Book Review: The Authority Gap

Mary Ann Sieghart is a British writer who was born in the 1960s. She is a former assistant editor of The Times, a political and social affairs journalist and a radio presenter (BBC Radio 4: Start the Week, Fallout, Analysis, Profile, One to One and Beyond Westminster).

In her book, Sieghart examines the way in which women have to contend with being underestimated, undermined, overlooked, talked-over and generally not taken seriously in their public and professional life. She terms this 'the authority hap'. Her academic prowess (visiting Professor at King's College London; All Souls College, Oxford) is evident in her reference to a broad body of research; the book's bibliography is 31 pages long and includes a body of academic studies and polling data. She combines her rigorously sourced evidence with extensive interviews with women from all over the world. She speaks with more than fifty high profile female leaders including Major General Sharon Nesmith, Baroness Brenda Hale, President of the Supreme Count of the United Kingdom, political leaders such as Julia Gillard, Helle Thorning-Schmidt and Hillary Clinton, and writer Bernardine Evaristo. All report experiencing the gender 'authority gap', which is further widened by class, age, ethnicity, sexuality and other intersecting prejudices.

Including her own personal experiences, Sieghart analyses and deconstructs the persistent undermining of female competence (which she terms "mandermining") and ways in which it is intensified as conscious and unconscious gender biases.

While some of the data and experience related by her high-performing female interviewees is shockingly unjust and depressing at times, the work is solution focussed. She provides concrete advice on how to combat the gender gap. Far from relying on institutional, structural and change among male peers, Sieghart map out how women, individually and collectively, can act to close the authority gap. In so doing, she challenges women's own gender-biases, which many of us may not have examined within ourselves previously.

The Authority Gap is far from a male-bashing rant, but an engaging and uplifting examination of what we all contribute to gender-based inequalities and how we might recognise our own unconscious bias and change our responses to better support female authority in our own cultures, families and spheres of action.

"...the Authority Gap 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. If we don't do anything about it, the gap between women and men in the public sphere will never disappear."

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