Elizabeth Holmes’ baritone was mocked for years. But research shows CEOs with deeper voices run bigger companies and earn $187,000 more

A vocal quirk the film doesn’t address, at least not directly, is Holmes’s famously low register.

That register was on full display at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit in 2014, months after Holmes landed on the cover of Fortune and while she still had credibility as Theranos’s founder. The author of that cover story would later write about how Theranos misled him.

Her company’s science was eventually debunked, starting with John Carreyrou’s reporting in the Wall Street Journal. The science of a low pitch is a separate question: How much credibility did that baritone actually lend her?

The benefits of being a baritone

Some of the most rigorous evidence on voice and corporate success comes from a 2013 study of 792 male CEOs of public companies, published in Evolution and Human Behavior. Researchers from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and the University of California, San Diego, found that CEOs with deeper voices managed larger firms and earned more money.

For the median CEO at the median company in the sample, a voice about 22 Hz lower was associated with managing a firm roughly $440 million larger and earning about $187,000 more a year. Deeper-voiced CEOs also stayed in their jobs longer, by about 151 days for the same drop in pitch.

The researchers were careful to say the study shows correlation, not causation. On a 2025 episode of the Fuqua Insights podcast revisiting the work, coauthor Bill Mayew said the effect is probably “a bit of both” perception bias and real leadership development. If people see someone as dominant early in life, they may hand that person more chances to lead. By the time that person is running a public company in their mid-50s, a first impression has had decades to turn into real experience. Like a good investment, those advantages compound.

Voters prefer deeper voices, too

The effect isn’t limited to the C-suite. In a 2012 study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, researchers from Duke and the University of Miami recorded men and women saying, “I urge you to vote for me this November.” They digitally altered each clip into a higher- and lower-pitched version of the same voice. When asked to vote for one or the other, both men and women chose the lower-pitched candidates, male and female alike.

The authors suggested that because women’s voices are higher on average, pitch could explain the shortage of women in leadership roles. The same researchers later found a similar pattern in real races: Candidates in the 2012 U.S. House elections with lower voices, male and female, were more likely to win.

A signal, not a credential

The researchers note that it’s still unclear whether the preference for lower voices leads people to pick better leaders. A low voice may be a signal listeners reward, but that doesn’t mean they should.

That preference may have helped Holmes in the rooms where she needed it. It couldn’t help her once her company’s claims collapsed. A jury convicted her in January 2022 on four counts of defrauding investors. She is serving her sentence at a federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas, and is slated for release in 2030.

Notably, throughout the wildly successful documentary, which has grossed $45.1 million domestically in two weekends, Holmes speaks in a noticeably higher register.

It may not be the last we hear from her, either. In the film, Evans tells Fielder the idea is to “put the band back together and do it all again.” His blood-testing startup, Haemanthus, has rejected the “Theranos 2.0” label and says Holmes has no role in the company.