Holmes’s Baritone and CEO Pay: What the Research Can’t Prove

Nathan Brooks

In a 2013 study of 792 male public-company CEOs, a voice roughly 22 Hz below median was associated with managing a firm about $440 million larger. The comparison covered the median CEO at the median company in the sample.

Researchers from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and the University of California, San Diego, conducted the study. They also linked lower pitch to about $187,000 more in annual CEO earnings and about 151 days—nearly five months—longer tenure.

Published in Evolution and Human Behavior, the paper tested whether voice tracked company scale, compensation and job retention. Researchers found that deeper voices were associated with larger firms, higher earnings and longer tenure, while warning that the results showed correlation rather than causation.

Coauthor Bill Mayew revisited the work on a 2025 episode of the Fuqua Insights podcast. He said the effect is probably “a bit of both” perception bias and real leadership development.

Mayew’s explanation says people who appear dominant early in life may receive more chances to lead. By the time that person runs a public company in their mid-50s, decades of first impressions can become real experience.

The limits of that signal frame A24’s You Can See Everything, which treats Holmes’s voice—and who controls it—as one mystery among many. Her partner, Billy Evans, acknowledges in the film that he runs her X account.

The documentary does not directly address Holmes’s famously low register, the vocal trait she displayed at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit in 2014. That appearance came months after Holmes landed on Fortune’s cover while she still had credibility as Theranos’s founder.

The cover-story author later wrote about how Theranos misled him. Theranos’s science was eventually debunked, starting with John Carreyrou’s reporting in the Wall Street Journal.

Voters reward the same signal

Researchers from Duke and the University of Miami tested that response in a 2012 Proceedings of the Royal Society B paper. They recorded men and women saying, “I urge you to vote for me this November.” They digitally altered each clip into higher- and lower-pitched versions of the same voice.

When participants chose one candidate, both men and women favored the lower-pitched version. The preference held whether the candidate was male or female.

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 that candidates with lower voices, male and female alike, were more likely to win in the 2012 U.S. House elections.

What does this change for executives?

For practitioners, the evidence suggests that vocal first impressions can become a feedback loop: lower-pitched leaders may appear more dominant, receive more opportunities and accumulate the experience that supports real authority. The practical lesson is to treat a low voice as a social signal, not a measure of competence.

The researchers said it remains unclear whether people who prefer lower voices choose better leaders. A low voice may be a signal listeners reward, but it does not establish skill. For Holmes, Fortune’s analysis says that preference may have helped in rooms where she needed credibility, though it could not repair the collapse of Theranos’s claims.

A jury convicted Holmes 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.

Fortune reports that You Can See Everything grossed $45.1 million domestically in two weekends. Across the film, Holmes speaks in a noticeably higher register. In the documentary, 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. If Evans and Holmes pursue another collaboration, the practical test is Haemanthus’s blood-testing performance and governance, not either founder’s vocal register.