The Authority Gap by Mary Ann Sieghart review – mocked, patronised and still paid less than men

Some years ago, Mary Ann Sieghart found herself at a dinner seated next to a banker, who asked what she did. She listed her impressive portfolio career – political columnist, former associate editor of the Times, broadcaster, chair of a thinktank. “Wow, you’re a busy little girl!” he responded. She was 50.

This is one of numerous depressing examples related by successful women of what Seighart calls “the authority gap” – the way women are belittled, undermined, questioned, mocked, talked over and generally not taken seriously in public and professional life. The gender pay gap, obviously a related issue, is by now a well-documented and measurable phenomenon, so much so that it is marked by equal pay day, symbolising the point in the year when women effectively stop earning relative to men. The authority gap is more insidious and harder to calculate because, as Sieghart shows, so much of it is down to unconscious bias. Even more depressingly, women can be just as guilty of this bias in favour of male authority, because it is ingrained from what we see modelled to us in our own families and the prevailing culture from childhood.

In The Authority Gap: Why Women Are Still Taken Less Seriously Than Men, and What We Can Do About It, Sieghart draws together a remarkable wealth of research (the bibliography alone is 31 pages long) from academic studies and polling data to analyse and deconstruct this pervasive underestimation of women’s competence. She has also interviewed dozens of eminent women, including Hillary Clinton, Julia Gillard, Elaine Chao, Major General Sharon Nesmith and Lady Hale, for first-hand accounts of the authority gap and advice on how to combat it.

First, Sieghart considers whether there could be any merit in the idea that women are “naturally” less well suited to leadership or to certain traditionally “male” careers – economics or Stem, for example – and briskly debunks this: girls outperform boys in education all the way up to graduate degree level, and statistically there is no difference between the sexes in average IQs. Where girls report feeling deterred from pursuing a subject or career, it comes down to perceptions of discrimination resulting from social conditioning.

As she begins to unpick this social conditioning, it becomes clear how deep-rooted and self-perpetuating the problem is. Perhaps most shocking is the research showing how early this unconscious bias plays out in the classroom. One US study found that elementary and middle-school boys were given eight times as much attention by teachers. Boys are rewarded for pushing themselves forward and calling out, girls for being neat and quiet. “Little wonder that so many girls lose their voice, confidence and ambition,” the study’s authors concluded.

Sieghart’s field of inquiry is broad: she examines the rise of online abuse as a means of silencing women; the media’s double standards in beauty and ageing that mean older women are quietly shunted out of the public eye as their expertise increases; the many ways in which bias against women intersects with prejudices of class, race and disability.

Anticipating the anguish women readers will feel, Sieghart’s final chapter is titled No Need to Despair. Here, she sets out the changes needed at individual, organisational and legislative levels to close the gap – a goal she believes is achievable in one generation if the will is there. Many of these suggestions are things feminists have long campaigned for – better representation; more transparency in the workplace – but some are corrections we can all begin to make. Sieghart urges us to check the language we use to our daughters and our sons, and to notice if a woman is being interrupted or ignored in meetings. She also stresses the importance of men reading more books and watching films by and about women. “All these men have to do is actively decide to expose themselves to women’s voices,” she writes, but doesn’t explain how they might be persuaded.

The sweetener for men is that closing the authority gap is not the great sacrifice they may fear; research shows that men in more gender-equal societies report higher levels of happiness and satisfaction in work and home life, while gender-diverse companies are more profitable. Sieghart points out that female-led countries have had far lower death rates over the past year of the pandemic.

The Authority Gap is an impassioned, meticulously argued and optimistic call to arms for anyone who cares about creating a fairer society. Now we just have to get men to read it.

• The Authority Gap by Mary Ann Sieghart is published by Doubleday (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply