Many people with hearing loss report that they have more difficulty hearing women’s voices. This seems to affect many different people. A common misconception is that women’s voices are higher and many people have high frequency hearing losses, therefore, they must have more trouble with women’s voices.
In fact, many people with high frequency hearing loss have trouble hearing the consonant sounds. However, many of these sounds are unvoiced. Meaning, there is no vocal energy that backs these sounds. Imagine sounds like /f/, or /th/, or /k/, /t/. These are sounds made with air and tongue placement in our mouths with no voice. As a contrast, sounds such as /m/, /d/, /ah/ all have quite a lot of low frequency voicing that provides volume to the sound.
So, for most people it is the volume of someone’s voice that makes it difficult to hear (soft spoken or not) rather than if they are a man or a woman or even a child. This is one of the main functions of any hearing aid, to emphasize the soft high frequency sounds that the ear is otherwise missing.