If you read just one book in 2018, may I urge you to give Mary Beard’s Women & Power your attention.

Based on a couple of lectures she delivered in 2014 and 2017, Beard accessibly explores the impact of Western culture on the public voice of women and the issue of unconscious bias as a mechanism for excluding women from centres of power.

This has far-reaching and embedded consequences for public speaking and leadership today. We need to work on solutions to ensure women have, in Beard’s words, “the ability to be effective, to make a difference in the world, and the right to be taken seriously, together as much as individually” (p87).

We constantly reference ’empowering’ women and ‘gender equality’, but on whose terms? When you speak, are you adopting ‘foundational’ and culturally entrenched stories of power that effectively keep women out of said power? Are you reflecting unconscious bias that perniciously reinforces the status quo?

Gender equality is on the agenda, but first we need to interrogate the very meaning of power and leadership to avoid perpetuating traditional narratives.

Please take a couple of hours to read this important contribution.