Talking, Teaching, and Listening: Gender differences in teachers’ responses to acoustic environments

School teachers have an elevated risk of voice problems due to the vocal demands in the workplace. Studies suggest that male and female teachers respond differently, which may explain why female teachers have an elevated risk for vocal disorders. Presented will be an amalgamation of two studies investigating gender differences in voice use in the school setting. In the first study, 57 teachers (45 f, 12 m) were observed for 2 weeks (waking hours) to compare how their voice was used at work versus not-at-work. The results suggest that female adjust more to their environment than males. In a second study, 45 participants (20 f, 25 m) performed a short vocal task in two different rooms, a variable acoustic room and an anechoic chamber. Subjects were taken back and forth between the two rooms using a deception protocol. Each time they entered the variable acoustics room, the room characteristics had been changed using two background noise conditions and two reverberation conditions. In this latter study, subjects responded to questions about their comfort and perception of changes in the acoustic environment. Objective acoustic metrics were compared to subjective perception of a room, as well as to metrics calculated from their vocal output. Several significant differences between male and females subjects were found. Most of the differences held for each room condition (at-school vs. not-at-school, varying reverberation times, varying noise levels, and levels of early reflections).