Gender penalty? Linguistic discrimination and perceptions of female football commentators

Abstract

This experimental sociolinguistic study investigates implicit attitudes relating to female football commentators. Several high-profile sports-media figures have claimed that women’s voices are “too high-pitched” for commentary on men’s football, a domain in which traditional, heteronormative gender relations remain especially dominant. With this critique in mind, we conducted a social perception experiment using voices artificially manipulated for pitch to investigate the interaction of pitch and gender stereotypes in this context. Contrary to the male-centred meta-discourse surrounding female commentators, our results show that listeners actually judge female commentators with lower-pitched voices less favourably compared to higher-pitched female voices. Male listeners, in particular, prefer gender-typical voices and male voices generally. These results support previous claims about the influence of stored stereotypes on the social evaluation of speech, how evaluations are dependent upon the specific gendered dynamics of a given domain, and the pervasiveness of a “double-bind” which female commentators are faced with.

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