Your Daughter is Gifted

Sadly though, your daughter may have a gap - between her dreams and reaching her full potential. A dream gap…. A precursor perhaps to the authority and wage gaps.

The dream gap is ‘a thing’ - this link "dream gap" paints a compelling picture about what it is.

With no thanks to the weight of history, entrenched conscious and unconscious bias, the gap between your daughter's dreams and her potential gets filled, during her early childhood years and beyond, with being ignored, patronised, under-estimated, and not being taken seriously. For most this gap will be something she will battle right through her adult life. Let me give you an example.

“Some years ago, Mary Ann Sieghart found herself at a dinner seated next to a banker, who asked what she did. She listed her impressive portfolio career – political columnist, former associate editor of the Times, broadcaster, chair of a think tank.

?“Wow, you’re a busy little girl!” he responded"………..She was 50 years old.

This is one of numerous depressing examples relayed by successful women of what Seighart calls “the authority gap” – the way women are belittled, undermined, questioned, mocked, talked over and generally not taken seriously in public and professional life.

I recently rewatched Sieghart’s TED Talk on ‘the authority gap’. It’s insightful and impactful. Here’s a link: https://shorturl.at/gzKMU

Spoiler Alert the TED Talk ends with ‘when women flourish we all flourish’. I think I’ll write about that in June.

Sieghart’s research (and her book) ‘The Authority Gap: Why Women Are Still Taken Less Seriously Than Men, and What We Can Do About It’ tackles the ‘pervasive underestimation of women’s competence’.

Sieghart’s field of inquiry is broad: she examines the rise of online abuse as a means of silencing women; the media’s double standards in beauty and ageing that mean older women are quietly shunted out of the public eye as their expertise increases; and the many ways in which bias against women intersects with prejudices of class, race and disability.

Yes, at the macro level there’s been policy and legislative intervention that has positively impacted gender equality in recent decades, relating to pay and representation for example.

However, there’s important micro, daily, intervention required to help close the dream gap for our daughters.

Sieghart urges us to check the language we use to our daughters (and our sons), and to notice if a woman is being interrupted or ignored in meetings. She also stresses the importance of men reading more books and watching films by and about women. “All these men have to do is actively decide to expose themselves to women’s voices”.

‘The authority gap’s’ conversation is about achieving greater gender equality, with, rather than at the expense of, men. Sieghart’s main hypothesis is that greater gender equality isn't something for men to fear and resist.

Rather, she hypothesises that greater gender equality leads to greater levels of happiness, satisfaction and health for men too, at work and at home.

Until (flourishing in) June,

H