What voice over to use? Male or Female?

The Voice narration dilemma …

Have you ever wondered which voice over would suit your commercial, presentation or explainer video best ?
We know the reason why most ads feature women, but for some reason i assumed that Female voice overs are more effective and convincing than males one …
We have been creating explainer videos for many years, yet we never paused to reflect on which is more effective…
We have pondered on the difference between text and images, we compared the attention grab,comparing the 10% to 65% retention rate …

and yet we never really questioned the voice narration effect … until now …

It seams that studies on voice overs in TV and Radio ads have been already made, i think we can easily extrapolate it to Explainer videos and White board Animations.

Voice over gender influence studies :

Below i will try to describe and explain the findings published in Trends in Social Psychology by John Z. Arlsdale:
The study done on British media showed that men were almost twice more likely to do voice overs than women,
72.1% of men compared to 41% of women in the study. Even though the study also found that Women were twice more likely to do visual advertising than men, 59% of women compared to 27.9% of men.
Credibility wise 87.7% of males were depicted as authoritative compared to 55.7% of women.
Another study by Furnham and Skae -1997 found similar results for the above mentioned observations.
A study by Gilly – 1988 argued that advertising companies hire male voice over artists, because they believe that a male voice is more authoritative and convincing than a female voice.
Indeed, a study by Rosen and Howell- 1987 have found that male voice narrations are perceived more clearly than female ones.

At the end of the day it all depends on the voice, all voices are not created equal, but in general we can expect a 20% to 40% better results when using a male voice-over than when using a female one.

For more data and information on the subject of gender role in advertising, i would recommend the below studies: