# Assessing Gender Bias in Auditory-Perceptual Ratings of Tracheoesophageal Speakers
## 4 Discussion
The same trend was seen for the construct of LC; however, this difference was not found to be significantly different. When male TE speakers were analyzed independently from their female counterparts, there were no significant differences in ratings for either SA or LC. Consequently, it may be concluded that female TE speakers may face greater penalty for the unusual characteristics of their alaryngeal voices than male TE speakers when it comes to listener judgments; this finding was more prominent for SA in the present study [32]. When _listener_ data were analyzed by gender, findings revealed that neither male nor female listeners rated a particular speaker gender significantly worse than the other. This suggests that auditory-perceptual ratings of male and female TE speakers are fairly consistent across a variety of listeners and cannot necessarily be predicted based on the gender of the rater. Further, it may suggest that male and female listeners have similar ideals when it comes to the SA and LC associated with listening to TE speech [23; 24]. In this context, it must again be noted that TE voices are inherently and considerably different from that of a normal speaker. Thus, the abnormality of the voice/speech sample will be easily recognized, and a listener may work to adjust their perceptual template in order to provide a rating that may better represent the sample population being assessed--in the present case, that of TE speakers [7; 8]. One final area that deserves comment is that related to potential acoustic markers that may distinguish TE speakers. Because the pharyngoesophageal voice source in TE speakers is not capable of adductor-abductor control, the signal generated is highly aperiodic. Thus, the noise quality of TE voices, in addition to the lowered fundamental frequency [14; 15], may lead to misperceptions of gender that may often default to that of a male speaker. In assessing data from the present study that are reflected in Figures 5-7, it can be seen that there appear to be two \"clusters\" of speaker data represented in those graphics. This raised the question of whether those clusters might correspond to distinct groups of our male and female TE speakers. Consequently, we assessed those data in a post-hoc manner to determine where individual speakers were represented on those figures. In viewing Figure 5 as an example, we were able to determine that the six data points shown in the lower quadrant of that figure represent four female and two male TE speakers. In contrast, the upper quadrant of Figure 5 represents four males and the remaining two female speakers. This would suggest that listeners were able to make independent judgments of speakers based on the dimensions assessed; however, the knowledge of speaker gender that is represented in this figure may have biased their ratings to the less favorable side of the scale for at least four of our six female speakers. Therefore, based on these data, future work that seeks to comprehensively describe the acoustic characteristics of any given TE speaker's voice may provide valuable information that potentially guides a listener's assessment of gender. of this study, or similar approaches to identifying possible gender bias in postlarynectomy speakers with a larger group of participants in both groups, would be of benefit. As sample sizes of speakers increase, one would need to be mindful of the proficiency of the speaker, as other factors such as intelligibility reductions would need to be carefully considered. Recall that our speakers were judged to be highly intelligible to reduce any potential confound specific to the listener also having challenges in understanding the speaker. Secondly, our listener group comprised young adults. It is possible that individuals who are older, perhaps a cohort that is similar in age to the speakers in this study, could provide different findings. To our knowledge, there are no published reports that address gender bias with specific respect to the age of either the speaker(s) or listener(s).