How to Close the Authority Gap | Mary Ann Sieghart | TED

At a conference a few years ago,

a man asked me what I did.

And I led a portfolio life,

so I just rattled off a list and I said,

“Well, I write a political column for ‘The Independent’ newspaper.

I make radio programs for the BBC.

I chair a think tank.

I sit on a couple of commercial boards.

I’m on the council of Tate Modern,

and I am on the content board of Ofcom,

our broadcasting regulator.

(Cheers and applause)

To which he replied, "Wow, you're a busy little girl."

Audience: Whoa!

MAS: I was about 50, older than our Prime Minister.

(Laughter)

This is a classic example of what I call the “authority gap,”

the way we still take women less seriously than men.

We're still more reluctant to accord authority to women.

We still assume a man knows what he's talking about

until he proves otherwise.

While for a woman, it's all too often the other way round.

Research shows that men have six times more influence in group discussions

than women.

Women are twice as likely as men

to say they have to provide evidence of their competence,

or that people are surprised at their abilities.

And women of color are much more likely than white women to say this.

If you're working-class or disabled, the gap gets bigger still.

Basically, the farther we are from the white, male, middle class default,

the wider the authority gap is.

I bet every woman listening has a tale to tell

about being underestimated,

ignored, patronized,

interrupted or talked over,

challenged or mistaken for someone more junior, right?

In fact, it doesn't matter if you are a president of a country,

the CEO of a huge corporation

or a justice of the US Supreme Court.

Female justices get interrupted three times more than male ones,

96 percent of the time by men.

If you still need proof though,

a great test is to talk to people who’ve lived as both a man and a woman.

Because they’re exactly the same person with the same ability, intelligence,

personality, experience.

And if they're treated quite differently after they transition,

that must be because of their gender.

As scientists would say,

we've controlled for all the other variables

and isolated the only one that matters:

whether they're seen as male or female.

While I was researching the authority gap,

I came across two Stanford science professors

who happened to transition at the same time in different directions.

Ben Barres, who was a neuroscientist,

was astonished by the difference it made to his life

once he started living as a man.

"I've had the thought a million times," he said.

"I'm taken more seriously."

An academic who didn't know his history,

was overheard after one of his seminars saying,

"Oh, Ben Barris gave a great seminar today.

But then his work's much better than his sister's."

Audience: (Gasps)

MAS: Right?

Meanwhile, Joan Roughgarden, who is an evolutionary biologist,

told me that when she was still living as a man,

she felt like she was on this conveyor belt to success.

Her pay kept going up,

she kept getting promoted,

when she spoke, people listened.

Once she started living as a woman,

all that changed.

So she was interrupted, she was challenged,

she was personally attacked.

She'd make a point and no one took any notice until a man repeated it.

"At first," she said, "I was amused.

I thought, well, if women are discriminated against,

I'm darn well going to be discriminated against the same way."

(Laughter)

And then she said,

"Well, the thrill of that has worn off, I can tell you."

Her conclusion, like mine,

was that men are assumed to be competent until they prove otherwise.

Women are assumed to be incompetent until they prove otherwise.

Obviously I’d like to do something about this,

but what’s in it for men?

Well, one of the most encouraging things I found

while researching the authority gap

was that narrowing the gap isn't like a seesaw,

in which as women rise, men just automatically fall.

I mean, there might be the odd occasion when,

if you're a man in direct competition with a woman

and the bias against her is dissolved,

she might just beat you on merit.

But in almost every aspect of your life,

greater gender equality is likely to make you happier, healthier

and more satisfied.

There's been some fascinating academic research

showing that both in more gender-equal countries and US states

and in more equal straight relationships,

not only are the women happier and healthier,

which you'd expect, less resentful, less exhausted,

they feel more part of a team.

And the children are happier and healthier.

They do better at school,

they get on much better with their dads,

they have fewer behavioral difficulties.

But more surprisingly, perhaps,

the men themselves are happier and healthier.

So they're twice is likely to say they're satisfied with their lives,

half as likely to be depressed.

They tend to smoke less, drink less,

sleep better, take fewer drugs.

And here's the absolute clincher:

they get more frequent and better sex.

(Laughter)

So if it's in all our interests,

what can we do to close the authority gap?

Well, I counted the other day,

I've come up with 140 solutions.

(Laughter)

You'll be glad to hear I'm not going to share them all with you today,

but I'm just going to leave you with a few ideas to take away.

I’m always asked, “OK, so what should women do?”

But it's not women we need to fix, right?

It's how we all perceive and react to and interact with women.

We need to make changes to ourselves, to our workplaces

and to the world around us.

Even women are biased against other women.

A few years ago in Britain,

we had a female leader of a political party

who had a high voice and sounded almost childish.

And when she came on the radio,

I'd find it quite hard to take her seriously.

But as soon as I had that reflex reaction, I'd say to myself, stop it!

Listen to the content of what she's saying,

and don't judge her by the pitch of her voice.

We all need to notice when our brains are trying to trick us like that.

It can also help to flip things around.

To ask ourselves, would I have thought that or said that or done that

if this person had been a man rather than a woman?

Would I have mistaken that male CEO for his assistant?

Or would I have called a 50-year-old man “a busy little boy?”

I don't think so.

When we're at work, we can actively affirm what a woman says,

as long as it's interesting.

Research shows that even if women make up 40 percent of a group,

they're half as likely as men to gain approval from it

and much more likely to be interrupted.

If Evie makes a point at a meeting,

and no one takes a blind bit of notice until Peter repeats it ten minutes later

and it's treated like the Second Coming,

we can say to Peter, "Oh, I'm so glad you agree with what Evie said earlier."

If Peter interrupts Rosa --

(Applause)

If Peter interrupts Rosa, we can say, "Hang on a minute.

I was really interested in what Rosa was saying there."

And what can employers do?

Well, the first thing they must do

is to make sure that they genuinely are hiring and promoting on merit.

One study found that 70 percent of men

will rate a man more highly than a woman

for achieving exactly the same goals.

Women with exactly the same qualifications as men

are 30 percent less likely to be called for a job interview.

If you have only one woman on a shortlist,

the chances of appointing her are vanishingly small.

Because it's telling us that men are the natural holders of this job,

and that appointing a woman would be risky.

Adding just one more woman to the shortlist

makes the odds of hiring a woman 79 times greater.

Companies or employers can also actively encourage talented women

to apply for promotion.

Because we are socialized to be less confident

and less self-promoting than men.

And if we do act confidently,

people often don't like it

and they start calling us words like “strident” or “pushy.”

I was caricatured for years in Britain's satirical "Private Eye" magazine

as Mary Ann Bighead.

Just because I tried to seem as confident

as my male colleagues.

And that's why it's really important not to fall for the confidence trick,

to mistake confidence for competence,

because they're absolutely not the same thing.

(Applause)

An academic paper, unusually entitled

"Bullshitters. Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives"

found that teenage boys are significantly more likely than girls

to pretend to understand mathematical concepts that didn't even exist.

(Laughter)

And this relative male overconfidence persists into adulthood.

So if we take overconfident men at their word,

we're going to be much more likely to hire or promote them,

even if they're nothing like as competent as their female rivals.

Now representation matters everywhere.

But one place that could really make a dent in the authority gap

is the media.

Because if it's sending us the signal that men are more authoritative,

more expert, more important than women,

that's just going to confirm our biases.

At the moment, men are three times more likely

to be quoted in news stories than women,

and twice as likely to be the protagonists in movies.

The BBC has recently made a push

to have 50 percent female experts on air.

And I think that could make a real difference to the next generation.

(Applause)

Because once we get used to seeing women as authorities in public,

we're going to find it much easier to accord them equal authority

in our daily lives.

So let's work together to close the authority gap.

We’ll all be happier and healthier.

We’ll get more sex.

(Laughter)

And the world will be a better place.

As Mary McAleese, the former president of Ireland,

put it to me so eloquently:

"If men don't take women equally seriously,

then we end up with this world that flies on one wing."

And that's our world flapping about rather sadly,

because of the refusal to use the elevation

and the direction and the confidence

that comes from flying on two wings.

We have to understand that when women flourish

and their talents and their creativity flourish,

then the world flourishes and men flourish.

We all flourish.

Thank you.

(Applause)