Greetings, Comes Now readers. Last week we discussed a chapter about confidence from Mary Ann Sieghart’s The Authority Gap: Why Women Are Still Taken Less Seriously Than Men, and What We Can Do About It. This week I want to talk about a few additional observations from the book, and then turn to the “What We Can Do About It” section of the book and talk about what might make a difference for women lawyers.

More Things That Contribute to The Authority Gap

The Authority Gap gets into many more behaviors that contribute to the authority gap, including:

• Conversational manspreading (What a great phrase!) - “taking up too much conversational space at the expense of people around you.” I’m quite confident that all of us have experienced what Sieghart describes.

• How—in journalism, literature, or politics—neither men nor women think of women when asked to identify leaders in their subject areas. If you’re a woman, you’ve probably read many books written by men. But if you’re a man, when was the last time you read a book written by a woman?

• How—on TV or radio—we rarely see women presented as experts on news shows. Or how in the movies women are rarely given leading roles and, if they are, they are cast only as supportive wives or murder victims.

• How, as a society, we demonize women in power. As Deborah Cameron is quoted as saying in the book, “The problem isn’t that women who run for high office have particularly unattractive personalities, it’s that we don’t tend to like women who run for high office.” p.211. The book also discusses how a minority of men try to silence women—particularly on the Internet—with sexually violent threats and language.

• How the authority gap is multiplied for women of color. Sieghart quotes research showing that, while black, Asian and white women with “impeccable qualifications” may be hired or promoted at rates comparable to those of white men, when their record is “anything short of perfect,” they fall victim to discrimination. Similar things happen with LGBTQ women and women of virtually any other differentiated status.

• How women are constantly judged based on their appearance, but at the same time will be discounted if they are beautiful.

Chapter 9, called Women do it too, makes clear that, as women, we often contribute to the authority gap ourselves. Because we’ve discussed the issue of internalized misogyny several times recently, I won’t go into that chapter at length here. I will say this particular passage spoke to me:

While you may think this issue—and the book—is directed to men, it is absolutely written for women as well. We must find value in our own voices before we can expect others to hear them too.

What We Can Do About It

I was admittedly a bit disheartened by the overwhelming evidence of the authority gap that Sieghart presents. Likely anticipating this response, the Authority Gap concludes with 28 pages of suggestions about things we can do to narrow the authority gap, and provides specific examples aimed at us as individuals, partners, parents and colleagues, and then suggests additional acts that can be taken by employers, teachers, the media, governments, and the rest of society. Given the obvious care Sieghart took in preparing this chapter, there’s no way I could fairly summarize or otherwise do justice to her recommendations.

But there were some that stood out to me as particularly relevant to women lawyers that I think are worth discussing here. I’ve focused on recommendations relevant to the workplace.

Check Ourselves and Ask Good Questions

Particularly because we contribute to the authority gap too, if you are a woman, the next time you have a negative reaction to a woman, notice it and ask yourself why. The other day I was listening to a show on public radio and changed the station when another woman’s voice came on. I stopped myself, changed it back, and listened. I realized that there wasn’t anything inherently discordant about the woman’s voice; instead, I just wasn’t used to listening to voices like hers. Within ten minutes I hardly noticed what I had initially thought was jarring. Because our knee-jerk reactions can have such cascading consequences in the workplace, it’s particularly important that we check ourselves there.

Hire Women!

Virtually all types of the authority gap are reduced in places where there are more women. So yes, while we can and should hire more women lawyers to work with us, it doesn’t end there.

In the world of litigation, for example, we should hire more women e-discovery advisors, more women expert witnesses, more women jury consultants, more women mediators, and more women special masters. We know from reading The Authority Gap—and in my case from practicing law for over 25 years—that these women exist. We just tend to default to the white men traditionally hired. Buck the trend. Hire a woman.

Use Objective and Specific Descriptions to Evaluate Candidates and Employees

As Sieghart explains, “evaluations of women tend to be shorter, less positive, vaguer and dwell more on their personality than their achievements.” One way to eliminate this bias in performance evaluations and after job interviews is to write down a candidate’s positive and negative traits and then compare those with a job description. During interviews, ask men and women the same questions.

Similarly, when writing letters of recommendation, make sure to use the same adjectives to describe a woman as you would a man. Sieghart explains that while people tend to write about men’s accomplishments and achievements, they describe women as “hard-working,” “conscientious,” and “diligent.”

Even job advertisements can reflect gender bias. Take out words like “ambitious,” “competitive,” or “assertive”—which are code for wanting a man—and keep the description of what you need specific and objective (“5 or more years’ experience of drafting contracts in the entertainment industry”).

Track Representation Goals Over Time

Finally, as we all know, we track things we care about. Rather than just patting ourselves on the back for doing a good job when it comes to gender equity, maintain meticulous data to ensure that your workplace is, in fact, walking the walk. “Data serves as an essential reality check on one’s gut instincts, countering overconfidence, sustaining motivation and encouraging goal pursuit.” p.183-4.

As an example, in chapter 10 Sieghart talks about The Equality Project started by Ros Atkins, a male journalist at the BBC, which tracked the number of men and women the BBC can control (e.g., reporters, analysts, experts, and any other invited guests) across its content, with the aim of reaching 50% women across all genres of reporting. (The women the BBC invites on air must be as qualified as the men.) Unsurprisingly, within two years of initiating the Project, two-thirds of BBC teams had achieved a 50:50 ratio.

Closing Thoughts

While of course I didn’t expect simple solutions, I was admittedly overwhelmed by the 28-pages of suggestions offered at the end of the book. It was difficult to process the enormous expanse of the authority gap and then think that there are so many things we need to improve to make it better.

But as I thought about it, it all goes back to the quotation from Malala Yousafzai at the beginning of this article. If even a small number of people in influential positions adopt a few of Sieghart’s suggestions, the authority gap will slowly begin to close. Indeed, there’s apparently a trend on TikTok of documenting acts of “microfeminism”—small acts that, when done by many people, can begin to make a difference. I think that’s the spirit in which the gigantic list at the end of The Authority Gap should be taken. It’s a menu, not a checklist.

It’s valuable work. We not only want women lawyers to feel more confident and powerful in the workplace, but if women are taken as seriously as men, things that matter to women will be taken seriously as well. As Sieghart writes:

Let’s get to it.

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