Do Women Really Have a Confidence Problem?

For decades, we (women) have been told we have “a confidence problem.” The mantras and mandates scribbled on millions of motivational post-it notes remind us to “lean in”, strike a power pose, and be a girl-boss. But are they right?

A conundrum

Here’s an interesting contradiction:

Over the past several years, I’ve been giving talks on leadership to all sorts of [mostly] corporate audiences. When those talks focus on women’s leadership, one of the questions I like to ask participants in pre-talk surveys is: What would you rate as the top 3 factors holding women back from leadership positions? Nearly every time I’ve done this survey, “Lack of confidence” comes in at the top.

So, I was surprised to see the outpouring of likes, comments, and private messages on this LinkedIn post that argues the exact opposite. It was a repost of a quote I saw floating around the internet, and it read:

“Girls and women don’t suffer from a lack of confidence, they suffer from an excess of experience in how the world reacts to confident girls and women.”

To this, a slew of women responded with notes like “truth” and “this hits” and at least one resounding “grrrrr!”

But this post presents a very different viewpoint from the one that comes through on my surveys. ?While the surveys say that a lack of confidence is the main issue holding women back, the post suggests it’s not us, but the sum of outside obstacle that’s the problem.

So, this week in Uncomfortable Questions, I ask: which is it? Naturally, I found an answer.

The debate

First, a bit of background on the two sides of the confidence debate:

Side 1: Confidence is the issue:

For decades, we (women) have been told we have “a confidence problem.” The mantras and mandates scribbled on millions of motivational post-it notes remind us to “lean in”, strike a power pose, and be a girl-boss. All this advice emerged in response to a perceived central problem: that women lack confidence in themselves and their abilities.

The belief, then, is that if we can just feel (and project) more confidence, we can break past the barriers to advancement, authority, and success that limit us.

However, in the past several years, this line of thinking has been challenged by another strand of research that says this thinking is all wrong.

Side 2: Confidence is not the issue:

This newer strand argues that such “confidence discourse” is both misleading and harmful. ?(For the best coverage of this stance, I highly suggest Confidence Culture by Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill ).

In the workplace, says this stance, our confidence isn’t the key factor holding us back; instead, it’s the mountain of outside, structural factors like bias, behaviors, and policy that are the true concerns. Thus, they posit, addressing these outside factors – through actions like training, flexible work policies, and better parental leave -- will have a much larger impact on women’s advancement in the workplace than projecting our voice or adjusting our posture.

Adding to this logic, proponents say that continuing to focus on confidence as the central issue (and solution) is actually harmful; it takes our attention and efforts away from the true culprits and places the burden for change on women’s shoulders.

The Facts

The research, which I gleefully devoured, tells us that there’s a little truth to both, but with some clear directives on what can be done about it. Below are three of the key facts about confidence that just may surprise you.?

Fact 1: There is a confidence gap

Decades of research from some very reputable sources (including the National Institutes of Health ) settle the score: men do, statistically, have more confidence than women. Experts call this differential the “confidence gap.”

Despite consistently equal performance (and, in some cases, higher performance) by women, men tend to overestimate their abilities, while women under-estimate theirs. This is seen across environments and lifespans, from elementary school math class to the corporate workplace.

At work, we see this clearly in the hiring process, where women tend to apply for roles only when they believe they meet 100% of the qualifications (vs. a threshold closer to 60% for men) and in self-promotion; one study found men tend to rate their performance 33% higher than women who performed equally well (National Bureau of Economic Research ).

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Fact 2: Women are penalized for showing confidence

There is also extensive research demonstrating that women are routinely punished when we show “too much” confidence. According to psychologists, displays of self-assurance and confidence in women violate what we unconsciously think are “behavioral norms” – traits like warmth, kindness, and nurturing that we implicitly expect of women.

Among men, displays of aggressiveness, confidence, and decisiveness align with our perceived “behavioral norms,” and so we not only accept them, we expect them.

For that reason, studies of female leaders find that women are judged more harshly when showing emotions like anger, while men were rewarded . Similarly, when women showed “dominance behaviors” like asking to be promoted or asserting competence, women were seen as less likeable and were promoted less often.

In sum, confidence in men is often and unconsciously viewed favorably, while the same behaviors in women make them less likeable and therefore less promotable. ?

For an excellent deep dive on this, I highly recommend Mary Ann Sieghart 's fantastic book, The Authority Gap.

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Fact 3: More confidence isn’t necessarily a good thing

In some pioneering research and a very amusing TedTalk, academic Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic argues that there is no empirical link between competence and confidence.

In other words, displays of confidence or lack of confidence do not tell us anything about a person's ability. This is particularly ground-breaking and goes against most of the assumptions that shape our hiring, promotions, and workplace decision-making.

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Fact 4: Less confidence may be a good thing

A second set of research on the topic further critiques our commonly held conceptions of confidence in arguing that a lack of confidence may actually be a good thing.

Take recent research from CENTRE FOR ECONOMIC POLICY RESEARCH(THE) and the World Economic Forum that examined how different world leaders managed COVID within their respective regions. The data showed that countries led by women clearly and significantly outperformed those run by men, with the former suffering half as many deaths as the latter.

Asking why, the study pointed to risk aversion when it came to saving lives, quicker lockdown responses, and a swifter willingness to follow the recommendations of medical and scientific experts.. In sum, many of the traits we associate with low confidence – like risk aversion or admitting a lack of knowledge in a particular area – are precisely the factors that led to success and saved lives.

What can we do about it?

To summarize the facts, we know that (a) there is a confidence gap that we should work to remedy, but that (b) the real problem lies in a range of structural and systemic factors, so (c), the solution does not lie in simply projecting more confidence.

The solution, instead, lies in a range of actions and adjustments that address the true, fundamental obstacles blocking women’s path to advancement. The two most effective that I’ve seen in my work are the following:

• More (and better) education on bias. We need to upgrade our approach to unconscious bias, focusing less time on the conceptual and more on the practical ways we can recognize and change the unconscious assumptions holding ourselves and our colleagues back.
• Upgrade our leadership training. Most of our assumptions about what constitutes great leaders and leadership is outdated and, frankly, wrong. We need to bring great, dynamic, and cutting-edge leadership training back to our workplaces, built on the huge pool of leadership science that’s been done over the past 5-10 years by a much more diverse set of experts.

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While it’s important to recognize the confidence gap as a real thing, it’s just as important to recognize it is one factor in a wider constellation of notions and practices we need to update in our post-2020 workplace if we want to see real and sustained progress for everyone.

And with that, I'll leave you with a funny little image I stumbled upon in my research (because facts can be fun, too).

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Melina Cordero is the Founder & President of P20 Workplace , a firm that delivers digital leadership development and DEI solutions built for the post-2020 workplace. Read the story of how she leapt from commercial real estate executive to DEI innovator, explore her services , and connect with her on?LinkedIn, where she shares the latest data, research, and ideas on the evolving world of work.

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