Topic: Why are women still taken less

seriously than men?

ENGLISH VIETNAMESE
At a conference a few years ago, Tại một buổi hội nghị vào khoảng mấy năm
a man asked me what I did. về trước, một người đàn ông đã hỏi tôi đã
And I led a portfolio life, làm gì. Và tôi đã có một cuộc sống danh
so I just rattled off a list and I said, mục đầu tư
“Well, I write a political column for ‘The
Independent’ newspaper.
I make radio programs for the BBC.
I chair a think tank.
I sit on a couple of commercial boards.
I’m on the council of Tate Modern,
and I am on the content board of Ofcom,
our broadcasting regulator.

To which he replied, "Wow, you're a busy little

girl."

I was about 50, older than our Prime Minister.

This is a classic example of what I call the

“authority gap,”
the way we still take women less seriously than
men.
We're still more reluctant to accord authority to
women.
We still assume a man knows what he's talking
about
until he proves otherwise.
While for a woman, it's all too often the other way
round.
Research shows that men have six times more
influence in group discussions
than women.
Women are twice as likely as men
to say they have to provide evidence of their
competence,
or that people are surprised at their abilities.
And women of color are much more likely than
white women to say this.
If you're working-class or disabled, the gap gets
bigger still.
Basically, the farther we are from the white, male,
middle class default,
the wider the authority gap is.

I bet every woman listening has a tale to tell

about being underestimated,
ignored, patronized,
interrupted or talked over,
challenged or mistaken for someone more junior,
right?
In fact, it doesn't matter if you are a president of a
country,
the CEO of a huge corporation
or a justice of the US Supreme Court.
Female justices get interrupted three times more
than male ones,
96 percent of the time by men.
If you still need proof though,
a great test is to talk to people who’ve lived as
both a man and a woman.
Because they’re exactly the same person with the
same ability, intelligence,
personality, experience.
And if they're treated quite differently after they
transition,
that must be because of their gender.
As scientists would say,
we've controlled for all the other variables
and isolated the only one that matters:
whether they're seen as male or female.

While I was researching the authority gap,

I came across two Stanford science professors
who happened to transition at the same time in
different directions.
Ben Barres, who was a neuroscientist,
was astonished by the difference it made to his
life
once he started living as a man.
"I've had the thought a million times," he said.
"I'm taken more seriously."
An academic who didn't know his history,
was overheard after one of his seminars saying,
"Oh, Ben Barris gave a great seminar today.
But then his work's much better than his sister's."
Right?
Meanwhile, Joan Roughgarden, who is an
evolutionary biologist,
told me that when she was still living as a man,
she felt like she was on this conveyor belt to
success.
Her pay kept going up,
she kept getting promoted,
when she spoke, people listened.
Once she started living as a woman,
all that changed.
So she was interrupted, she was challenged,
she was personally attacked.
She'd make a point and no one took any notice
until a man repeated it.
"At first," she said, "I was amused.
I thought, well, if women are discriminated
against,
I'm darn well going to be discriminated against
the same way."

And then she said,

"Well, the thrill of that has worn off, I can tell
you."
Her conclusion, like mine,
was that men are assumed to be competent until
they prove otherwise.
Women are assumed to be incompetent until they
prove otherwise.

Obviously I’d like to do something about this,

but what’s in it for men?
Well, one of the most encouraging things I found
while researching the authority gap
was that narrowing the gap isn't like a seesaw,
in which as women rise, men just automatically
fall.
I mean, there might be the odd occasion when,
if you're a man in direct competition with a
woman
and the bias against her is dissolved,
she might just beat you on merit.
But in almost every aspect of your life,
greater gender equality is likely to make you
happier, healthier
and more satisfied.
There's been some fascinating academic research
showing that both in more gender-equal countries
and US states
and in more equal straight relationships,
not only are the women happier and healthier,
which you'd expect, less resentful, less exhausted,
they feel more part of a team.
And the children are happier and healthier.
They do better at school,
they get on much better with their dads,
they have fewer behavioral difficulties.
But more surprisingly, perhaps,
the men themselves are happier and healthier.
So they're twice is likely to say they're satisfied
with their lives,
half as likely to be depressed.
They tend to smoke less, drink less,
sleep better, take fewer drugs.
And here's the absolute clincher:
they get more frequent and better sex.
05:55
(Laughter)
06:00
So if it's in all our interests,
what can we do to close the authority gap?
Well, I counted the other day,
I've come up with 140 solutions.
06:11
(Laughter)
06:13
You'll be glad to hear I'm not going to share them
all with you today,
but I'm just going to leave you with a few ideas to
take away.
06:21
I’m always asked, “OK, so what should women
do?”
But it's not women we need to fix, right?
It's how we all perceive and react to and interact
with women.
We need to make changes to ourselves, to our
workplaces
and to the world around us.
Even women are biased against other women.
A few years ago in Britain,
we had a female leader of a political party
who had a high voice and sounded almost
childish.
And when she came on the radio,
I'd find it quite hard to take her seriously.
But as soon as I had that reflex reaction, I'd say to
myself, stop it!
Listen to the content of what she's saying,
and don't judge her by the pitch of her voice.
We all need to notice when our brains are trying
to trick us like that.
07:18
It can also help to flip things around.
To ask ourselves, would I have thought that or
said that or done that
if this person had been a man rather than a
woman?
Would I have mistaken that male CEO for his
assistant?
Or would I have called a 50-year-old man “a busy
little boy?”
I don't think so.
When we're at work, we can actively affirm what
a woman says,
as long as it's interesting.
Research shows that even if women make up 40
percent of a group,
they're half as likely as men to gain approval from
it
and much more likely to be interrupted.
If Evie makes a point at a meeting,
and no one takes a blind bit of notice until Peter
repeats it ten minutes later
and it's treated like the Second Coming,
we can say to Peter, "Oh, I'm so glad you agree
with what Evie said earlier."
If Peter interrupts Rosa --
08:17
(Applause)
08:22
If Peter interrupts Rosa, we can say, "Hang on a
minute.
I was really interested in what Rosa was saying
there."
08:29
And what can employers do?
Well, the first thing they must do
is to make sure that they genuinely are hiring and
promoting on merit.
One study found that 70 percent of men
will rate a man more highly than a woman
for achieving exactly the same goals.
Women with exactly the same qualifications as
men
are 30 percent less likely to be called for a job
interview.
If you have only one woman on a shortlist,
the chances of appointing her are vanishingly
small.
Because it's telling us that men are the natural
holders of this job,
and that appointing a woman would be risky.
Adding just one more woman to the shortlist
makes the odds of hiring a woman 79 times
greater.
09:19
Companies or employers can also actively
encourage talented women
to apply for promotion.
Because we are socialized to be less confident
and less self-promoting than men.
And if we do act confidently,
people often don't like it
and they start calling us words like “strident” or
“pushy.”
I was caricatured for years in Britain's satirical
"Private Eye" magazine
as Mary Ann Bighead.
Just because I tried to seem as confident
as my male colleagues.
And that's why it's really important not to fall for
the confidence trick,
to mistake confidence for competence,
because they're absolutely not the same thing.
10:05
(Applause)
10:10
An academic paper, unusually entitled
"Bullshitters. Who Are They and What Do We
Know about Their Lives"
found that teenage boys are significantly more
likely than girls
to pretend to understand mathematical concepts
that didn't even exist.
10:28
(Laughter)
10:31
And this relative male overconfidence persists
into adulthood.
So if we take overconfident men at their word,
we're going to be much more likely to hire or
promote them,
even if they're nothing like as competent as their
female rivals.
10:48
Now representation matters everywhere.
But one place that could really make a dent in the
authority gap
is the media.
Because if it's sending us the signal that men are
more authoritative,
more expert, more important than women,
that's just going to confirm our biases.
At the moment, men are three times more likely
to be quoted in news stories than women,
and twice as likely to be the protagonists in
movies.
The BBC has recently made a push
to have 50 percent female experts on air.
And I think that could make a real difference to
the next generation.
11:30
(Applause)
11:34
Because once we get used to seeing women as
authorities in public,
we're going to find it much easier to accord them
equal authority
in our daily lives.
11:45
So let's work together to close the authority gap.
We’ll all be happier and healthier.
We’ll get more sex.
11:54
(Laughter)
11:56
And the world will be a better place.
As Mary McAleese, the former president of
Ireland,
put it to me so eloquently:
"If men don't take women equally seriously,
then we end up with this world that flies on one
wing."
And that's our world flapping about rather sadly,
because of the refusal to use the elevation
and the direction and the confidence
that comes from flying on two wings.
We have to understand that when women flourish
and their talents and their creativity flourish,
then the world flourishes and men flourish.
We all flourish.