Consultancy

Mary Ann Sieghart Consultancy

The authority gap costs employers money.

If women’s views aren’t taken as seriously as men’s in meetings, worse decisions will result. And if women feel they’re not being fairly valued or treated at work, they are going to be less engaged and more likely to leave in search of a work environment that is more sympathetic. This often leads to a loss of women at middle-management levels, which then reduces the pipeline for promotion into senior management.

Mary Ann Sieghart and her colleagues can come into your business or organisation, assess the extent of the authority gap there and help you to find ways of narrowing it, thereby saving you money, improving your female talent pool, and helping you to perform better. Find out more here.

To enquire about consultancy, please email contact@maryannsieghart.com.

We can create a bespoke package for you, including any or all of the interventions below.

Introductory talk

Mary Ann gives an organisation-wide talk to set the scene and explain the authority gap to as many employees as possible. This is followed by a thorough question and answer session to allow the subject to be fully debated and aired.

Quantitative research

Employees fill in an anonymised online survey, asking them whether and how often they have experienced or witnessed authority gap behaviour, such as being underestimated, patronised, undervalued, interrupted or talked over, ignored at meetings or disproportionately challenged. This acts as a baseline and can be repeated several times over the course of a year to evaluate whether the culture is improving.

Qualitative research

We conduct focus groups of female employees from all levels and teams in the organisation to discern whether and how they have experienced the authority gap at work. Their stories are anonymised and shared with HR and senior management.

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Buy-in from senior management

The results of these research exercises are taken to senior management so that they can understand the initial extent of the problem and agree a programme of remediation.

Allyship workshops

We conduct men-only workshops to help them understand the problem in an unconfrontational way, encouraging them to empathise with what women often experience, to give them the tools to act as allies, and to explain how gender equality isn’t a zero-sum game: men benefit from it too.

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HR audit

We look at what the HR department is already doing to promote equality in recruitment and promotion decisions and compare it with best practice. We offer advice on shortlisting and selection panels, interviews, evaluations, reverse mentoring, policies on flexible working and parental leave, and how to incentivise managers to close the authority gap in their departments.

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Training and toolkits

We offer training and a toolkit of actions to departmental managers. We run workshops with managers to train them on how to look out for the authority gap and how they can use the toolkit to narrow it in their teams.

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Follow-up

We return after a year and repeat the qualitative and quantitative research to evaluate how successful the programme has been in narrowing the authority gap.

To enquire about consultancy, please email contact@maryannsieghart.com.

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