HOW CAN I CLOSE THE AUTHORITY GAP?
Mary Ann Sieghart on getting the professional respect from men that you deserve
‘You have no authority here, Jackie Weaver!’ A chaotic Handforth Parish Council Zoom meeting turned into an internet sensation earlier this year, raising our spirits in the dankest of lockdowns as we watched shouty men shut down at the click of a mouse by a preternaturally calm middleaged woman.
If only it were always so easy to close the authority gap; the difference between how seriously we take women compared to men.
You know when you come up with a good idea and nobody takes any notice, only for a man to repeat it 10 minutes later and it’s treated like the second coming? Or when you’re in full flow, and a male colleague interrupts and starts talking over you? Or when you’re an expert in a subject, but every fact you assert is challenged or disputed by a man who clearly knows less than you do? However much lip service we pay to equality, people still assume a man knows what he’s talking about until he proves otherwise, while for women, it’s all too often the other way around. As a result, women have their expertise challenged more, they are listened to less, they find it harder to influence other people and they are frequently underestimated.
This is the mother of all gender gaps. If women aren’t taken as seriously as men, they are going to be paid less, promoted less and held back in their careers. They are going to feel less confident and less entitled to success. And if we don’t do anything about it, the gap between women and men in the public sphere will never disappear.
While researching my book on this subject, I met Frances Morris, the director of Tate Modern, in an office brimming with books. She is startlingly intelligent and talks in fully formed paragraphs. ‘As director of Tate Modern, I can spend all day as a powerful, articulate person who’s taken seriously, and I can leave this building and I am nobody,’ she told me. ‘I’m very often in situations where people don’t know my job, and my hand is shaken after the hand of a male colleague, my eyes are met after the eyes of my husband, and no interest is shown in my opinion if it’s just my opinion as a late-middle-aged female. I see all that because it’s in stark contrast with the way I’m approached and treated when it’s known I’m the director of Tate Modern.’
Might that not also be true of men in a similar position? ‘No,’ she insisted. ‘I’ve worked for three male directors of Tate Modern, and it hasn’t happened to them.’
I have had similar experiences. At an international conference recently, I was talking to two fellow (male) attendees: a former head of the Foreign Office and a BBC foreign correspondent. They know far more about foreign affairs than I do, but I probably have the edge in UK politics, having spent 30 years as a political columnist, most of it as the assistant editor of The Times. Up came an Italian journalist, who knew none of us. He ignored me and asked the men if they would answer a question about British politics. ‘Could Tony Blair ever make a comeback?’ he enquired. ‘Not a chance,’ I replied, and went on to explain why. He half turned his back on me, refusing even to look at me while I was answering, and asked a follow-up question of the two men. ‘Look, I’m the British political columnist here,’ I retorted, touching him on the arm so that he had to turn my way. ‘I do actually know what I’m talking about.’ He merely shrugged, in a nonchalant way.
Even the most powerful of women have their abilities challenged. Louise Richardson is the vice-chancellor (effectively the CEO) of the University of Oxford. Yet even so, she told me, she still finds herself being undermined. ‘I preside over Congregation [the sovereign body of the University]. Once, when I was in mid-speech in front of 350 people, this new guy said, “You’ve got it wrong. You should be reading this,” pointing to another part of my script, in front of everybody. I said, “Thank you, but actually I’ve got it right,” and I proceeded. I said to him the next day, “I’d just like you to give a little thought to one question. Would you have done that yesterday if I were a male vicechancellor? Would you have interrupted a male VC speaking publicly to a room full of people in a very formal setting to correct what they were saying? Especially when this was your first time at the gathering, and as it turned out, you were wrong?” He was extremely shocked.’
This is the test we all need to do if we’re to narrow the authority gap. Let the men in your life know that, if they find they’re listening less attentively to a woman than to a man, or doubting her expertise, or interrupting her, they should ask themselves whether they’d do the same to a man. And if you catch them at it, don’t hesitate to call them out if you can. The authority gap dents women’s confidence and holds us back. Sadly, in real life, we don’t have a mute button and we can’t just expel miscreants from a meeting. So, it’s time for those who claim to care about gender equality to stop and think: would I even be challenging this, if she were a man?
Women are listened to less, they find it harder to influence other people and they are frequently
underestimated