Original Article
Voice pitch and the labor market success of male chief executive officers

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2013.03.001Get rights and content

Abstract

A deep voice is evolutionarily advantageous for males, but does it confer benefit in competition for leadership positions? We study ecologically valid speech from 792 male public-company Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and find that CEOs with deeper voices manage larger companies, and as a result, make more money. After including proxies for other CEO attributes including experience, education and formant position, we document economically significant voice pitch effects. For the median CEO of the median sample firm, an interquartile decrease in voice pitch (22.1 Hz) is associated with a $440 million increase in the size of the firm managed, and in turn, $187 thousand more in annual compensation. Deep voiced CEOs also enjoy longer tenures. Although this is a study of association, the results are consistent with recent experimental predictions suggesting a role for voice pitch in leadership selection and also suggest economically meaningful effects of voice pitch reach the upper echelons of corporate management.

Introduction

Among males, deep voices are correlated with evolutionary success. Deep-voiced men are judged as more attractive by women (Feinberg, Jones, Little, Burt, & Perrett, 2005), mate more frequently (Hodges-Simeon, Gaulin, & Puts, 2011), and father more children (Apicella, Feinberg, & Marlowe, 2007). Such success has been attributed to perceptions of deep voiced males as more physically and socially dominant (Puts et al., 2006, Puts et al., 2007, Wolff and Puts, 2010).

But is a deep voice associated with success in economic settings where leadership selection, not mate selection, is the objective? Recent laboratory evidence (Tigue et al., 2011, Klofstad et al., 2012) suggests such a possibility, whereby deep-voiced individuals are perceived to have greater leadership capacity, and as a result may be more successful in obtaining leadership positions. Perceptions of enhanced leadership capacity generally stem from listeners viewing deep voiced males as more competent, persuasive, confident and trustworthy (Apple et al., 1979, Burgoon et al., 1996, Tigue et al., 2011, Klofstad et al., 2012). Whether this laboratory evidence of perceived leadership capacity based on voice pitch is descriptive in actual competition for leadership positions is unknown. To provide initial insight on this issue, we examine whether, and to what extent, a deep voice is associated with labor market success among public company Chief Executive Officers (CEOs).

We measure labor market success with respect to the hiring, compensation, and retention of CEOs. If a male with a deep voice is perceived to have greater leadership capacity, we predict that deeper voiced CEOs will be employed by larger firms who have relatively more physical, financial and human resources to manage. In addition to the prestige and reputational enhancements that stem from operating a large firm, we also consider annual compensation and tenure as additional measures of CEO labor market success. If voice pitch is an honest signal of important leadership traits, we predict deep voiced CEOs will be paid more and retained longer.

Section snippets

Sample

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, and Parsons (2013). 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. (2013) observations with the Mayew and Venkatachalam (2012) CEO speech corpus, which is

Results

Table 1 provides descriptive statistics for each measure and reveals that the median sample CEO operates a firm with $2.4 billion in assets, is paid $3.7 million annually, is 56 years old and has led the firm for 1,824 days, i.e., 5 years. The median CEO in our sample exhibits a fundamental frequency of 125.5 Hz, which is consistent with standard values for adult males of comparable age in the general population (Kent, 1994). In all statistical analyses, we use log transformations of labor market

Discussion

This study is the first to examine the relationship between voice pitch and labor market success among males in a corporate leadership context. We find deep voiced males oversee larger firms, in turn receiving more compensation, and are retained longer. These associations offer external validity for recent experimental evidence suggesting voice pitch matters in leadership selection. Our estimations also provide the first economic quantification of the benefits that accrue to CEOs with deeper

Supplementary materials

The following are the Supplementary data to these article.

MPV_EHB_DATASET.csv

MPV_EHB_DATASET_CODEBOOK.csv

Acknowledgments

We appreciate helpful comments from two anonymous referees, Brad Barber, Jim Bettman, Judee Burgoon, Dan Hamermesh, Cam Harvey, Casey Klofstad, Alok Kumar, Rick Larrick, Cheryl McCormick, Daniel Nettle (the editor), Margaret Ormiston, David Puts, Shiva Rajgopal, Ashleigh Rosette, Richard Sansing, Sheridan Titman, Greg Waymire and workshop participants at Dartmouth, Duke, Emory, University of Miami Behavioral Finance Conference, University of South Carolina, and Virginia Commonwealth University.

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