What's behind 'The Dropout' Elizabeth Holmes' low voice?

The third episode of Hulu's "The Dropout" released Thursday gives viewers an idea of how the low-toned, turtleneck-donning version of Elizabeth Holmes came to be. Her pitch – like Paris Hilton's baby voice or the unique accent of convicted con woman Anna Sorokin (the focus of Netflix's "Inventing Anna") – becomes a defining characteristic.

The eight-part "Dropout," starring Amanda Seyfried, tells the story of the deliriously hopeful and deceitful founder and CEO of biomedical company Theranos, established in 2003 when the Stanford dropout was only 19. Holmes, now 38, falsely claimed she could run elaborate tests using just drops of blood from the prick of a finger. A jury found her guilty of fraud and conspiracy in January. She is slated for sentencing in September.

As her business grows in the episode, titled "Green Juice," Holmes begins to understand her image's impact and starts to play with the pitch of her voice. She's rightfully slammed for her lack of leadership abilities. She has yet to build a working machine, despite participating in a clinical trial with live patients. But she also faces sexism as a young CEO in the male-dominated tech industry. Dressed in a wrinkled gray and white plaid shirt, she's told by Apple alum Ana Arriola (Nicky Endres) she "should just dress more like a CEO." When the noise of an active construction site drowns out a meeting with her all-male board, a member directs her to "Speak up! We can't hear you!" drawing laughs from attendees.

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Around the episode's midpoint, Holmes reenacts a conversation with an insubordinate employee and lowers her voice in an attempt to sound more authoritative. Her CEO transformation – complete with black suit and Steve Jobs-inspired turtleneck – is finished by the episode's end. By the fourth "Dropout" installment (out this Thurday), she adopts the deeper tone whenever she's in a professional setting.

"When we hear someone speak, we make all sorts of judgments about them, about their level of education, about their gender, their ethnicity, age, all kinds of things," says Carmen Fought, professor of linguistics at Pitzer College in Claremont, California.

"Inventing Anna" creator Shonda Rhimes spoke of the importance of including Sorokin's accent in the Netflix limited series chronicling her deceit. Adopting the named Anna Delvey and pretending to be an heiress, Sorokin defrauded financial institutions and New Yorkers out of an estimated $275,000, according to prosecutors.

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"It lent to her mystique," Rhimes told the streaming platform. "It went to why people were willing to buy her story. This German heiress thing wouldn’t have flown, I think, without that accent.”

Darth Vader appears all the more menacing when voiced by James Earl Jones, instead of the higher-pitched David Prowse, who embodied the Sith Lord on screen.

"Because women have been marginalized in comparison with men in terms of power structures, there's an advantage to borrowing stuff that's associated with masculinity," Fought says, likening a woman deepening her voice to a power suit. "Lowering your voice pitch is a way of conveying authority, of conveying strength, intelligence."

Whether the real-life Holmes adopted a fake tone has been debated. If she did intentionally modify her voice, she's not alone. It's been widely reported that the United Kingdom's first female Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, took lessons to lower her pitch.

"Dropout" executive producer Elizabeth Meriwether, who created Fox's 2011-18 sitcom "New Girl," says she connected with Holmes' confusion on how to handle a powerful position.

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"The first week of 'New Girl' I lost my voice, and I had to go to a doctor, and the doctor said, 'Have you been drinking a lot of coffee and/or trying to sound authoritative?'" Meriwether recalls. "I was like, 'Yes, to both of those things.' So I really related to the experience of feeling like something about your body doesn’t fit the role that you're in and that you sort of have to change your body to fit this role."

Bill Mayew, a Duke University business professor who researches managerial communication, says assessing someone's voice stems from a need to assess threats in hunter-gatherer societies from more than 10,000 years ago. "Those things don't really go away, even though we're not in an environment where it's dark out at night and (you're trying) to listen to someone's voice to figure out if you can win a fight."

"In a business context, you're not talking about fighting, you're talking about getting people to listen and getting people behind the view of the firm," he adds.

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University researchers Casey A. Klofstad, Rindy C. Anderson and Susan Peters made higher and lower-pitched a recordings of hypothetical political candidates and asked participants to vote for one of them.

They found that participants (both male and female) selected female candidates with lower voices, likely because they "perceive lower-pitched female voices to be more competent, stronger and more trustworthy," they wrote in their study, published in 2012 by The Royal Society. The team also concluded the lack of women in leadership positions could be attributed to the fact that "higher-pitched female voices are judged to be weaker, less competent and less trustworthy."

While a man with a deep voice is deemed powerful and attractive, the same perceptions don't apply to a woman's deep voice, Klofstad, a professor of political science at the University of Miami, says in an interview.

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"There is sort of a tug and pull for a woman who would gain benefit socially from being perceived as attractive, that takes us towards higher-pitched voices. But then there's also a benefit to being seen as strong and authoritative and competent, which would gravitate towards the lower fundamental frequencies, the lower voices," says Klofstad. "I think of it as a balancing act or a tightrope that a woman in a position of authority has to walk within the confines of the physiology of her throat."

But researchers say a woman shouldn't feel obligated to change her tone: The onus is on the listener to shuck their perceptions.

"We perhaps cannot control the inherent biases that we have that just pop into our head that lead to very thin, impressionistic judgments, but we do have the ability to be more mindful of them," says Klofstad. "There are two parties in the conversation."

If only Holmes would've had that lightbulb moment about herself and her ineffective machine, dubbed the Edison: She didn't need to try so hard to sell, either.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'The Dropout': Elizabeth Holmes series prompts voice-changing talk