Comments on: Women as Narrators: Bad Logic in Documentary-Land

By: Jennifer

Jennifer — Thu, 07 Apr 2005 21:36:17 +0000

I frequently watch the Discovery channel, and I’ve heard Candice Bergen narrating lots of shows. Keep up the good work Discovery

By: Celia Siegel

Celia Siegel — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 22:13:50 +0000

I love to see people talking about this! This is an issue that is central to my business. I manage voice over talent and spend LOTS of time trying to change this situation. I do believe that the business is slowly but surely moving in the direction of using more women. There are so many brilliant, engaging and talented women out there. If there is anyone reading this that has ideas about how to make a change here I would love to hear them. I think that more production companies are going to take the leap and use women on historical narrations, movie trailers and other areas that are mostly voiced by men and they are going to get such a bang for their buck for being innovative that there will be many more to follow. People are ready to do it, we are just in that catch 22 phase…

By: ken

ken — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 14:48:07 +0000

Here is another reason to use women for voice-over work. Back in the latter half of the eighties I worked as a video production assistant for The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. The director preferred women to do the videotape voice-overs because their voices were more easily heard in a large room full of presentation attendees. I recall using only one guy (we tended to hire students from the Drama Dept), and we would schedule his time first thing in the morning while he still had his deeper just-woke-up voice.

By: doug

doug — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 03:50:00 +0000

Key quote:

Authority is part of the issue, but in the narrative context, men are perceived as gender neutral, while women are perceived as female.

I would assume (perhaps ignorantly?) that this is solely a product of the “no women narrators” policy.

If it is only men narrating, then of course a female voice will sound singularly female.

With the plethora of women in the TV news business, I doubt that anyone even thinks about the gender of the reporter on-screen. I suspect that the same will happen with more female narrators.

By: ryan king

ryan king — Sun, 27 Feb 2005 21:18:45 +0000

What I don’t understand about the quoted piece is this:

The History Channel’s audience is mostly men and they want to continue to target only men.

This sentence doesn’t make sense to me- I’m a man and I enjoy hearing women’s voices. To be honest, often, I’d rather hear a woman’s voice than a man’s.