[Lockyy]

They took men and women who were both gay and straight and demonstrated a bias in expected leadership ability based on perceived sexual orientation. They are not comparing charisma, the voice selected where selected specifically to have a high likelyhood of being attributed as gay or straight.

Arguing that a difference in outcome from this is because CEOs all sound charismatic and that they are able to pick up attention of a crowd better when there is a demonstrated bias between the two when the difference involved is specifically whether a voice is perceived as gay or straight implies that gay speakers are less likely to have those characteristics. Which is exactly what the paper's conclusion is, a bias against people who are perceived as gay for leadership positions based on their voice.

    We investigated this issue in four studies (overall N = 276), conducted in Italian language, 
    in which heterosexual listeners were exposed to single-sentence voice samples of gay/lesbian 
    and heterosexual speakers. In all four studies, listeners were found to make gender-typical 
    inferences about traits and preferences of heterosexual speakers, but gender-atypical inferences 
    about those of gay or lesbian speakers. Behavioral intention measures showed that listeners 
    considered lesbian and gay speakers as less suitable for a leadership position, and male 
    (but not female) listeners took distance from gay speakers. Together, this research demonstrates 
    that having a gay/lesbian rather than heterosexual-sounding voice has tangible consequences for 
    stereotyping and discrimination.

[pc86]

I think the sexuality bit is getting shoehorned in here, though. I'd want to see evidence that the study used charismatic, "big" voices that were judged as both straight and gay and still show that there is a bias against those perceived as gay.

Not only that but especially for CEO, hiring decisions are not made in a vacuum like this. Were the participants given mock resumes and career history? In an actual hiring process, again especially for CEO, the folks on Board responsible almost certainly would be familiar with the candidates' previous work, and probably know them already.

[Lockyy]

Being familiar with the client introduces another area of potential bias, removing that allows us to compare the specific variable being tested for.

I'm not entirely sure why the big voices thing is important. It's not like they were saying all the voices had low favourability or that what were perceived as gay voices had low favourability, they were demonstrating a difference between the two groups based on that one variable. Whether they were all high up the rankings or all low down the rankings is irrelevant, you just need them to be all within the same band. It's the difference that is what is being tested for.