Yes. I mean, er, yes [said in a low voice so as to be perceived to be maximally authoritative]. To make that determination, the authors created hypothetical elections for two traditionally lady-led outfits: one for School Board member, the other for president of the Parent Teachers Organization. They recorded their "candidates"--ten men and ten women, with mean ages of 33 and 28, respectively--uttering a so-common-it's-neutral political phrase: "I urge you to vote for me this November." They then manipulated those recordings, creating two versions, one high-pitched and one low-, of each "candidate's" utterance of the given phrase. Presenting those recordings to a group of 35 women and 36 men, the researchers asked their "electorate" to vote among the candidates--testing the assumption, they say, "that men and women will prefer male and female leaders with more feminine voices for feminine leadership roles."

And they were also, it turns out, debunking that assumption. The low-pitched voices won the day, despite the fact that those voices were seeking "feminine" leadership roles. "The preference is, indeed, consistent," the authors put it: "Regardless of social context, and regardless even of gender, the lower-pitched voice was deemed more authoritative than the higher. As in previous studies, men and women preferred female candidates with masculine voices. Likewise, men preferred men with masculine voices. Women, however, did not discriminate between male voices."

Here are their results, charted:

So why would this be? Is our discrimination against high-pitched voices so deeply ingrained that we apply it indiscriminately? On the one hand: Yes, maybe. "In the case of women's voices," the study notes, "this bias could be a consequence of lower-pitched female voices being perceived as more competent, stronger, and more trustworthy. That is, these traits are perceived as positive in the context of leadership and could be the mechanism that leads us to prefer female leaders with lower voices." But the preference for lower voices could also reflect another bias, too: toward age, and all that comes with it. The pitch of the female voice declines over a woman's lifespan, the authors point out--meaning that a low female voice might also indicate an older owner. In other words, "men and women may be biased to select older women as leaders, regardless of the type of position in question."