Modern Boeing and Airbus airliners both feature a male voice, which calls out height above terrain on approach to landing, and other related warnings.
Early human factors research in aircraft and other domains indicated that female voices were more authoritative to male pilots and crew members and were more likely to get their attention.
[citation needed] In October 1996, a report by UK's Defence Research Agency on the fast jet Collision Warning System Technical Demonstrator Programme (Reference DRAMS/A VS/CR96294/1) reported: "The primary alerting signal from the CWS to the crew was an audible warning passed over the aircraft intercom system.
"[6] More recent research, however, carried out since more women have been employed as pilots and air traffic controllers, indicates that the original popular hypothesis may be unreliable.
Edworthy and colleagues in 2003, based at the University of Plymouth in UK, for example, found that both acoustic and non-acoustic differences between male and female speakers were negligible.
They reported an experiment showing that knowledge about the sex of a speaker has no effect on judgments of perceived urgency, with acoustic variables accounting for such differences.
[7] Arrabito in 2009, however, at Defence Research and Development Canada in Toronto, found that with simulated cockpit background radio traffic, a male voice rather than a female voice, in a monotone or urgent announcing style, resulted in the largest proportion of correct and fastest identification response times to verbal warnings, regardless of the gender of the listener.
[8] There have been several "Bitching Bettys", over the years, for various commercial and military aircraft: Voice warning systems included in cars of the late 1970s to early 1980s, such as the Datsun and Nissan "Z-Car" series, found in the 280ZX and 1984–1988 300ZX (optional in the base model and standard in the Turbo model), and the Datsun Maxima and Nissan Maxima of the early 1980s, were also known as Bitching Betty.
The system used a small box located under the vehicle's dashboard that implemented a small, white plastic record disc that used a magnetic cartridge to play spoken commands through the vehicle's audio system's speakers, similar to that of some Texas Instruments talking toys of the time period.