Academic who has faced online abuse says prejudice against women is hardwired over two millennia, from Homer to Twitter

Women who claim a public voice "get treated as freakish androgynes" with women under-represented in national politics and relatively "mute" in the public sphere, the classicist and author Mary Beard has said.

Highlighting the lack of the voice of expertise from women outside "the traditional spheres of women's sexual interests", the Cambridge academic said: "To put it another way, for a female MP to be minister of women or of education or health is a very different thing from being chancellor of the exchequer.

"Across the board we still seem resistant of female encroachment into traditional male territory, whether that is the abuse hurled at Jacqui Oatley for having the nerve to stray from the netball court for becoming the first woman commentator on Match of the Day, or what can get meted out to women who appear on Question Time."

Jacqui Oatley is the first female commentator on BBC's Match of the Day. Photograph: Clara Molden/PA

In a London Review of Books lecture at the British Museum on Friday, Beard said that to understand how to change the way women were heard it was necessary to understand how attitudes were hardwired through culture over more than two millennia from Homerto Thatcher to Twitter.

"I'm hoping that a long view will help us get beyond the simple diagnosis of 'misogyny' that we tend a bit lazily to fall back on. To be sure, 'misogyny' is one way of describing what's going on. If you go on a television discussion programme and then receive a load of tweets comparing your genitalia to a variety of unpleasantly rotting vegetables, it's hard to find a more apt word," said Beard, who has been targeted by internet trolls.

"But if we want to understand – and do something about – the fact that women, even when they are not silenced, still tend to pay a very high price for being heard, we have to recognise that it's more complicated and that there's a long backstory."

Women's interventions were often described as "strident" or "whining". "Do those words matter? Of course they do – because they underpin an idiom that acts to remove the authority, the force, even the humour from what women have to say. It's an idiom that effectively repositions women back into the domestic sphere (people "whinge" over things like the washing up); it trivialises their words," she said.

"Contrast that with the 'deep-voiced' man, and its connotations of profundity. It is still the case, I'd argue, that when as listeners we hear a female voice, we don't hear a voice that connotes authority; or rather we haven't learned how to hear authority in it."

There is no neurological reason. These assumptions and prejudices are "hardwired" into "our culture, our language and millennia of our history.

"And when we are thinking about the under-representation of women in national politics, their relative muteness in the public sphere, I'm sure we have to think beyond what the prime minister and his chums got up to in the Bullingdon Club, beyond the bad behaviour and blokeish culture of Westminster, beyond even issues about family-friendly hours, childcare provision or all-women shortlists (important as those are)."

Addressing abuse on Twitter, she said: "The 140 characters of a tweet act as a kind of magnifying glass on attitudes we find elsewhere. It's hard not to see some faint connection between these mad Twitter outbursts and the blokes in the House of Commons heckling women MPs so loud that you simply can't hear what they're saying. In the Afghan parliament, apparently, they simply disconnect the mics when they don't want to hear the women speak."

Odysseus and Penelope in Homer's Odyssey. Their son Telemachus told her that speech was a man's business. Photograph: Alamy

The first recorded instance of a man telling a woman to "shut up" was at the start of Homer's Odyssey, when Telemachus, son of Penelope and Odysseus, tells his mother speech is a man's business. The same language is used today in trolling, she argued. "What's the connection between publicly speaking out in support of a female logo on a banknote, Twitter threats of rape and decapitation, and Telemachus's putdown of Penelope?

"It doesn't much matter what line you take as a woman – if you venture into traditional male territory the abuse comes anyway. It is not what you say it that prompts it – it is the fact that you are saying it."

Beard said she was attempting to get people to think harder about the role of women in public debate. "We have got to think much more deeply about why we don't hear women as authoritative, how we hear them speak, what we think public debate is for and why we demand such a high price from women who want to enter it.

"You can perfectly well say: 'Look at you, Beard. You have got fantastic opportunities to get your voice heard.' Yet the fact remains women who put their head above the parapet have a much harder time than men. We have got to think about that in a calm, historical analytical way.

"We just have got to have a bit more onsciousness-raising, old-fashioned feminist consciousness-raising. How do we use language? Why does it matter? And how does it put women down?"

There was a tendency to go for quick fixes such as all-women shortlists. The problem went deeper, she said. "And unless you recognise that it is culturally hardwired into us, then we are never going to get it right."