Mary Ann Sieghart

Mary Ann Corinna Howard Sieghart (born 6 August 1961) is an English author, journalist, consultant, radio presenter and former assistant editor of The Times, where she wrote columns about politics, social affairs and life in general. She has also written a weekly political column in The Independent. Her best-selling book, The Authority Gap: Why Women Are Still Taken Less Seriously Than Men, and What We Can Do About It, was published by Transworld/Doubleday in July 2021. She now runs The Authority Gap Consultancy, which helps organisations narrow and close their authority gaps.

On BBC Radio 4, she has been a presenter of Start the Week and has also presented Fallout, Analysis, Profile, One to One and Beyond Westminster, as well as many one-off documentaries. She is a visiting professor at King's College London and chaired the Social Market Foundation, an independent think tank, from 2010 to 2020. She has been a non-executive director of the Ofcom Content Board, a member of the Tate Modern Council, and is currently a Non-Executive Director of the Guardian Media Group, Senior Independent Director of a FTSE 250 investment trust, Pantheon International and a Trustee of the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and the Kennedy Memorial Trust. She was Chair of Judges for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2022. In 2018, she was named as one of the Female FTSE 100 Women to Watch.

She was appointed a Visiting Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, for the academic year 2018–19, where she researched The Authority Gap. She has since been an Associate Member of Nuffield College, Oxford (2019–20) and a Senior Academic Visitor at Oriel College, Oxford (2020-21). She is now a visiting professor at King's College London.