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Mastering The Confidence Code: Acknowledge The Confidence Gap, with Claire Shipman, Journalist and Co-author, The Confidence Code
The Confidence Gap
Anecdotally, it was fairly clear that women have a confidence problem. But to be honest, my co-author and I were not sure that this sense had was going to be supported by the data. But when we started digging into the data, it’s quite compelling. Essentially, it goes like this. Hewlett-Packard did one of these studies and there have been other studies done since. A woman will apply for a job or a promotion when she thinks she has roughly 100% of the qualifications for the job. A man will feel comfortable taking that risk when he has about 60%. So you can imagine over the course of a career what that means in terms of opportunities lost. Because we’re not just using that standard for applying for jobs, we’re using that on a daily basis for measuring whether we’re ready to speak up in a meeting, whether our presentation is ready to go, whether we should attempt this or that or the other thing. We’re judging ourselves really harshly. The academic data is even more overwhelming. We had one professor say to us, “Every time I get a new crop of graduate students and I need a new study to give them, just so they can learn how to conduct studies, I give them this one because I know what the results are going to be in advance.” And it’s essentially you have men and women take the same sort of quantitative reasoning test in some math or science. Before you give them the results, you ask the women how they think they’ve done. They routinely underestimate how they’ve performed. You ask the men how they think they’ve done, they routinely overestimate how they’ve performed. When in fact, they’ve all performed roughly the same.
Honest Overconfidence
Columbia University has done some interesting studies on this and they call it, especially in terms of the overconfidence on the part of men, honest overconfidence. In that it’s not bravado, it’s not I’m sort of faking it, it’s really there’s a genuine overestimation of what I’m capable of. That just overwhelmed us. There’s a lot of data that’s been gathered in the last 10 years on men and women asking for more money, for example, which is just one more concrete example of why we think we’re not worthy. The University of Manchester conducted a study of soon-to-be graduates in England, and they found that on average, women, when asked what they deserved to earn, felt that they deserved to earn 20% less than the men were saying. The other thing we thought was so compelling was there’s one researcher, Zach Estes, who’s now working out of Italy, he decided to look at the issue of confidence directly – confidence in gender, I should say. And he tried to measure it in spatial ability, and that’s a kind of category that’s usually on an IQ test and men tend to score better on spatial ability. Women tend to score better on verbal ability. Sure enough, in the first round, it was as he expected. The men were scoring better. Then he looked at the results and he noticed something interesting – that the women were skipping a lot of the questions. They just weren’t answering the questions. He told the next group, “Everybody has to answer all the questions.” Guess what? The scores were almost identical. Which again said to us a lot about a willingness to take a risk. If the women weren’t sure of the answer, they weren’t going to take a guess. They were just going to skip it. And that has very real consequence for us.