation within the community (not just in comparison to straight women).

This perception of lesbians being more masculine is still (erroneously) prevalent in society. In the context of voices, this stereotype would mean that gay women might be expected to sound more ‘male-like’, or less feminine than straight women. Men typically have lower pitched voices than women, and have a smaller pitch range – features that, if this stereotype was true in terms of voicing, would be the same in gay women.

However, this study showed that gay women do not have different average pitches from straight women. Their voices did, in fact, not sound lower – unlike male voices. Therefore, vocally at least, this stereotype of increased proximity to masculinity is untrue.

Also, though the lesbian participants did have smaller pitch ranges than the heterosexual women, this also cannot be used to suggest that they sound more like men. Even with their range in pitch being smaller than the straight women, it was still much higher than men’s average pitch ranges. Therefore, even though their pitch range was reduced, it was not to the point that it overlapped with men’s – again showing that this stereotype of being more ‘male-like’ is not present in lesbian voices.

Conclusions

The fact that gay and straight women did differ in the range of their pitches does suggest that their voices are significantly different, with a reduced pitch range contributing to a so-called ‘lesbian voice’. We are currently unsure of how or why this occurs, and how widespread it is (whether it is also true in lesbian women of different nationalities and backgrounds). It could be that gay women have less range in how high/ low their voices sound from birth. Alternatively, they might begin to sound this way later, using it as a tool to express themselves and their sexuality. More research needs to be done to answer these questions.

Reflections and Follow-Up Questions

What do you think? Are we born with these differences in voices, or are they developed for self-expression? And, are there other personal characteristics, apart from vocal features, that might arise in a similar way?