A Century of “Shrill”: How Bias in Technology Has Hurt Women’s Voices
A Century of “Shrill”: How Bias in Technology Has Hurt Women’s Voices
Technological bias is about more than audio quality—it’s about the forces that influence whose stories are told and how.
An old article, but I just stumbled upon it and found it enlightening. The trope of criticizing women for the way they talk has deeper implications than I thought.
Thanks, that's a fascinating read, especially the part about the decisions which distorted women's voices. It reminds me a bit of the choices made with early colour film stock, which was so bad at dark skin tones.
Good analogy! More recently, the same kind of thing is happening with facial recognition software.
I'll attest to most modern day cameras still being bad at exposing dark skin tones correctly.
Especially in the prosumer & professional camera world where intelligent exposure algorithms are kind of ignored, lighting, exposure, and white balance algorithms destroy dark skin tones. You have to very consciously & purposely ignore the primitive default algorithms to take any decent pictures of darker skinned people - it takes extra time you may not have or have not planned for (or might not even know how to compensate for if you've never had to take a great photo of a dark skinned person).
In fact, all my cameras from the late 2010s have facial recognition, but none of them reliably detect my dark skinned friend when the background light source is extremely bright (causing his face to become a black blob). Funny enough, the best way to accurately take a picture of his face seems to be to use the most primitive algorithm available called "center weighted average". This is the same algorithm used by my 70s camera with no electronics.
Phones are where this technology has made leaps and bounds in the last 5 years - the AI processing capability and massive online database of pictures have put phones miles ahead of traditional cameras for "no knowledge required" photography of dark skin tones.
So, so many things have similar design flaws for similar reasons.
Within medical devices & systems, it possibly has the gravest consequences, but all of it combines to add extra stress to those who are not from the dominant group.
It seems now that education is starting to catch up with the curve of reality, mostly because intake has become more diverse than in the padt, but I gather there is still resistance.
The podcast Twenty Thousand Hertz did a great episode on this topic - I recommend it. I think it was this one: [Twenty Thousand Hertz] The Leaky Pipeline https://podcastaddict.com/twenty-thousand-hertz/episode/135413913
It's a great podcast about audio otherwise, too.
On a related note, if you search, you can find a lot of articles/podcast eps/etc about the differences in how people respond to vocal fry and upspeak depending on if it comes from a man or a woman.
Thanks for posting, really interesting read ! I had never thought about it.
I wonder to which extent the described mechanisms also make it more difficult for men with a higher-than-average-pitched voice and thus contributes to the patriarchal vision of what a man(tm) should be - in this instance, of how a man should speak.
This is a great history lesson, but it's important to note that none of those technical challenges still exist today. We can perfectly record and transmit the entire voice frequency spectrum for human speech. With the advent of wideband audio, the internet, HD Radio, and HD TV, these challenges are a thing of the past.
You're right, but this article points out present-day women are still being coached to slow down, lower the pitch of their voices, and prevent being described as "shrill", despite advancements in technology.
I see this article as a half-and-half argument on gender biases in speech and on the way audio / broadcast technology still leans toward male voices, even with theoretically solved problems.
For example, the frequency response of lots of microphones still boost higher frequencies which may cause a "shrill" sounding female voice, even though the transmission medium can theoretically broadcast that voice losslessly (but still don't, for bandwidth's sake). This can be solved with a bit of AV sound engineering, but the article points out how limited this time & budget is.
I have personal experience with this - Taylor swifts voice transmitted via industry standard Bluetooth SBC codec is shrill to the point of pain for me in every car I've tried. A quick switch to a different Bluetooth codec or to an aux cable solves all problems for me.
I am agreeing with you. I use TS or discord for years for ttrogs, but always had the problem, that my high voice is cut of by the programms. It's frustrating to figure out how to change that and finding a solution that sounds nice.
As always: if men would have these problems, it would be fixed in a short time.
I was always ashamed of my voice and thought i could not create potcasts, Videos or everything else voice based. I thought noone would like my voice. One day a stranger came up to me and told me i sound like daisy duck, while talking to a friend... 😒
This appears to be an archive of that article, in case you get paywalled. https://www.studocu.com/en-ca/document/the-university-of-british-columbia/business-communications/a-century-of-shrill-new-yorker-article/37832837