The Confidence Gap Isn’t a Woman Problem — It’s a System Problem
Don’t internalise the bias
Confidence increases over the life course, peaking around age 60 before declining in older age. Women and men follow the same confidence trajectory, with one major difference — women have less of it at nearly every stage.
Girls and boys start off equally confident, but by adolescence, a gap opens. A gap that will not close for years to come. From the teen years through to retirement, women consistently report lower levels of confidence than men. Women spend more than 60 years of their lives under-confident.
Why does this gap exist?
The workplace often blames women’s lack of confidence for the glass ceiling effect, the reason that women don’t get hired, promoted, or get the recognition they deserve. The fault doesn’t lie with women and their lack of confidence, as we are often led to believe. It lies with the unequal and subtly hostile environments that remain in the shadows of our organisations. But much of the discrimination women face at work is not explicit; it’s implicit.
Women spend more than 60 years of their lives underconfident
A large body of confirms that when hiring panels are presented with an identical résumé that has either a woman’s or a man’s name, they consistently pick the man. He is perceived as being more competent. They don’t say they prefer men; they don’t know they do. It’s unconscious bias.
A widely quoted statistic from a Hewlett-Packard once claimed that men apply for jobs when they meet 60% of the criteria, while women only apply when they meet 100%. While that specific figure has been questioned, LinkedIn’s own data shows that women are less likely to apply for roles than men. The subtext: women are holding themselves back. But are they? Or are they responding rationally to a world that assumes male competence, but questions theirs?
In meetings, women are interrupted more, credited less, and rated as less helpful, even when they say the same things as men. Behavioural economics professor Angela Dorrough to explore this bias. Dorrough and her team set up group problem-solving activities and gave participants preformulated, gender-neutral messages to use in the group chat. They found that if a message is shared by a woman, it is rated as less helpful. Women in the group are also rated as less competent overall, compared to their male counterparts. Male competence is assumed, whilst female competence must be proven, over and again.
They don’t say they prefer men, they don’t know they do. It’s unconscious bias.
Because these biases aren’t explicit, they are often missed by both parties. The effect is to subtly but consistently undermine women, whilst men get the opposite message — one that positively reinforces their value and competence. These patterns reinforce gender gaps in general, but especially the gender confidence gap. It’s hard to maintain confidence in the face of constant critical feedback. When the world keeps telling you that you aren’t good enough, you believe it.
Negotiating bias
The confidence gap isn’t limited to hiring. It shows up everywhere, especially when it comes to pay. When women and men negotiate for the same pay — women get less. There are two possible explanations, the first, and often assumed, is that women are less skilled at negotiating. The alternative is, that women receive a backlash for negotiating which means they get offered less. led by Jennifer Dannals — Professor of Business at Dartmouth, put this to the test. In a study of more than 2,500 people from all over the world, Dannals found that women and men employ the same strategies in negotiating. They are equally ambitious, picking the same goal value and the same acceptable minimum. Despite these similar strategies, men received almost twice as much. Women were also more likely to experience a conflict dynamic, resulting in an impasse. Even when women negotiate in a similar way to men, they receive an unfair backlash and a lower offer.
This perpetuates a cycle that allows men to expect more, ask for more, and feel more confident about asking. This is not about competence or skill — men are not better negotiators. They simply experience privilege at the negotiating table. They get better offers and experience less hostility — green light after green light. This success begets confidence. Women do not get to benefit from this same system of green lights; they experience red lights.
When the world keeps telling you that you aren’t good enough, you believe it.
Over time, women internalise these biases as personal failures. They are never quite good enough and always need to improve. They aren’t assertive enough, or confident enough — messages echoed throughout the media and threaded throughout society. Meanwhile, for men, it’s more green lights. “You’re doing great, Gary!”
Stop fixing women
Women are offered assertiveness training, confidence building, and imposter syndrome workshops to fix the gender confidence gap. The issue with this approach is that it blames the individual women and gives us yet another thing to add to our To Do lists. What if we focused on fixing the biased society instead? In the meantime, we need to be aware of the biases we face and be cautious not to internalise them as personal failings.
Psychologist Brenda Major has spent years the effect of discrimination on self-esteem. She has found that how we interpret negative feedback can increase or reduce our self-esteem. Major and colleagues asked women to complete a creativity task, in which they were given deliberately poor feedback and artificially low scores. While they waited for their feedback, some of the women were told that the man marking the tests was biased against women. The women who were given this prompt were significantly more likely to attribute their poor performance review to discrimination than to their own abilities. The shift in attribution helped protect their self-esteem. These women were more resilient to the confidence-crushing effects of bias.
We need to be aware of the biases we face and be cautious not to internalise them as personal failings
When you don’t get the job, when you receive poor feedback, when you don’t get the pay rise, when you get ignored — it’s not you, it’s bias. Understanding the biases that we as women face every day is crucial to our ability to resist. We can’t afford to internalise the misogyny of our society. Recognising bias isn’t just useful, it’s essential to our resilience.
The world doesn’t need more confident women. It needs fewer barriers in their way and fewer systems rigged against them.
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