Carla Miller 00:00
Welcome to the influence and impact podcast for female leaders. My name is Carla Miller. And I'm a leadership coach who helps female leaders to tackle self doubt, become brilliant influencing and make more impact at work. I've created this podcast to help you to become a more inspiring and impactful leader. And I want to become the leadership BFF that you didn't know you were missing until now. So I'm back for a second episode this week. I hope you enjoyed the episode earlier in the week on embracing equity. And I hope that you shared it widely. And here is another republished episode for you, because it's just so timely with International Women's Day. This is one of my favourite interviews from the podcast, I'm going to tell you all about my guest, Marianne Sieghart, in a minute and her book, but I just wanted to say that I've had so much positive feedback on this episode, it has been a real eye opener for lots of women, in terms of understanding some of those barriers that we're facing, she shares these issues in a way that men can understand as well. And I really, really encourage you to share this episode with your male colleagues, and with the managers and leaders in your organisation. And she also tell some great stories that I have been retelling on a regular basis as well, because they're just so enjoyable. So this is a really frank, honest, practical conversation between two women who are really trying to change the workplace for the better. Now Marianne, Sega is way, way ahead of me on that journey, I am a super fan of hers and recommend her book to everyone. If you don't have the book, go out and buy the book and give a copy to your if you've got a male chief exec, give it to your male chief exec if not give it to the nearest senior male that you work with. It's an amazing book, and it could really help to create change. So I will run this episode for you. And just a reminder that I do talk in organisations on male ally ship, and also what managers and leaders can do to support women in the workplace, as well as obviously working directly with women early career on their confidence, and speaking up in meetings, and with women leaders on influencing and getting to those top levels within an organisation. So if you are within an organisation that wants to develop, and pipeline of women who are ready to lead who wants to retain and support their staff and to overcome the gender pay gap and close that gender pay gap, then do get in touch for a conversation. So I'm delighted to welcome one of my book, author heroes, or heroines, I should in fact, say to the podcast. Welcome, Marianne, how are you doing today?

Mary Ann Sieghart 03:15
I'm very well, thank you. How are you?

Carla Miller 03:17
I'm good. Thank you. I was just showing you where your book sat on my colour coded bookcase. And you've been on my wish list for a while for the podcast. So exciting to have you here. Obviously, you've researched and written about so many topics over the years. What is it that drove you to this topic and to writing the book that you did?

Mary Ann Sieghart 03:38
Well, I've mainly been involved in writing about politics, as you say, and also a little bit about business. But all the way through my journalistic career, I would intersperse those columns, with columns about feminism. And so some of the topics in the book are topics that I've written about singly in columns over the years, because it's something that's annoyed me all my life. And actually, I was one of the founders of women in journalism. Gosh, 30 years ago, I think now when it was deeply unfashionable. So it is something I've been thinking about all my life and writing a little about all my life, but I think I probably had to earn my spurs in a very male stereotypes world, I have being a political commentator, before men would take me seriously enough to read this sort of book. And so I may as well say QED, you know, this is exactly what I'm writing about, is that women find it harder to be taken seriously than men. And I suspect if I'd written this book 20 or 30 years ago, the men would have just thought, oh, that's just sort of very niche fluffy female stuff. I don't even need to think about it. But because I was part of their world already. I think it made it easier.

Carla Miller 04:49
Yes, I think you have to time books. Well, don't you? There's another book. I haven't read it yet. But the book about why so many incompetent men promoted or something along those?

Mary Ann Sieghart 04:58
That's fantastic Thomas Cho Moto premier says yes, really

Carla Miller 05:02
amazing. And I'm like a woman could never have written that book, it would just have been shut down straight away,

Mary Ann Sieghart 05:08
or should have been seen as a man hater, wouldn't she? Yeah. Whereas he is just saying, look at the evidence,

Carla Miller 05:13
exactly one of the best male allies that are out there. And so when you wrote the book, did you have a vision for the impact that you wanted it to achieve?

Mary Ann Sieghart 05:21
I've just been thrilled by the impact that it has achieved, I have to say, when I first conceived of this book, it was before even the me to movement. And so I suspected it would be still seen as a little bit niche. But then along came this fantastic wave. And everybody was thinking about and talking about gender equality and inequity. And basically what a ship time women have had over the years. Am I allowed to say that? Yes. And so I think it just fitted very neatly into the zeitgeist, it wasn't, I mean, I couldn't have hoped actually, for it to hit at such a good time. And so a lot of people seem to be talking about it. And a lot of men, thankfully seem to be talking about it, as well as women, which I think is great. I

Carla Miller 06:07
was going to ask you about that, actually. Because I every time I speak to a male chief exec, which isn't as often as I'd like, I tend to speak to HR most of the time, every time I speak to my chief exec, I give them a small list of books, and your book is on there, because they're the people that need to read it in my mind. Anyway, who is your ideal reader book? Yeah, my

Mary Ann Sieghart 06:27
ideal reader is a senior male manager, actually, I mean, of course, I want women to read this book, and they will get a lot out of it. And I think we'll be talking about that later. But I think the world won't change unless senior men read it, or at least start talking about what's in it. And thinking about it, it requires, you know, a lot of examination of our own thoughts and instincts and behaviour. I think I'm calling for a lot more awareness. Absolutely.

Carla Miller 06:55
Because that's the first stage if we don't know there's an issue, then we can't do anything about it. Can we? I've seen you doing an awful lot of talks. In fact, you've just spent the whole weekend doing talks, haven't you?

Mary Ann Sieghart 07:05
I have how I've been in Hay on Wye talking at the hay Festival and the how the light gets in festival. And I've done seven speaking events in three days. So forgive me if my brains a bit laggardly today. And when you

Carla Miller 07:18
are speaking to audiences, what's the engagement like from men versus women? It is so different.

Mary Ann Sieghart 07:24
I mean, the women almost break into the Hallelujah chorus at the end. They get so engaged, and you can almost see them going. Yes, yes, yes. And all these heads nodding and all these smiles. And the men tend to sit there looking starting off looking sceptical. And by the end looking quite embarrassed, I would say, but I do say right at the beginning, if I can, this isn't a man bashing book, because a lot of what I write about women actually do too. But it's women who are the victims of this behaviour, not men. And so I think it does give men more to think about than women.

Carla Miller 08:04
Yes. And that's something I want to chat to you about later, actually how how women have embraced it, but also what women can be doing to be supporting other women and championing change. For those that haven't read the book. And honestly, I go on about it so much I imagine most of my audience have. Do you want to give us a brief summary of what the book is about and what you're trying to achieve with that?

Mary Ann Sieghart 08:25
Yeah, so the authority gap is a measure of how much more seriously we still take men than women, we still assume a man knows what he's talking about until he proves otherwise. Whereas for a woman, it's all too often the other way round. And I'm sure every woman has a tale to tell or being underestimated patronised, being interrupted or talked over, having her views ignored at a meeting, and then a man makes exactly the same point and everybody leaps on it is brilliant. Having her expertise challenged, or having her authority resisted. This is what happens as a result of the authority gap. And we often as women notice this sort of behaviour. And we blame ourselves, we sort of beat ourselves up, you know, suppose we make a point at a meeting and no one takes notice until the man makes it. We think, oh, maybe I wasn't confident enough or eloquent enough or articulate enough? No, you were just too female. And what I proved in this book, through all sorts of academic evidence is that these are real phenomena that happen to people just because they are women, and not because they are bad at their jobs, or somehow incompetent, or not clever enough. So for instance, there was one fantastic experiment done, in which the researchers brought together actually a mixed gender group of people, men and women together, ostensibly to decide a child custody case. And they gave the group all sorts of information about the family concerned. But they gave a couple of members of the group a piece of information that none of the others knew. And when that information was presented by him than it was six times more likely to be used by the rest of the group in its deliberations than when it was introduced by a woman six times more. So that's that just shows how much harder women have to work to influence a group compared to men. And then there are other studies, for instance, on interruptions and you know, interrupting is not only incredibly annoying, but it's actually silencing you. It's suggesting that the man concerned generally is the man doing the interrupting, believes that what he's got to say is more important than you and it shuts you down. So it's actually very annoying behaviour. And you would think that the more senior you got as a woman, the less likely it was to happen. But no. So there was this fascinating study done of US supreme court proceedings. And what they found was that although women made up only a third of the Supreme Court justices, they suffered two thirds of all interruptions. So that means they're four times more likely to be interrupted than their male colleagues 96% of the time by men. So you don't get more senior than being a US Supreme Court Justice, you still get your four times more likely to be interrupted. So these were the sorts of studies that I found in order to prove that the authority gap exists, because I think a lot of men are sceptical about it. And they think, Oh, we're just being hypersensitive, or chippy, or paranoid. We're absolutely not, we notice it. And they don't, of course, because we're at the wrong end of it. But I think there's another brilliant way of proving that it exists. And this is to talk to people who have lived as both a man and as a woman. And I'll explain why. Because suppose you are up for promotion against a male colleague, and he gets the job and you don't, and he might scratch your head and think that there was a bit of bias at play there, that is impossible to prove, isn't it, because he might genuinely just be better at it than you. So if you talk to someone who has lived as both a man and a woman, they are someone with exactly the same intelligence and ability and expertise and experience and personality, and body of work. And if they are treated completely differently, once they've transitioned to the other gender, then what you've managed to do is control for all the other variables and isolate the only one that matters. And that I think, is slam dunk proof. And so I talked to some trans people about this. And I found two Stanford professors who happened to transition in opposite directions at exactly the same time, by coincidence, and they used to meet up and compare notes about it. And Ben barriers, who was a neuroscientist, said once he started living as a man, he said, I've had the thought a million times, I'm just taken more seriously now. He said, My work is taken more seriously the same down work, as he put it is taken more seriously. Now that people see me as a man. And someone who didn't know his history was overheard at the back of one of his seminars, saying, Ah, Ben Barris gave a great seminar today. But then his work so much better than his sister's. I is. And we don't rock garden, who's an evolutionary biologist transitioned in the opposite direction. And she said that when she was living as a young man, she just felt like she was on this conveyor belt to success. She kept getting promoted, her pay kept going up. She was appointed to the University Senate committee, you know, life was just gilded for her. Once she started living as a woman, all that changed, and she started coming up against all this authority gap behaviour being interrupted, being underestimated, being patronised, being unnecessarily challenged. And she said, To start with, I thought, well, if I'm going to live as a woman, I'm doing well going to be discriminated against like a woman. And then she said, Well, the thrill of that is worn off, I can tell you. And her conclusion was men are assumed to be competent until proven otherwise. Women are assumed to be incompetent until proven otherwise. And much bigger studies of trans people have shown exactly this phenomenon. Trans men say this is amazing. I'm taking more seriously now I'm more respected now. I can get away with so much more. Now. I speak people listen, and trans women saying exactly the opposite. And often saying I had no idea of the extent of sexism until I started living as a woman.

Carla Miller 14:28
It must be nice to be a man's Oh,

Mary Ann Sieghart 14:30
must be amazing. I often think

Carla Miller 14:34
I've just got one child, he's four. And he asked me what I did at work the other day and I'd been interviewing someone on the gender pay gap. So he's really interested in tractors but I started trying to explain in charge and what the gender pay gap was explained his life is probably going to be easier at work because he was a boy. But um, yeah, it's when you see how much evidence you have gathered in book, it's mind blowing. Did you have that experience and thinking, oh, there must be stuff out there and then just being blown away by how much? Yes,

Mary Ann Sieghart 15:07
there was. Yes, absolutely that and I just kept finding more and more and more and more. And it was actually difficult, very difficult, in fact, to do the research because it's in so many fields, and it's such a big broad topic. So you know, if I were, if I were writing a book on, I don't know, mediaeval monasticism in southwest France or something, they would be very much a sort of closed loop of information there wouldn't there, you know, there would be perhaps 10 books that I had to read and 20 academic papers, and I just have to draw it all together. But with this, it was such an enormous subject straddling so many disciplines, that every time I found an academic paper, it's send me to another 23 different ones, and they'd send me to another 27 different ones. And then I'd think, but I've only been looking in social psychology, now I need to look in politics or management or business, you know. And eventually, after about two or three years of research, I said to myself, I just got to stop, because this is infinite, there's never going to be an end to it. Otherwise, you're

Carla Miller 16:08
the Encyclopaedia of gender bias. And so I sometimes when I'm working within an organisation, I'm talking to men about ally ship, and I'll share some of the statistics. And as I share them, that gathered from yours and a number of other books, as I share them, you can see them wanting to challenge it in their heads with the experiences that they had. And they will always they're trying to be open minded. And I can see they will take something and go yet and that area, I can see that's really helpful. But the rest of it I don't see happening within my team. Do you think they've got blinkers on? Yes.

Mary Ann Sieghart 16:48
Not necessarily deliberate. Most of what I write about is unconscious, not conscious bias. So I'm trying not to blame people on the whole. But I use the analogy of it's as if men are swimming in a river with the current, of course, they can't feel the currents, but they can see the banks racing past them. And they think, Oh, my God, I'm really strong swimmer. And then they see the women swimming in the other direction, struggling to make headway against the current. And they think, Well, clearly not as good at swimming as either. Because you don't feel the current, you know, I probably don't notice my white privilege enough. I drive a beaten up old Mercedes. And I've never been stopped by the police and searched for drugs, because I'm a white middle class woman. But I don't really appreciate that, because it's just something that doesn't happen to me. So dogs not barking.

Carla Miller 17:41
Absolutely. It's funny. You talk about the current, I talk about it as an electric bike, like you're on, everyone's on this journey on their bikes. And men are still cycling hard. But what they don't realise is that bikes for electric and cars aren't so there's so

Mary Ann Sieghart 17:55
much harder for us. That's that's a really good analogy. I like that. When

Carla Miller 17:59
you've got a book, it's almost like you've got a thesis you're putting forward and you're looking for the evidence that supports that thesis. There's so much in there. It's so overwhelming. I was not overwhelmed. It was just so much evidence. I was wondering, are there things that disagreed with it that you left out because it wouldn't make the central thesis of the book?

Mary Ann Sieghart 18:19
There was one very recent study which showed that people now believe they never used to, but people now say they believe that women are just as competent as men. And I thought, does that invalidate the thesis of the book? No, actually, because people may say that, they may even consciously think it, but they know they've got to say it anyway, whether they consciously think it or not. But it's actually unconscious bias that I'm writing about much more than conscious bias. So the fact that people now do say to pollsters, yes, women are just as good doesn't necessarily mean that they're treating them that way.

Carla Miller 18:54
People don't always tell the truth to pollster Exactly. As you know, from your background. And so, I've got so many different topics, I wanted to talk to you about one of the things, you've got a whole chapter on what you call conversational manspreading. And I loved the idea of that. Can you tell us more about that?

Mary Ann Sieghart 19:14
Yes. So this is a phenomenon in which men just take up disproportionate conversational time. Not all men, but men on average. So for instance, there is this wonderful study that always makes me laugh, in which men and women were given two paintings by juror to look at and then given a tape recorder and asked to talk for as long as they light into the recorder about these paintings. And women talked on average for 3.14 minutes. And men talked on average for 13 minutes, in other words, four times as long but even that wasn't accurate because three of them and we're still talking when they're 30 minute cassette tapes right. So this just illustrates a phenom phenomenon that all All academic studies find that men on average talk more than women in public settings. So if you actually wire up a man and a woman for the day, and record how many words they've spoken, it's roughly the same. It's about 16,000 words. But outside the home on average, men will talk much more than women. I've got two stories are sitting next to a man at a dinner, remember them. And I have interviewed them in a very polite way. And I've asked them all about their lives, their families, their jobs, where they live, you know, right under the sort of tiniest detail of their lives, and haven't asked me a single question about myself, even though I've, you know, dropped hints into the conversation that I might have something interesting to say that absolutely nothing. So at one time this happened. And I actually lost my patience with this man, because he was so self aggrandizing. And so self obsessed, that I just smiled sweetly after about 45 minutes of this. And I said, Well, it's been fascinating hearing all about you. But I think according to conversational etiquette, now is probably the time at which you ask, What do I do? Ah, he said, What do I do? Well started started launching in UK. And then another time this happened, and I didn't actually have the nerve to say that, so I just ignored it. But I mean, I was really bristling with anger, the rudeness of it apart from anything else. And we were staying the night so we were staying with some friends. Up in Scotland. I hadn't met this man before. He didn't ask me a single question. The next day and other man in the party said to me, oh, what's it like presenting start the week, you know, on radio four. And so man number one from the night before I whipped his head around and said, Oh, do you present start the week? And I just said yes. And move back to the conversation. I thought four syllables would have elicited that from me last night at you know, what do you do? All you have to ask, and he hadn't bothered to do it. That's conversational. manspreading.

Carla Miller 22:06
Yes. Yes. Reminds me I had went to a dinner party. It was only six of us there at this dinner party, sat next to this guy all night, spoke to him. And my default is to ask lots of questions. Tonight, isn't it exactly. And then a week later, we went to his house for this giant party. And I went up to him and he was oh, it's really lovely to meet you. But he had no recollection of spoken at me. hours, and there's only six of us there. Personally, I was like, I am so unmemorable. I really have no personality. I shouldn't go out in social

Mary Ann Sieghart 22:45
situations. Well, he didn't he didn't bother to find anything out about you, did he? So

Carla Miller 22:51
it's crazy.

Mary Ann Sieghart 22:53
I tell them another story in the book about a university Vice Chancellor. So a woman who runs an entire university enormous job. And she came to dinner at an Oxford college and sat next to the man who was head of the college ie junior to her actually. And he talked about himself all the way through the first course all the way through the main course. And then said Well, enough about me and turn to the woman on the other side, has asked her a single question, I had no idea who she was.

Carla Miller 23:20
I mean, you can make a TV show out of this couldn't be

Mary Ann Sieghart 23:23
sure one exists. This is important, though. I mean, when I'm telling jokes, not quite jokes, but you know, I'm telling funny stories. But this really is important. Because so often women are penalised at work, because they don't contribute enough at meetings is what they're told by their superiors. And the problem is that we have been socialised from a very young age to talk less than boys and men. And I had some, you know, some really quite horrifying findings that I came across about what happens in schools. So teachers, on average, are eight times more likely to ask a boy to answer a question to call on a boy to answer a question than a girl. Boys are much more likely to shout out answers, and teachers will accept them. Whereas if a girl shouts out an answer, she's told to put your hand up if you want to speak, boys are much more likely to put their hand up before they even know the answer. And girls will wait and then it's too late. And basically, girls get rewarded for being quiet and well behaved. And boys get rewarded for speaking up. And I think what this what this imbues in these boys is a sort of sense of entitlement, disproportionate conversational time. And you see it all the way through school. You see it in academic seminars at universities. You see it at conferences, you see it in Q and A's. You see it in Parliament's and local councils. There's an anecdote I tell in the book about a Canadian mayor who took her knitting to cancel meetings. She had two balls of wool, one red and one green. And she knitted in red when a man was speaking and then moved to green as soon as a woman started speaking and of course, you can actually look at it Online, you can imagine what the result was like, almost entirely read. But the problem is that men are allowed to speak a lot in meetings and women aren't. So first of all, we have very skewed perceptions of men and women speaking. So one study had a scripted conversation in which both parties talked for exactly the same amount of time. And when it was two men talking together, people perceive them to have talked 5050. And when it was two women, people perceive them to have taught 5050. But when it was a man and a woman, they thought that the woman had dominated the conversation. Because so we'd have a skewed perception in the first place. We think that women are talking too much, I'm using air quotes, because it's not actually too much when they're not when they're just talking the right amount of time, we think they've talked too much. And we then actually penalise them if we think they have talked too much. So another study took two fictional CEOs, they said that the CEO talked more than other people, which you would expect the CEO to do. When that CEO was given the name John, people who were studying him gave him much higher competence and leadership ratings, if they were told that he taught more than other people. If she was called Jennifer, her leadership and competence ratings shot down. And it was only if she taught less than other people, that people rated her more highly again. And so we know we just knows instinctively, don't we? I mean, you often hear a woman saying, Oh, God, did I talk too much, even though I'm slightly feeling I've got some voice in the back of my head, you're talking too much, even though I'm supposed to be talking to you. You know, we have this sort of ingrained in our psyche that mustn't talk too much. You hardly ever hear a man say, Oh, God, did I talk too much? When you

Carla Miller 26:47
were talking about at school? And how teachers are treating people? And obviously, that's unconscious. But what's driving that? Is it that they are? I guess it's hard to know, what is unconsciously driving them? Or what what do you think is unconsciously driving them to treat boys and girls differently? I

Mary Ann Sieghart 27:05
think it's partly because boys tend to be more disruptive than girls. And so quite often, it's a way of drawing a boy back into the lesson, you know, if he's chatting with his neighbour, you know, Johnny, you tell me the answer to this, it's quite a good way of of stopping them being disruptive. And it's also because boys push themselves forward much more than girls do. And they tend to react to whoever's got their hand up. And so good practice would say that you don't even ask for a show of hands. You just, you know, call on on pupils and try and have an equal balance of genders for answers. Another one is to wait at least three or four beats before you ask them to put their hands up so that girls can formulate their answer in their head, and then put their hand up because boys are much more likely to put their hand up before they've even thought of the answer. You know, there are things that you can do to mitigate this bias.

Carla Miller 27:55
Interesting, and when you talk about that makes me think about introverts and extroverts. Because I wonder how that maps I've never looked to see how that maps onto men and women. I wonder if more women are introverts and extroverts we've just society has just trained us to be a lot quieter.

Mary Ann Sieghart 28:14
I don't know the answer to that. I don't know if any studies have been done on that. But you know, I know that women are twice as likely as men to suffer from imposter syndrome. And, you know, it's not surprising that women speak out less given the way that they get treated in meetings, if you're much more likely to be interrupted or talk to over if when you say something, people challenge it even though you know that you're right. If when you make a point, no one takes any notice, you know, you are going to start thinking well, I'm really what's the point in speaking up here. So we are really swimming against the current. Exactly. And

Carla Miller 28:48
I think that's where that's where I focus. My time is on that where women have internalised that gender bias and made it means something about them and that imposter syndrome or I call it impostor feelings side of things. It was in jail witty Collins book why men when at work, she's I think it's perfect. She shares a statistic about how when women start in the workplace, they have the same ambition to be chief exec as men do, in fact, even slightly more so. But two years in, that has completely changed if it only takes two years in the workplace, to establish this isn't a place where you can thrive.

Mary Ann Sieghart 29:26
Isn't it? So sad? It's my daughter, who's an architect went to do her first trainee year two big London practice. And on their first day, they were given this sort of very glossy brochure with pictures of all the partners in the practice, and pictures and contact details of their pas. And she brought it back and she said, Look, man, just look at this. All the partners were men, all the PAs are women.

Carla Miller 29:52
Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, if you had asked me how long I worked for maybe 25 years In the workplace, if you'd asked me 15 years ago, I would have thought if my journey if my career had been harder, because I was a woman, I would have thought of like three tangible examples. But other than that, I would have thought, well, actually, you know, my dad brought me up to think i equal to any man and I can do whatever I want. And I think lots of us are like that lots of us think of ourselves as empowered women. It's really only this last decade, where feminism has come back again. And when we started to really realise what we're up against, I think your book has been so important, and like to say really well timed, as well, for us to open up to that. One of the things you touch on in your book is around women having this unconscious bias as well, I'd be really keen to explore that. And also, are women helping other women? I know within my community they are but generally, are women supportive of others? Or is there a sense of I'm at the top now, and I've got to protect this because this area is scarce up here for women?

Mary Ann Sieghart 31:02
Yes, it's a really good question. So on tests of implicit bias, there's a thing called the Implicit Association Test, which was drawn up by some Harvard psychologists, and it has its critics, but what it does at least do is measure how quickly and how accurately you can associate male and female words with office and home words. And it's much easier, frankly, you're going to be quicker and more accurate with mother an ironing board than daughter and board table. You know, it's, it's like when you're trying to sort a pack of cards. Suppose you're asked to sort them into spades and clubs on one side, and hearts and diamonds on the other. That's really easy. It's just black against Red. But if it's hearts and spades and diamonds and clubs, is just going to take you longer, and you'll probably make mistakes. So this is what the implicit association test does. And it shows that women are every bit as biassed as men are. And in fact, quite a few of the academic studies that I cite, show that women are as biassed as men, not all of them, but some of them. So for instance, in one of them, the researchers sent an application for a lab manager position with a CV and an accompanying letter to science professors at big US universities. And it was identical materials, and they just randomly assigned a male or a female name to them. And the so called male candidate was deemed significantly more competent, more hireable was offered a higher starting salary. And the professors are more interested in mentoring him, I say sort of him in air quotes. And that was both male and female science professors. So why does this happen? Well, because we've all grown up in the same world, it seems irrational, why would you be biassed against your own gender. But we've all grown up in a world in which men have been in charge and a still basically in charge, you know, three times as many men as women in the cabinet, 90 out of 100 of the footsie 100 companies are run by men, you know, it's so basically a man's world. And we've probably grown up in families in which our father and more than our mother maybe worked more than our mother and maybe had more authority at home than our mother. So that's what's been ingrained in our unconscious brains. So, in fact, I made a radio programme about women's bias against women for radio four. And I said, Imagine a hijacker has burst into the cockpit of a plane and attack the pilots. Now, how are you picturing the pilot? I bet you're thinking of a white middle aged man. And a woman tweeted, driving home in uniform. I was listening to this radio programme. And yes, I pictured a white middle aged man despite being a female pilot, which just shows how ingrained this unconscious bias is. I mean, I know I suffer from it. And I've written a whole book bemoaning it. So, you know, I might hear perhaps a young woman being interviewed on the radio, and maybe she has quite a high voice and sounds a bit childish in the way that men can't, because their voices break. And My instant reaction will sometimes be, Oh, I wonder if she knows what she's talking about. And then I'll go No, stop it. Listen to the content of what she's saying. Don't judge her by the pitch of her voice. So what we have to do is to recognise this unconscious bias when it becomes conscious when it manifests itself and then correct for it. And that's what I'm asking everyone to do in this book. But as for the queen bee syndrome, which you then talked about to ask about, you know, do women help other women, some women help other women, and I think more women now than in the past are helping other women and being systole, which I think is fantastic. We should all be helping each other because on the whole the men aren't going to be they will be helping each other so we have to compensate for that. I think in the generation above me there will probably be more queen bees as it's now Did you know women who actively didn't want to help other women, and it was in some senses a rational response to the situation they found themselves in, because quite often, they were the only woman at their level surrounded by men. And they knew that there was room for only one woman there. And therefore, for more junior woman was sort of making her way up, the chances were that she would replace the existing woman, this is not what happens to men. And therefore, you know, the existing woman wasn't going to reach down and and offer her a leg up. I think that happens much less now. And in fact, there was one interesting study done, I think, by Credit Suisse, of companies run by women companies with female CEOs to see whether they had more or fewer women at the level below. Because if these CEOs were queen bees, they wouldn't be helping other women up the ladder, actually, they found they were twice as likely to have women as CFO or COO, if they had a female CEO. So that suggests that women on average, are being sisterly rather than queen bee ish.

Carla Miller 36:05
That's good to hear. Definitely happens with the women that I know. And also, I guess, one of the ways we change things is by getting more women in senior positions. One of your chapters is on how we can narrow the authority gap in one generation, which seems like a big goal. How, how do we do that?

Mary Ann Sieghart 36:25
I don't say we can actually abolish it in one generation. But we can narrow it down to the other day, there are 140 ways that I've suggested, we can narrow it. Because I talk about, you know, what we can do as individuals, as parents, as partners, as colleagues, as employers, what teachers can do, what the media can do, what government can do, you know, there are so many different areas of life in which we can do things to improve this. And the reason there are so many suggestions is that each instance of authority gap behaviour may seem quite trivial at the time. I mean, it's very annoying if you get interrupted in a meeting, but it's not career ending. But they accumulate, they sort of roll up like compound interest over the course of a lifetime, to create this huge gap in opportunity and achievement between women and men. But because each one is small, each solution is also going to be small. And it's going to be things like, check if you're listening as attentively to women as to men. Notice, if you're interrupting women more than men and try and stop doing it, you know, it's little things like that, as an individual. If you walk up to a man and a woman standing together, do you automatically address the man first about you? Do? You know that's the sort of thing you can change? Are you reading as many books by women as by men? If not, you can start doing that. Are you following as many women on Twitter as you are men, if not, you can start doing that. So there are lots of little things we can easily do. And I also have a lot of suggestions for employers ticularly in HR. So things like having any one woman on a selection panel actually reduces the chance of a woman being hired for the job, doesn't increase it, it actively reduces it. Because what happens is that the men think, Oh, we don't have to worry about this diversity business, the woman can take care of that. And the woman thinks I'd better not recommend the female candidate because the men will think I'm just being nepotistic, and then she doesn't get hired. So there are a lot of there's lots of research backed ideas like that. But fundamentally, I think there are two things we have to recognise. First of all, that however, liberal or enlightened or intelligent or even female we are, we probably do harbour this unconscious bias against women. And we can't put a lid on it. We needn't feel ashamed about it. It's not our fault. It's not deliberate. It's called unconscious for a reason. But we can notice when it manifests itself, and then do something about it, as I've just suggested. And I think the other big message I would draw is that we should never mistake confidence for competence, because it absolutely aren't the same thing. And so often, a man will be hired or promoted on the basis of his outward confidence, and not his underlying competence. And in fact, that book you mentioned, is all about this. Why does so many mediocre men reached the top? It's because they've been hard on their confidence, not their competence.

Carla Miller 39:25
Do you think that that makes an argument that we need to be more confident? Or is that we talked earlier about is that, are we being gaslit? Basically thinking we need to change our behaviour. It's

Mary Ann Sieghart 39:39
so difficult this I mean, it will be so easy if all we had to do was be more confident and immediately people would start treating us as respectfully as they treat other men. I wish it were that simple. If it were I wouldn't even have had to write this book. If it were just a question of leaning in more or sending us on assertiveness training courses. I wouldn't have to write this book. Try Chick fil A it's not because it is complicated by our unconscious bias based on very, very old fashioned stereotypes. So, what happens is, if a woman isn't confident enough, she'll be disrespected, and she won't be taken seriously. But if she does start behaving as confidently and as assertively as her male colleagues will often dislike her and resist her, and will start using words like ooh, she's quite abrasive, isn't she or she's strident or aggressive or bossy, overbearing, stern, controlling, bitchy bull braking. You know, you've heard all these words and never used about men showing exactly the same character traits. Why? Because the traits that we expect in men, the masculine traits are what social psychologists call agentic traits. That means being confident and in charge and assertive and showing leadership. The stereotypes, traits that we expect in women are to be warm and gentle and nurturing, unassertive and self promoting uncompetitive. unthreatening trouble is if you behave like that, in today's workplace, no one will take a blind bit of notice of you, you won't get anywhere. But if you start behaving in the so called masculine way, people recoil because you're going against stereotype. So you're either under confident and disrespected or confident enough and disliked. How do you find a way through that it is possible, you'll be glad to hear before you slit your wrists. It's not great as a solution because it may be inauthentic. But what you have to do both what the evidence suggests and also I interviewed about 50, really senior women for this book, you know, former presidents and prime ministers and Supreme Court justices, and that sort of thing. And they all agreed that what they try to exert is warm authority. So you have to overlay this enormous sort of layer of warrants onto your personality in order to mitigate the hostility that you would otherwise attract by being as confident as the man. So you know, we ended up smiling more, you know, here I am talking to you on Zoom, I can see myself smiling, is it we smile more, we use humour to try to live in the situation, we have to read the room incredibly carefully be very emotionally intelligent. Try not to tread on any men's toes, which is exhausting. And some women aren't very good at it, and why should they be? And and it's a burden that men absolutely don't have to bear. And I hate to having to recommend this. Because as I say, you know, it's an authentic and why should we have to do it? And why can't we just be ourselves, but I like to think it's just a sort of transitional tactic. Until people find it less in Congress to see women in positions of authority. We're going to have to do it, I'm afraid.

Carla Miller 42:56
I think it is. I mean, so I teach people a lot of that. And I've never called it warmth, I've just, that's the way that I learned to navigate things. And but it is what it's, you know, when you're claiming your authority, you're doing so with warmth, like you say, your your firm, but you're fair, like, you cannot act like a man and be taken. Thank you. So you are judged very harshly for that. So yeah, I think I wouldn't have called it once. And I'd like to think, for me, it was discovering that inner warmth, rather than faking it. But if no one teaches you it, then it's really, really hard to navigate, isn't it? And you do end up just thinking there's something wrong with me or going off and doing your own thing.

Mary Ann Sieghart 43:40
For me it feels quite authentic, because I think I'm probably quite a warm person anyway. So. So I didn't feel like I'm faking it, but telling other people to do it. They may feel it's quite fake. But yeah, if you think about it, you know, for male CEOs described as tough. People admire him for it. If a female CEO is described as tough, she's a bitch.

Carla Miller 43:59
Yeah, absolutely. I, when I gave a speech recently to it, I was running a workshop for a group of 20 women, and they were all relatively young. They were all sort of in their 20s, maybe early 30s. And their response was anger. Like, oh, yeah, like, if someone had just put this in front of me, I would have been angry too. I think it's just that my entire life. This is what it's looked like. And it's just the norm. I was I grew up in the 80s. It was still very sexist environment then. So this is progress. But yeah, do you do you see people reacting? Do you see women reacting with anger when they Yeah,

Mary Ann Sieghart 44:39
I see young women in particular, acting angrily and saying, Why should I have to do that? And I say, Look, I'm really sorry. Don't do it if you like, but you will be held back if you don't. So all I'm telling you is the world is as it is, at the moment. I'm trying to change it. We're all trying to change it. The more awareness we can spread of this sort of thing, the more we'll be able to change it but The way the world is today that probably is the way you have to act.

Carla Miller 45:02
Yeah. And obviously women are not a homogenous group intersectionality is also now finally on the radar, as well, did you uncover evidence that showed that it is much harder for women of colour? Yes,

Mary Ann Sieghart 45:18
I did. So basically, the farther away you are from the white male middle class default, the wider the authority gap is. So women in general are twice as likely as men to say that they have to provide evidence of their competence, and much more likely than men to say that people are surprised at their abilities. Black women are twice as likely as white women to say both those things. So it's wider still for women of colour. And then of course, you have two other problems for women of colour. One is that suppose you have this brilliant black woman who gets promoted to a senior job. People will say, Oh, she was just a diversity hire. You know, she didn't deserve it, however good she is. And of course, this happens to women in general. You know, I get I get a board directorship. A man actually said to me the other day, Oh, do you think that was because you're a woman? And I said, I bet you got yours because you were a man. But anyway, it happens to women in general, but it happens much more to women of colour. And then of course, you get the racial stereotypes overlaid onto the gender stereotypes. So suppose a woman of colour, a black woman gets interrupted at a meeting and stands up for herself and says, Let me finish please, suddenly, she becomes the angry black woman. You know, so it is much harder. If you're a woman of colour, if you're working class, it's harder. If you're disabled, it's much harder. I think the authority gap is wider support for women with disabilities.

Carla Miller 46:46
Interesting, and I wonder if that's the same on the male side? Yes. In terms of disability,

Mary Ann Sieghart 46:51
I should think so. Sorry. I say yes, I'm imagining so I haven't I haven't seen the evidence. But I should imagine. So yes. Or

Carla Miller 46:57
no, I think was on Instagram. Recently, I saw someone where they'd said, oh, yeah, you're You're quick to say that's a diversity hire. How about every time a man named John gets the job? We say that's a normality hire.

Mary Ann Sieghart 47:10
Be great. Yes.

Carla Miller 47:15
Well, um, so we could talk all day. But let's finish off by exploring what could men gain by closing or narrowing the authority gap. But

Mary Ann Sieghart 47:25
this was the most cheering research that I came across, in in researching the book, I think, because I had slightly assumed that we would have to ask men to be altruistic, you know, unselfish, helping ourselves of fairness and a sense of justice, and that they would lose out as we gained as if we're on a seesaw. But actually, what I've discovered is gender equality isn't a zero sum game in which as one rises, the other falls, it's actually a positive sum game, which I think is incredibly cheering. So what the evidence shows is that both in more gender equal countries, you know, like Scandinavian countries, Northern Europe, in general, and in more gender, equal relationships, straight relationships, that is in which the man and the woman, share the chores equally, and share the childcare equally. Not only are the women happier and healthier, which you would expect, and the children are happier and healthier, and they do better at school, and they have fewer behavioural difficulties. And the girls are more ambitious for themselves and the boys are less likely to be violent. All this is wonderful. But the men themselves are happier and healthier. So they are twice as likely to say they're satisfied with their lives, half as likely to be depressed, much less likely to get divorced. And they tend to drink less, to smoke less, to take fewer drugs to get more sleep at night. And here is the absolute clincher. They get more frequent and better sex. So guys, this is really in your interest

Carla Miller 48:56
to we will leave it on that point, I think. Well, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. Marianne, we will make sure that in the show notes, we link to your Instagram and website and Twitter, and also the programmes that you mentioned, that you think will be really relevant to our listeners as well. It's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. Thank you