Things haven’t changed much: in 2014, historian and Stylist cover star Mary Beard revealed that female broadcasters are encouraged to ‘copy’ their male co-stars deeper tones in order to sound more authoritative.

“It’s not a coincidence that even on radio, the successful women presenters tend to have [an] unusually deep (i.e. male) voice,” Beard wrote in Radio Times. “The fact is that even now authority still seems to reside with the men in suits, and their deep voices.”

Former Today programme presenter Sue MacGregor agreed with Beard’s statement, stating that, although she’d never been personally requested to lower her voice for added weight, there was an understanding that naturally higher voices lacked gravitas for listeners.

“On radio you can’t see faces and the voice is all the listener has to go on,” said MacGregor. “So you do have to be careful not to come across as high-pitched, shrill or squeaky.”

Nowadays, if you search a current female broadcaster’s name along with the voice ‘voice’ on a site like Twitter, you’ll likely come across multiple tweets complaining about the way they sound. Jo Whiley’s is ‘beige’ and ‘droning’. Zoe Ball’s way of speaking is deemed ‘stupid’ and ‘unlistenable’ in the morning, while hearing Sara Cox’s dulcet tones is deemed to be akin to ‘drilling yourself in the earholes with a pneumatic drill’, and ‘irritating.’

What the Zoe Ball vs Sara Cox debate tells us about female representation in radio