'Why women are STILL taken less seriously than men, and what we can do about it'
We’re excited to be hosting Mary Ann Sieghart for our next online event, at 7pm on Monday 14 March. Mary Ann’s book The Authority Gap was published to critical acclaim last year and the scale of the gap between men and women that it reveals has taken many of its readers by surprise.
Please register here.
Women have been enfranchised for almost a century and yet sexism and inequality are alive and kicking, and thoroughly entrenched in our social structures. Mary Ann Sieghart takes a deep dive into the conscious and unconscious bias faced by women, especially in the workplace, in this meticulously researched book. Her findings are startling, revealing that even today this conditioning begins very early in life, that 70% of men rate men more highly than women for achieving the same goals and that women themselves will often assume a man is more likely to be the expert.
The Authority Gap includes interviews with many eminent women, including Baroness Hale, Mary Beard, Hilary Clinton and Julia Gillard, who give first hand accounts of how they dealt with the authority gap. The last chapter is titled No Need to Despair and suggests ways in which we can all work towards counteracting the systemic sexism in our society and in doing so, help to close this gap.
Reviews
The Guardian The Times The Independent.ie
Biography
Mary Ann Sieghart leads a portfolio life. She makes programmes for BBC Radio 4 and is a Visiting Professor at King’s College London. She spent 2018-19 as a Visiting Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, where she researched her book, The Authority Gap, on why women are taken less seriously than men. She is Chair of the judges for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022.
Mary Ann is a Non-Executive Director of the Guardian Media Group and Chair of the Investment Committee of The Scott Trust (owner of The Guardian and The Observer), Senior Independent Director of Pantheon International, Non-Executive Director of The Merchants Trust and Senior Independent Trustee of the Kennedy Memorial Trust. Until recently, she was Chair of the Social Market Foundation, a non-party-political think tank, Senior Independent Director of Henderson Smaller Companies Investment Trust and sat on the Content Board of Ofcom and the Council of Tate Modern.
She spent 19 years as Assistant Editor of The Times, including as Acting Editor of the Monday edition, Op-Ed Editor, Arts Editor, Chief Political Leader-Writer and political and social affairs columnist both on the Op-Ed page and in Times2.
She has also written a weekly column in The Independent about politics, economics and social affairs, and presented Newshour, the BBC World Service’s flagship news and current affairs programme.
Mary Ann has extensive TV and radio experience, including presenting Start the Week, Analysis, Profile, One to One, Fallout, The Inquiry, Beyond Westminster, Newshour, Powerhouse, The Brains Trust, The Week in Westminster, Taking Issue, The Big Picture, No Illusions and The World This Week. She has regularly appeared as a guest on Question Time, Any Questions, Today, Newsnight, The World Tonight, Channel 4 News, PM, The Andrew Marr Show, The World at One, Woman’s Hour and The Daily Politics.
Before joining The Times, Mary Ann was political correspondent of The Economist, City Editor of Today newspaper and a Lex columnist and Eurobond correspondent at the Financial Times.
She has also sat on numerous boards, including the Heritage Lottery Fund, the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the North Fulham New Deal for Communities, New Europe, the No Campaign, the Radcliffe Trust, the Social Studies Faculty of Oxford University, Women in Journalism and the National Council for One-Parent Families.
She won the Laurence Stern Fellowship to work on The Washington Post. She also captained The Times’s University Challenge: The Professionals team, which reached the semi-final.