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Book Summary and Reviews of The Authority Gap by Mary Ann Sieghart

The Authority Gap by Mary Ann Sieghart

The Authority Gap

Why Women Are Still Taken Less Seriously Than Men, and What We Can Do About It

by Mary Ann Sieghart

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  • Published:
  • Feb 2022, 384 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

An incisive, intersectional look at the mother of all gender biases: a resistance to women's authority and power.

Every woman has a story of being underestimated, ignored, challenged, or patronized in the workplace. Maybe she tried to speak up in a meeting, only to be talked over by male colleagues. Or a client addressed her male subordinate instead of her. Despite the progress we've made toward equality, we still fail, more often than we might realize, to take women as seriously as men.

In The Authority Gap, journalist Mary Ann Sieghart examines the wide-ranging implications of this critical gender bias. She explores its intersections with race and class biases and the measures we can take to bridge the gap. With precision and insight, she marshals a wealth of data from a variety of disciplines―including psychology, sociology, politics, and business―and interviews pioneering women like Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo and Janet Yellen. The Authority Gap offers ... "a credible roadmap that is capable of taking women from the margins to the center" (Mary McAleese, former president of Ireland).

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"[T]he author conducts interviews with women who work in fields like academia and politics, which work as case studies of experiences of gender bias...Sieghart takes particular care to interview trans men and women about their experiences and how they were treated at work after transitioning...A practical book about gender bias and how to alleviate it. Highly recommended." - Library Journal (starred review)

"[A] cogent analysis of the ways in which women are denied the respect and authority given to men...Skillfully interweaving psychology, sociology, politics, and pop culture, this a persuasive introduction to the problem of gender bias." - Publishers Weekly

"An important and hopeful reminder that much work is still needed in order to bridge unjust gaps between women and men." - Kirkus Reviews

This information about The Authority Gap was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Mary Ann Sieghart

Mary Ann Sieghart is a London-based journalist and broadcaster who has worked for the Times, the Independent, the Economist, the Financial Times, and the BBC. She researched this book as a Visiting Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford.

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