Men swim with the current, women swim against it
Not even being president of a country insulates a woman from not being taken as seriously as a man, says the writer and journalist Mary Ann Sieghart in the latest The Backlash Q&A.
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Alona
Last year, a colleague moving on to a new job gave me a gift. It was a book called The Authority Gap: Why Women Are Still Taken Less Seriously Than Men, and What We Can Do About It, and I read much of it in one sitting. Its author, the veteran British journalist Mary Ann Sieghart, had managed to articulate and find evidence for various frustrations that I had felt as a woman trying to make my way in the world. Mary Ann looked at the available research and interviewed around 50 women who had achieved positions of power and responsibility, including former presidents, prime ministers, and CEOs, to understand whether women are ever taken as seriously as men — by both men and women. What she discovered — depressingly? predictably? — was that the authority gap persists worldwide, and in the corridors of power. Women across industry and politics, and at varying levels of seniority, are constantly undermined and patronised because they are women. For the latest The Backlash Q&A, I spoke to Mary Ann about her findings, and what can be done to close this gap. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
The Backlash: Once men have read The Authority Gap, how do they tend to respond?
Mary Ann Sieghart: For starters it's hard getting them to read it, but when they do so many have said to me “gosh my eyes have really been opened by this and I just had no idea of the extent of the bias, of the extent of the bad treatment women were getting until I read the book.” That's very cheering, but the problem is actually getting them to read it in the first place because a lot of them just aren't interested in anything to do with women — which is part of the problem.
TB: Do you think men are genuinely not interested or is it more that they think "this can't be true I won't engage with it"?
MS: It's partly a defensiveness, or a "that doesn't apply to me, I am a good man, I don't do this sort of thing", and it's partly a lack of interest. I've got a whole chapter on how men are much more reluctant to read books by women and about women than women are to read books by men and about men.
TB: Do men not see books by women? Do they not register them as interesting? Or is it something else?
MS: There's no data on it because I don't think there's been qualitative research, but certainly anecdotally men say "oh that's not for me that sort of book. If it's written by a woman, it's aimed at women,” whereas if it's written by a man, it's not seen as being aimed at men, it's seen as being aimed at everybody, unless it's a book about SAS exploits or something. Most of the time we see men as writing about the human condition and women as writing about the female condition. And yet the weird thing is that men quite often say "oh I just don't understand women, I just don't understand what makes them tick." And you think, well, just read a couple of books by them. It might help.
TB: I read your book and felt completely vindicated. You described exactly what it’s like to live as a woman and feel constantly undermined. Your research for the book included interviews with powerful women, former national leaders, CEOs, and so on. What did you find most surprising in that research? Or did it all feel familiar, like the things that you had experienced yourself?
MS: Two things I found surprising. One was that even the most senior, successful, authoritative women come across this. It's not an insulation from the authority gap even to be president of a country. I thought that was pretty extraordinary. And the other surprising thing, not from interviews but from research — and depressing — was that I had assumed that this was a cohort effect, i.e. older men were going to be more sexist than younger men and the problem would die out as the older men died out, and I just wanted to hasten its demise. Actually what I discovered is that, in some ways, younger men are more sexist than older men. There is one study, for instance, which asks people every year “how suitable do you think women are for leadership positions” and they ask "how comfortable would you be to have a woman leading your country or being CEO of a big company”, and so on. Young men were less comfortable than older men, which is extraordinary isn't it? It's surprising. And part of it, I think, is that there is so much indoctrination now going on among young men via various figures, which most of us don't even know about, telling them that women are trying to take over the world, that people who believe in equality are feminazis, that people who are oppressed these days are actually white men, not women or people of colour.
TB: And the people who are saying it to them are also younger men, it's not that it's older men who are sexist indoctrinating younger men…Do you feel now less or more optimistic about closing the gap than when you finished the book?
MS: I feel more optimistic because people are talking about it much more, and what I really wanted to do was raise awareness. I think that there are a lot of men who are not actively malign towards women, and are not consciously sexist, but don't realise that, for instance, by taking up disproportionate conversational time when they are talking to a woman they are contributing to the problem. These sorts of men, once they become more aware of their behaviour, are really quite likely to want to change it, so that makes me optimistic. I think there's about a third of men who are complete dinosaurs and they are never going to change and they are not going to read my book, and there's about a third of men who are already very good and very respectful of women's views and treat us the same as other men. So if we can convert the men in the middle, the ones who are not actively malign, then we would have two-thirds on the right side. What makes me more pessimistic, however, is what I was just talking about, which is younger men being more sexist, and falling into the hands of these extreme mysoginists online. That worries me a lot.
TB: Do you think the media has improved when it comes to the authority gap over your career?
MS: I think it's getting better. There are a lot more female editors now, which makes a difference. That's great. Nearly half of national newspapers [in the UK] are edited by women. We'd have to count them, but it's something like 40 per cent. So that's an improvement, but actually some of this extreme misogyny in a very diluted form is translating itself into the way the media treat women, particularly papers like The Mail, and that's worrying.
TB: Your book contains a long list of practical steps to close the authority gap between men and women. What do you think would make the biggest difference?
MS: Probably the most important thing after accepting that we are all biased — I'm biased against women, but now I'm aware of it, when I see it happening I correct for it — is to stop mistaking confidence for competence, because they are absolutely not the same thing, and to understand how boys and men are socialised to be more confident and more self-promoting than girls and women are. And then, if girls and women start acting as confidently and self-promoting as men, people really don’t like it. We punish them for it. So it's no use to send women on assertiveness training courses or to tell women just to “lean in” and be more confident because it doesn't help them either. I think that we should actually look at how good someone is rather than how good they tell you they are, that's really important.
TB: Also when you promote that confidence and bluster you get Boris Johnson, you don't get somebody doing a good job, and we don't want women doing that, either.
MS: Exactly, overconfident people make terrible leaders, and women aren't usually allowed to be overconfident, so there's less danger of them being terrible. In fact, it's hard for them to be overconfident, because at every step their confidence is undermined. If every time you speak up in a meeting your expertise is challenged, you’re interrupted or someone talks over you, or patronises you or ignores what you say — this is what happens to us every bloody day as a result of the authority gap — of course your confidence is going to be dented. The chances of us being overconfident are pretty remote.
TB: There is a section in your book where you write “in everyday life, it’s as if men are swimming with the current in a river and women are swimming against it. The men see the banks racing past them and congratulate themselves for swimming so powerfully. They look at the women struggling to make headway against the current and think, ‘Why can’t they swim as fast as me? They’re obviously not as good.’” That really resonated for me.
MS: I actually used that analogy with a man the other day and he looked quite puzzled and he said “well why don't women swim with the current as well then?”, and I said “because they haven't got a cock!”
TB: I hope you gave him a copy of the book.
MS: I didn't have one on me…
TB: You are very thoughtful in your book about intersectionality and the multiple challenges faced by minoritised women, for example, or those living with disabilities. Do you think feminists still have a problem of not thinking enough about these intersecting challenges?
MS: I think ten years ago perhaps we weren't, but now there's a lot of talk and a lot of thinking about that, which is great.
Bonus: For the New Statesman, Mary Ann wrote this week about how the authority gap led to the current crisis in the Middle East. Female IDF soldiers had repeatedly warned that a Hamas attack was imminent, but were ignored.
Thanks so much for reading, see you next time.