Raise Your Voice

Admit it — you’ve used your best baby voice to get what you want. The baby voice is a lethal weapon.

By Candy

When used on family members, it conjures images of you as a helpless young one that they cannot resist bending to.

For everyone else, it’s creepy and annoying and they comply to whatever your sugar – throated wishes are just so you’ll shut up.

According to some recent reports on jezebel.com, salon.com, and in The Washington Post, the baby voice is presenting some problems for women in an unlikely place — at work.

It’s pretty easy to see where this trend’s force is coming from: the great female role models of our day, Paris, Lindsay, Britney, et al.

Feminists cry that women are degrading their ability to be taken seriously by adopting the weak, vulnerable tone of voice in the workplace.

And it’s not just the baby voice: besides speaking in high – pitched tones, grown women are more likely to employ superfluous “ums” and “likes” in their speech that don’t exactly say “I’m a powerful, confident woman who wants to excel.”

Some experts theorize that women purposely use a higher tone of voice in the workplace so not to be considered hardcore feminists or heartless, Machiavellian backstabbers by their male co – workers.

But since you can’t exactly control the natural pitch of your voice and having good communication skills is one of the most important assets in the workplace, women need to stop their voices (and their vocabularies) from shrinking — or they’ll never be taken seriously by anyone.

But one blogger had a good point: she said people always underestimated her because of her baby voice — so they were that much more surprised when they realized she was a hard – nosed smartass with the goods to make it to the top, regardless of her pitch.