Leaning in...to uncertainty

A few years ago, the New York times highlighted a fascinating study about a study on financial literacy around the world.

Here’s what it found:

When researchers gave women and men a short quiz that tested their financial literacy, men got higher scores. That shouldn't shock us: boys and men are exposed to more informal financial education, and they are encouraged to learn about investing and money management. Women and girls often are not.

But there was a second part of the findings that brought a fascinating twist to the first.

“When we took away the ‘do not know’ option [from the multiple choice financial tests] women were no less likely to choose the wrong answer. So if forced to pick an answer, women seem to know as much as men,” Professor Annamaria Lusardi, one of the principal researchers, reported.

In other words, the gender gap in the test scores was a result of women choosing “I don’t know” more often than men. When that option was taken away, they performed just as well as their male counterparts.

The female test-takers knew as much as the men, but they were less likely to trust what they knew, and make an educated guess.

It's notable that this behavior showed up on this test - a survey - when there was absolutely no penalty for making the wrong choice, no risk involved. 

This is where I recognized myself, and so many of the talented and smart women I've worked with. We often say, “I don’t know” when we do know. We say “I don’t know” when our knowledge may be partial, but when it’s more than sufficient to point us in the right direction.

Women are not to blame for this, of course. Boys are taught to cover up anything that could be perceived as weakness or vulnerability; they start getting trained early on to hide uncertainty of all kinds. Girls, by contrast, are often socially validated for expressing confusion and uncertainty and turning outward for help and answers. Just think about the size of the “advice to women” industry compared to that of men.

Girls and women are also more likely to be penalized for being wrong. Bias – in women and men – causes women’s mistakes to be seen as more significant indicators of our capabilities than they are in a man. We learn quickly we may be judged harshly for being wrong, and so we become more conservative in speaking up if we aren’t sure about what we’re saying.

And of course, the well-documented “imposter syndrome” that women – especially high-achieving women – almost universally experience, the sense that we are somehow imposters who don't really have expertise or authority, is at play here. 

To make all this practical for you, run this experiment: What happens if you push yourself to remove the “do not know” option for a while, just as the researchers removed it from their quiz? What if you push a little harder to see what answer you’d lean into if you had to just pick one?

You know more than you think you do. And we need you to share it. 

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[previously published on taramohr.com]