July 2021

Recommended in FT Business Books

There are already many, many books about the structural blocks to women’s advancement, but Sieghart, a British journalist and broadcaster, sensibly focuses on an under-reported angle, “the authority gap” of her title. Women, she demonstrates in her well-written chapters, always face a struggle to be taken seriously because of profound and inbuilt biases in both men and women. Right from the start, this gap means that “we still expect women to be less expert than men. Most of us . . . are still less willing to be influenced by women’s views. And we still resist the idea of women having authority over us.”

About the author

Journalist, author, public speaker, consultant, non-executive director, broadcaster

Mary Ann Sieghart is author of the best-selling book, The Authority Gap: Why Women Are Still Taken Less Seriously Than Men, and What We Can Do About it and Founding Partner of The Authority Gap Consultancy. She spent 20 years as Assistant Editor and columnist at The Times and won a large following for her columns on politics, economics, feminism, parenthood and life in general. She has presented many programmes on BBC Radio 4, such as Start the Week, Profile, Analysis, Fallout and One to One. She chaired the revival of The Brains Trust on BBC2 and recently spent a year as a Visiting Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. She has chaired the Social Market Foundation think tank, is a Visiting Professor at the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London, and sits on numerous boards. She was Chair of the judges for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022.

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Mary Ann Sieghart