It’s time we treated sexism like racism
Despite her glittering career, MARY ANN SIEGHART was belittled by men. In a new book, she laments how, after decades of feminism, her daughters are facing the same prejudice
Women are 27 times more likely to be abused online. As one columnist wrote: ‘An opinion is the short skirt of the internet’
When I was small, I often smarted at the injustice of being a girl. Why was my brother taken into the cockpit of a plane, but I wasn’t? Why wasn’t I allowed to join the football game at my summer camp? What infuriated me most of all, though, was being patronised.
I hoped that, as a childhood annoyance, this would disappear as I grew up. Like pretty much all women, though, I discovered that I still had to fight harder than men to be taken seriously, and that even then, people I met for the first time would often patronise me.
A few years ago, I spent a fascinating day at a small conference in which we all had a chance to see each other in action.
At dinner, I found myself sitting next to a man only a little older than me. he asked me what I did. By then I led a portfolio life and wasn’t sure which jobs would interest him most. So I replied: ‘Well, I do a number of things. I write a political column in a newspaper, I chair a think tank, I sit on a couple of commercial boards, I make the odd radio programme, I’m on the Council of Tate Modern and I’m involved with some charities.’
‘You’re a busy little girl!’ he exclaimed.
I was about 50, older than the then Prime Minister. how to respond?
The majority view on Twitter was that I should have either stabbed him with my fork or poured my wine over him. Instead, I spluttered: ‘I haven’t been called a “little girl” since I was about six, and I remember it infuriating me even then!’
Women have to put up with this sort of behaviour because of what I call the ‘authority gap’. We assume a man knows what he’s talking about until he proves otherwise; while for women, it’s all too often the other way round.
This is not just maddening for women, but it also holds them back. It undermines their confidence and makes them less likely to be promoted or paid as much as they deserve.
having two daughters myself, I was determined to give them the intellectual confidence to fight back against this. I read them books that were challenging for their age and talked to them a lot about politics and the world around them.
When my daughter evie was five, I overheard her saying to her little friend: ‘Let’s play parties.’ I waited for her to get out the pretend birthday cake. I laughed when, instead, she announced: ‘I’ll be Tony Blair and you be John Major!’
I banned Barbie dolls because, as I told the girls, they created an unnatural and unhealthy ideal of female beauty. I encouraged them to believe that they could achieve as much as men in any field they chose. As an assistant editor of a national newspaper, I felt I was being a role model to them, showing that it was possible to combine a successful career with a family.
But outside the home, life was as hard for them as for most girls their age. When evie — having been at an all-girls school — moved to one with a mixed sixth-form, she was horrified by the sexist, laddish culture there.
She had the intellectual confidence to hold her own in class, but the humiliating sexual banter and behaviour were hard to endure. And girls who tried to call it out were ostracised by the boys. It was so difficult, as a mother, to know what to advise. All I could do was encourage her efforts to ignore it.
Rosa, our other daughter, stayed in an all-girls school, which was probably better. But in the outside world, she saw the inequity.
When she started her first trainee architect job in a big and prestigious practice, she was given a leaflet listing the 12 partners and their PAs. You guessed it: all the partners were men and all the PAs women.
I really hope, though, that the world will be easier for them than it has been for my generation. Through the everyone’s Invited campaign, girls and young women are already being immensely brave in calling out the abusive treatment they have had at the hands — sometimes literally— of boys and men.
But I also hope my new book, The Authority Gap, will open people’s eyes to the more subtle ways in which we still mistreat girls and women: annoyances such as interrupting them, challenging their expertise, talking over them, underestimating them, undervaluing them and ignoring their views.
ThIS starts very young. For instance, one American study found that when boys called out in class, teachers listened and responded, but when girls did, they were told to ‘raise your hand if you want to speak’. Teachers asked more questions of boys, called them up in front of the class more often and rewarded them for talking, while praising girls for being quiet.
In my book, I ask men to flip things round to see the problem more clearly. So I say: imagine living in a world in which you were routinely patronised by women. Imagine having your views ignored or your expertise frequently challenged by them. Imagine trying to speak up in a meeting, only to be talked over by female colleagues.
Imagine women superiors promoting other women, even if they are less talented than you. Imagine people always addressing the woman you are with before you. Imagine writing a book and finding that half the population is reluctant to read it because it is written by a man. Imagine being trolled on social media and receiving death or rape threats from women merely for expressing an opinion.
It’s this last example that turns ‘authority gap’ behaviour from an irritation to a serious hazard.
Women are 27 times more likely to be abused online than men. As the columnist and author Laurie Penny puts it: ‘An opinion…is the short
skirt of the internet. having one and flaunting it is somehow asking an amorphous mass of almost-entirely male keyboard-bashers to tell you how they’d like to rape, kill and urinate on you.’
But you don’t have to be in public life, like Laurie, to be abused. Just being female with an internet connection can be enough. even girls putting up videos about braiding hair or recipes get rape threats in the comments section.
The challenge today is to close the authority gap for girls and young women by tackling the curdled misogyny they encounter online and in school from their peers.
My fear is that the more power women win, the harsher the backlash will be. But there are things we can
do. If social media companies insisted that all users had to prove their identity, at least some of this trolling would cease.
And schools have to take sexual harassment of girls far more seriously.
Last month, an Ofsted review found that sexual harassment was a routine part of life for British schoolchildren.
It’s time we stopped hiding behind the notion that ‘boys will be boys’ and treated sexism as punitively in schools as racism: it’s just as pernicious.
Yet 64 per cent of teachers hear sexist language at least once a week, and girls complain that nothing is done about it.
As for adults, the rude man at dinner all those years ago represented my generation — the Boomers and Gen-Xers well into midlife. We must call out the pure sexism of behaviour like his whenever we encounter it.
And if we want to change our own behaviour caused by the authority gap, first we have to notice that we’re doing it.
When we walk up to a man and a woman standing together, do we automatically address the man first? Do we interrupt women more, or assume they’re not going to be interesting or expert until they prove otherwise?
When a man takes up all the conversational airtime at our expense, do we push back? Do we, as parents, share the authority and chores equally at home?
Surprisingly, perhaps, behaving equally at home turns out to be in men’s interest too. Research shows that, in more equal relationships, not only are the women happier and healthier, but so are the men.
And if we can bring up our children to understand that girls and women are the equal of boys and men, we can narrow the authority gap in one generation.
It’s a lesson we must urgently teach our youngsters. Only when boys respect girls on all levels, seeing them not just as potential sexual conquests but as fullyrounded intellectual equals, will we at last close that unacceptable gap and allow the next generation of women to flourish fairly.
■ THE Authority Gap, by Mary Ann Sieghart (£16.99,
Doubleday) is out now.
DAUGHTER EVIE, 29
GROWING up, I had no idea that it was unusual for parents to be equal partners. Mum and Dad took equal responsibility for me and my sister, sharing the work with a succession of delightful antipodean nannies.
They tried hard to give us a gender-neutral childhood. Barbies were banned for their unrealistic beauty standards, and our lives were full of ‘braveness tests’ — from climbing onto roofs to navigating our way through London’s hyde Park alone, aged perhaps eight and six, armed with only a compass and map.
Moving to Westminster, the historic boys’ public school in the heart of London, for sixth-form, I was determined I wasn’t a feminist. This juvenile stance largely originated from my teenage desire to antagonise my mother, but I’m still ashamed to look back at my naivety and obliviousness.
It also left me with many fewer defences in the battleground that was Westminster. If I didn’t believe sexism existed, then I had to accept it when sexual harassment, objectification and misogynistic insults were deemed ‘jokes’. The difficult thing about Westminster was that, much as the boys wanted to impress the girls, they also resented them. We entered the school at a critical time in the boys’ development, and became symbols of their indignation at having to grow up.
Friendships that had been uncomplicated in the past became muddied and adversarial once girls were introduced to the mix. It was a fall from eden, and the girls were (almost literally) demonised for it.
Being a young woman at Westminster was a strange balancing act, somewhere between audience, scapegoat and prey. An anonymously hosted website, The Westminster Tree, ranked students according to attractiveness and charted all amorous connections in a spider diagram; but girls got the brunt of the resultant shaming.
We were referred to as ‘poon’ and ‘gash’, both slang terms for vagina. ‘Banter’ — barely ironic misogynistic harassment — abounded, even in the classrooms. This led directly to an Authority Gap. how can the opinions and expertise of a woman be worthy of respect when she herself is reduced to her reproductive organs?
In support of everyone’s Invited, I spoke out about my experience at Westminster. I was wary of the backlash, but I grew up with a mother who argued for what she thought was right and damn the consequences.
That’s who I want to be, too.
Denying I was a feminist to antagonise my mother left me with fewer defences at Westminster