The sex test

‘We hear women’s voices differently from men’s,’ concluded Anne Karpf at the end of her search back through the radio archives to seek out the first women newsreaders on the airwaves. In Spoken Like a Woman (Radio 4, Saturday night), she decided this was the reason why it took so long for women to make it up through the plummy-voiced ranks to the heady heights of the newsroom.

In 1922 when radio broadcasting began from 2LO on the Strand, there were plenty of female executives (such as Hilda Matheson, Olive Shapley and Mary Somerville) organising schedules, booking talent, coming up with ideas for programmes. Yet very few of them were allowed behind the mike for that all-important job, reading the news. The female timbre was not thought of as having enough professional authority. Their voices, it was said, were too high and screechy to be convincing, or too low and breathy, i.e.,