Mary Ann Sieghart in conversation with Dena McCallum
A study of proceedings at the US Supreme Court found that female justices were interrupted three times as often as the men were, and 96% of the time the interruptions were made by men. When even the highest court in the most powerful nation on earth is home to this kind of behaviour, it suggests that women may indeed face a challenge being recognised and taken as seriously at work as their male colleagues are.
This was one example of several offered by the author, consultant and journalist Mary Ann Sieghart in a fascinating discussion of the phenomenon she calls “the authority gap”. What is this phenomenon? “The authority gap is a measure of how much less seriously we take women than men,” Sieghart explained. “We assume that 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.”