The Gender Confidence Gap:

As a qualified Mind & Body Coach specialising in helping women play bigger in their career by overcoming self-doubt, when I watched my employers presentation on the Gender and Ethnicity Pay Gap 2021, it really got me thinking about how self-confidence might be linked to the pay gap between men and women.

While not all women lack the confidence to achieve what they want or change what they don’t, many do. Don’t get me wrong women enjoy opportunities today that our mothers, much less our grandmothers, never had. Specifically, in my place of employment we have seen amazing progress towards gender equality. Especially more recently seeing change at our very top level achieving a much more gender balanced Executive Board. Which could not have happened if it were not for the many great male colleagues we have acting as allies.

However, my employer's statistics over the last 2years show that despite our great progress, many women still lag behind men in career progression. Meaning there is still work to be done. We also know women still struggle to ‘have it all’ or to at least feel good about 'all' that they do have, in terms of career/life balance. There are various reasons for this lag. Many of which are down to external and systemic barriers and biases.

On a wider scale however, there have been many cited studies that suggest one of the biggest barriers to female career progression is self-belief; these studies suggest that on average women struggle more than men to have confidence in themselves and their own ability.

To name a few of these well quantified and well documented studies:

In 2011, the Institute of Leadership and Management, in the United Kingdom, surveyed British managers about how confident they feel in their professions. Half the female respondents reported self-doubt about their job performance and careers, compared with fewer than a third of male respondents.

Linda Babcock, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University and the author of Women Don’t Ask, has found, in studies of business-school students, that men initiate salary negotiations four times as often as women do, and that when women do negotiate, they ask for 30 percent less money than men do. At Manchester Business School, in England, professor Marilyn Davidson has seen the same phenomenon, and believes that it comes from a lack of confidence. Each year she asks her students what they expect to earn, and what they deserve to earn, five years after graduation. “I’ve been doing this for about seven years,” she has written, “and every year there are massive differences between the male and female responses.” On average, she reports, the men think they deserve $80,000 a year and the women $64,000—or 20 percent less.

A meticulous 2003 study by Cornell University homed in on the relationship between female confidence and competence.

The study wanted to focus specifically on women, and the impact of women’s preconceived notions about their own ability on their confidence. They gave male and female college students a quiz on scientific reasoning. Before the quiz, the students rated their own scientific skills. They wanted to see whether their general perception of Am I good in science? shapes their impression of something that should be separate: Did I get this question right? The women rated themselves more negatively than the men did on scientific ability: on a scale of 1 to 10, the women gave themselves a 6.5 on average, and the men gave themselves a 7.6. When it came to assessing how well they answered the questions, the women thought they got 5.8 out of 10 questions right; men, 7.1. And how did they actually perform? Their average was almost the same—women got 7.5 out of 10 right and men 7.9.

To show the real-world impact of self-perception, the students were then invited—having no knowledge of how they’d performed—to participate in a science competition for prizes. The women were much more likely to turn down the opportunity: only 49 percent of them signed up for the competition, compared with 71 percent of the men. “This was a proxy for whether women might seek out certain opportunities. “Because they are less confident in general in their abilities, that led them not to want to pursue future opportunities.”

Food for thought indeed.

Looking for some tips on how to recognise and overcome this self-doubt? Then keep an eye out for my next article “Tackling Self-Doubt 101”.