“IN A WORLD…”, a film from 2013, is about, of all things, the voice-over industry—specifically, the warm, masculine voices that lend a ponderous authority to film trailers and advertisements. Lake Bell, an actor, plays the daughter of a legendary voice-over man; she wants to break into the industry herself, but faces sexism at every turn. Ms Bell has a rich and deep voice of her own, but she is also a gifted mimic. A bubbly young woman with a squeaky high voice stops to ask her: “Do you know where I can get a smoothie around here?” Ms Bell expertly mimics her tone in reply.

The scene highlights two vocal features associated with young women: vocal fry and uptalk. Uptalk, as the name suggests, is the rising intonation that makes statements sound like questions? And vocal fry—often said to be typical of Kim Kardashian, an American celebrity—happens at the ends of words and phrases when a speaker’s vocal chords relax, giving the voice a kind of creaky quality (a bit like something frying in a pan).

From these descriptions, an alien observer would be bemused to learn that these harmless phenomena drive some people to scorn, or even anger. But they do. When Christine Blasey Ford testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, had sexually assaulted her, some viewers were so infuriated by her speaking style that they denounced it on Twitter: “Christine Blasey Ford’s little girl voice…vocal fry, and uptalk worse than clubbed toenails down a chalkboard.”

The complaint goes like this: since uptalk uses the intonation of a question for a statement, it makes the statement sound uncertain, and its speaker weak. Additionally, since higher voices are characteristic of children, using uptalk seems like a voluntary abdication of authority. And vocal fry, for its part, is criticised as a put-on sexy, fake-femme-fatale affectation. The rise of both is said to constitute an epidemic of “sexy baby voice”.

But vocal fry is found among all sorts of speakers. It just tends to be noticed more often among purportedly vapid young women. Even in the scene where she mocks vocal fry, Ms Bell lets it slip briefly in her own voice as well: at the moment of a distracted “uh”, her pitch is much deeper than her young interlocutor’s, but that “uh” displays unmistakable fry. And men fry all the time, too. Critics of the fry-panic have discovered it in the back catalogues of George W. Bush, Kurt Cobain (who was the lead singer for Nirvana, a grunge-rock band), and Ira Glass (an American radio host). None are known as sexy babies.

Moreover, vocal fry is, in a way, uptalk’s technical opposite. It tends to happen when speakers are relaxing their voices to try to make them sound deeper than they naturally are. Women seem to be damned whatever they do. Speak loudly and they are deemed shrill; speak softly and they are meek. A high voice is unserious. Low-frequency vocal fry is off-limits too. If Ms Blasey Ford had an especially deep voice, she would no doubt be described as an unfeminine battle-axe.

This treatment is all the more remarkable given that Ms Blasey Ford’s adversaries at the hearing were abysmal vocal performers. Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, rambled badly through his prepared opening statement: hardly the authority associated with powerful men. Mr Kavanaugh’s voice ran the gamut from shouty to tearful, but even among those who criticised his performance, few noted its vocal qualities. And if anyone could be dismissed as shrill, it was Lindsey Graham, another (male) Republican senator, who called the proceedings “the most unethical sham since I’ve been in politics” in his distinctively high and nasal timbre.

There is no escaping the fact that some voices sound more pleasing than others. And there is no quick way around society’s belief that deep voices convey authority; men have been more powerful than women for all of known history. It may be good practical advice to tell women who want to get into the voice-over industry—or indeed others that have been historically dominated by men—to use firm and deep voices if they want to impress. They might also take care to avoid the distraction of vocal fry, while simultaneously ensuring that they don’t sound too mannish. Women, in other words, are required to walk a thin line when they speak in public, a no-room-for-error performance never expected of men.