ABSTRACT
This study examines how gender-based voice norms have developed historically and persist to this day in the radio environment, and how these norms influence the perception of the credibility, competence and genre suitability of voices. The theoretical section traces developments from the early days of radio through its golden age, characterised by a predominance of male voices, through the television and digital eras, to current debates on synthetic voices generated by artificial intelligence, drawing on insights from sociophonetics and the concept of communicative injustice. The empirical section is based on pilot research (total number of respondents N = 32; for selected items N = 16) and utilises standardised audio samples of two professional newsreaders. The male voice achieves a higher average rating (7.88/10) compared to the female voice (7.44/10), and respondents prefer it more strongly for news formats, while the female voice slightly prevails in ratings for sports and service programmes. An interesting generational shift is indicated by the under-25 age group, which shows more balanced preferences across genres, including news. A lexical analysis of the descriptions used confirms the presence of stereotypical attributes: respondents characterise the male voice as pleasant, concise and clear, and the female voice as clear and fluent, though at times monotonous. Based on these findings, the study recommends building editorial diversity through casting, voice coaching, sound design and genre framing, and urges caution and transparency in the use of AI voices, particularly in utilitarian formats. The research findings highlight the need to evaluate voices based on performance and context, rather than gender, and to systematically address perceived audience biases.
KEY WORDS
AI Voices. Credibility. Gender Stereotypes. News. Radio. Sociophonetics. Voice.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.34135/mlar-26-01-08
The Perception of Male and Female Voices in Radio Broadcasting © 2026 by Andrej Brník, Martin Paučin,
UCM Trnava is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.