Speak Up (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Woman’s Hour (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
The Spark (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
This Union: The Ghost Kingdoms of England (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
The unassailable argument of Mary Ann Sieghart’s book The Authority Gap is that women continue to have far less voice than men in all forms of public life. Early last week, Sieghart made a determined personal effort to redress that balance, at least for an hour or so.
Her investigation, Speak Up, made suitably uncomfortable listening for male ears. Sieghart’s academics lined up one after the other to first undermine any myth that women were naturally more chatty than men – “if you wire up women and men for a day and count the number of words they use, it is almost exactly the same” – and then to examine the group psychologies that mean that in public group settings men still tend to take up 75% of the air time (and if any woman tries to change that meeting room dynamic they are routinely perceived as bossy or verbose).
Sieghart drew on evidence ranging from ancient Babylonian texts that demanded that women who talked too much have their “teeth smashed with a burning brick” to the patriarchal rearguard at the Handforth parish council meeting and its unhinged efforts to silence Jackie Weaver. Many of the experiments were shocking – in one, different juries were assembled to assess a theoretical case. Sometimes a male jury member was provided with the crucial piece of evidence that should change the verdict, sometimes a woman. On average, the man was six times more likely to be listened to when he presented the new killer fact.
Sieghart’s book was also the subject of discussion on Wednesday’s Woman’s Hour, the original BBC bulwark against men banging on. Emma Barnett focused on the fact that half the population were unlikely even to pick up Sieghart’s book: figures show that only a fifth of the readers of books written by women are male, while women read books of both genders in roughly equal numbers.
The writer Andrew Billen was the key witness here, citing friends who refused to read books by women because they “contained too many adjectives”, and pointing out how novels by women were routinely more astute about the domestic world in which most of us live. “Hemingway may have dealt with matters of the heart,” he said, “but then you have to put up with 10 pages of him wittering on about catching trout.” One listener texted in to highlight the culpability of publishers peddling “chick lit”. Sieghart confessed that even she had to battle to have a cover for her own book that might appeal equally to men (ie, using those reliably manly colours orange and black, and employing graphics rather than girly photographs).
Anyone left in doubt about another strand of Sieghart’s research – that the presence of women around any table makes discussion more substantive – would be advised to listen to the second series of The Spark (Radio 4), in which journalist Helen Lewis interviews contemporary thinkers. Her instalment with the American political scientist Karen Stenner was particularly enlightening. Stenner’s work on authoritarianism explains both the appeal of populist “hard men” and the alternative extremes of “cancel culture” that polices social media for impure thoughts.
Stenner quietly, persuasively put the evidence that around a third of any population is genetically predisposed to desire conformity. The controversial aspect of her work suggests that this aversion to human complexity is as likely to infect the left as the right. Each political vocal wing has a deep-seated psychological need to divide society into an us – “patriots, true believers, real people” – and a them – everyone who thinks things might be a bit more complicated and messy.
As always in this series, Lewis achieved that rare thing for an interviewer: pre-empting precisely the question that you might otherwise have been shouting at the radio.
Some of Stenner’s closely argued conclusions have, she said, necessitated that she work outside academia – notably, her suggestion that if you are in favour of spreading diversity you should avoid advertising the fact. “Give up performative things,” she said. “Expand the boundaries of ‘us’.”
Ian Hislop, in a timely new four-part series about the origins of England’s tribes, This Union: The Ghost Kingdoms of England (Radio 4), took our most strident “us” back to its origins, with plenty of trademark chuckling. Wandering in Suffolk and Essex, he pieced together how the motley assemblage of northern European invaders formed an “Anglo-Saxon” identity that bound them to the land in the vacuum left by the Romans. He stood on top of the burial mound at Sutton Hoo and mused upon the ways those East Angles expanded the boundaries of “us” into our fractured present. His account of the haphazard and chaotic birth of the country of Saint George brought my mind to the misspelt tattoo I once saw on the thick neck of a football fan in front of me on the terraces: Made in Egland.
