Hello and welcome to The Spectator Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for The Spectator.

This week, I'm delighted to be joined by Mary Ann Seekhart, who has been an assistant editor of the Times,

is the chair of the Social Market Foundation, a very long time, journalist and commentator on political matters and many others.

And her new book is called The Authority Gap,

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

Maryam, welcome.

What do you mean by the authority gap?

Because you talk about authority in more than one sense,

don't you? Yes, I talk about authority in terms of expertise, being an authority on a subject,

but also authority in terms of power, having authority over other people. And women in both sorts

of authority find it harder to be accepted and taken seriously than men do.

I mean, you yourself, as I sketched only a couple of your many accomplishments at the beginning of this.

You know, you're a person who is in considerable authority as a woman.

What's your experience been of the authority gap in your own life in reaching

the distinctions you met? Well, this book really isn't about me. It's about all women. I do put the

odd anecdote in, but you know, I was lucky enough to be accorded public authority by the Times

as a colonist and a senior editor. So that made life much

easier for me and I acknowledge that. But even so, I've still had experiences of having my authority

either undermined or questioned or challenged. I mean, I give an example, for instance, in the book,

I was at a conference and I was standing with two other

male delegates and one was a former head of the foreign office and another was a BBC foreign

correspondent. So they knew far more about foreign affairs than I did. But I was the UK political

...