As with the Valley Girl uptalk of the 1980s, or the supposed overuse of the word “like” in the 1990s, vocal fry remains a divisive conversation topic over 10 years on. Their findings clearly indicate an inordinate amount of vocal fry criticism is directed towards women. They also found that vocal fry is more likely to occur pre-pausal (ahead of a conversational pause), no matter the speaker. That said, males were more likely to use vocal fry outside the pre-pausal situations. However, the flipside to this finding is that men used to speak with a vocal fry more than the stereotyped woman today.