Elizabeth Holmes is accused of fraud on a massive scale. So why is everyone obsessed with her voice?

Holmes’s behaviour was undeniably bizarre. But focusing on her voice and appearance rather than her fraudulent actions reeks of sexism

Teasing Google’s autofill search bar has become a well-worn internet game. Collating the most common questions asked, the search engine attempts to ease your research journey by guessing what it is you want to know about whatever it is you are researching.

Start typing “Why do” and you might be offered the answer to the question “Why do cats purr?” Start typing “What is” and you’ll be presented with searches for “a customs union”, “a backstop” or “Article 50”. Start typing a person’s name and what comes up often reveals hilarious truths about our fascination with celebrity. But they can also reveal our private and differing attitudes to the sexes.

Take disgraced ex-CEO of now-defunct US tech company Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes. Type her name into Google and what comes up first is not a question about her life or her work or even her alleged crimes, but one about her voice. Compare this with, say, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and what you get is: “Mark Zuckerberg salary”. Apply it to Phillip Green and the most-searched term after his name is “daughter”. And serial killer Ted Bundy? “Movie”.

The reason for comparing these particular people is to illustrate the discrepancy between how a female tech company founder is compared with a male one. How a woman accused of a crime is compared with a man accused of one. And then, what the public most wants to know about a man who killed 30 women: not his victims, it seems.

Holmes was charged in 2018 with multiple counts of fraud for peddling a product to investors, doctors and patients that had not proved effective. She had invented a home blood-testing kit that she claimed could run hundreds of tests with just a single drop extracted from a pinprick on a fingertip. At one time Holmes was the world’s youngest woman billionaire, hailed as the female equivalent Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk.

She was doing for health what – people thought – they had done for mobile phones, social media and space travel, respectively. Holmes was a prodigy; she had dropped out of Stanford University to launch her company at just 19 years old. Today, she is awaiting trial, possibly facing a 20-year prison sentence, and her remarkable story has become the subject of obsessive internet conspiracy theorists.

At her peak, Holmes was backed by the likes of Bill Clinton and Joe Biden. She was said to have pulled the wool over people’s eyes for years and ex-colleagues claim she ran a disturbingly Orwellian regime at Theranos with her boyfriend Sunny Balwani. Her apparently untested product was used to diagnose and prescribe medicine for people’s real-life ailments and life-threatening illnesses to potentially devastating effect.

It’s an extraordinary story, which is why it feels even more bizarre that much of the interest around Holmes has been focused on her appearance and mannerisms: most notably her deep baritone voice that many claim was faked for effect, as well as her “unblinking eyes” and her dress sense.

In new HBO documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, the filmmakers become fixated on Holmes’s voice. Similarly, the podcast The Dropout sees Holmes’s old professor Dr Phyllis Gardener express her shock at Holmes’s new deep tone, describing it as “quite off”. Ex-Theranos employee Ana Arriola also recalls a time Holmes had had a few drinks and revealed “that was not necessarily her true voice”.

Twitter is loaded with memes mocking the absurdity of this woman who appears to conjure a gruff cadence before every single word comes out of her mouth. It must take an enormous amount of effort. Not as much, one imagines, as committing complex wire fraud and convincing top business investors to dole out millions in cash to a fictitious company. So why the obsession?

Women’s voices – much like their appearance, their weight, their relationship statuses – have long been on the receiving end of sexist bias. Shrill, whiny and screechy are words regularly used to describe them, so much so that Lindy West’s non-fiction book Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman became a bestseller.

As a result, it is the women with husky voices who are the ones we most often hear presenting serious radio shows: Sarah Montague, Mishal Hussein, Jenni Murray. Would these women have been less capable journalists had they possessed higher pitched tones?

Research shows people consider male voices as more trustworthy, more capable of leadership, more likeable, even. Voters are more likely to choose candidates with lower pitched voices as they are deemed more authoritative. People with lower voices tend to have more testosterone, suggesting they might be physically stronger, ready to fight.

An Australian study from 1998 found that women’s voices are significantly lower today than they were in 1945, dropping by 23 Hz over five decades, in line with their more prominent role in society. We have, it seems, changed the way we speak to fit into the working world and advance our careers.

People have been changing their voices for years. Most famously, Margaret Thatcher attended voice coaching to adopt a more authoritative tone. Female reality TV stars and influencers all began, at one point, to adopt the croak of a “vocal fry”, though this trend soon waned.

Other theories buzzing around Holmes include that she carefully curated her wardrobe to mimic that of Apple creator Jobs, whose get-up of Sartre-esque black polo necks, Levis 501s and New Balance trainers became a uniform that limited his daily need for choice and enabled him to focus solely on conquering the tech world. Barack Obama, similarly, only wears grey or blue suits.

Holmes’s hair has also become the focus of much criticism – she dyed it blonde. On James Cordon’s The Late Late Show this week he kicked off a sketch about Holmes by asking: “How’s my hair?” Her eyes, too, have been criticised; she doesn’t blink enough, they say.

Holmes’s behaviour sounds undeniably bizarre. But if she indeed fakes her voice, the fact that a woman feels the need to literally change her every word to fit into a prescribed acceptable decibel says more about entrenched sexist values in society than it does about Holmes. It’s hardly surprising that a potential con artist would take the idiom “fake it ‘till you make it” to the extreme.

She took what many women attempting to navigate male-dominated waters do and stretched it to exhaustion. But that her voice has become the primary focus of this story for many exposes the absurd levels of obsessiveness people are willing to go to spite a woman on the decline. So far, indeed, that they ignore the most interesting part of the story: the unfolding of a billion-dollar fraud trial.