The Confidence Code (4 page)

The incident had reminded her that women don’t necessarily have to compete according to the guidelines of a male playbook.

“To the extent that it is more interesting to be female than male, why would we have to repress that rather than be ourselves with strength and worthiness? I’ve always said that we should not try to imitate the boys in everything they do.”

It was an interesting thought, but one we wouldn’t fully appreciate until later.

20 Percent Less Valuable

The shortage of female confidence is more than just a collection of high-octane anecdotes or wrenchingly familiar scenarios. It is increasingly well quantified and documented. The Institute of Leadership and Management, in the United Kingdom, conducted a study in 2011, simply asking British women, in a series of questions, how confident they feel in their professions. Not very, as it turns out. Half of the women reported feelings of self-doubt about their performance and careers, while less than a third of male respondents reported self-doubt.

Linda Babcock, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University and the author of
Women Don’t Ask
, has uncovered a similar lack of confidence among American women, with concrete consequences. She found, in studies with business school students, that men initiate salary negotiations four times as often as women, and that when women do negotiate, they ask for thirty percent less than men do.

At Manchester Business School in England, Professor Marilyn Davidson says the problem stems from a lack of confidence and expectation. 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 said, “and every year there are massive differences between the male and female responses. The male students
expect
to earn significantly more than the women, and when you look at what the students think they
deserve
to earn, again the differences are huge.” On average, she says, the men think they deserve $80,000 a year and the women $64,000—a $16,000 difference.

As reporters we are always thrilled to find precise measures, but still, the number is dismaying. Think about that for a minute. What Davidson’s findings really mean is that women effectively believe they are 20 percent less valuable than men believe they are.

A more meticulous study by Cornell psychologist David Dunning and University of Washington psychologist Joyce Ehrlinger homed in on the perplexing issue of female confidence versus competence. At the time, Dunning and a Cornell colleague, Justin Kruger, were just finishing their seminal work on something called the Dunning-Kruger effect—the tendency for some people to substantially overestimate their abilities. (The less competent they are, the more they overestimate their abilities. Think about it for a minute. It makes strange sense.)

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

In a final layer, to show the real impact of self-perception, the students were then asked, having no knowledge about how they’d performed, to participate in a science competition for prizes. The women were much more likely to turn down that opportunity—only 49 percent signed up for the competition, compared with 71 percent of the men.

“That was a proxy for whether women might seek out certain opportunities,” said Ehrlinger. “Because they are less confident in general in their abilities, that led them to be less confident when they are actually performing in an achievement-related task. This then led them not to want to pursue future opportunities.” It was a concrete example, in other words, of the real-world results of a lack of confidence.

The data confirms what we instinctively already know. Another example: We know that most women tend to talk less when we’re outnumbered. We go into a meeting, study the layout, and choose to sit at the back of the room. We often keep our thoughts, which we decide can’t be all that impressive, to ourselves. Then we get cross with ourselves when the male colleague next to us sounds smart saying the same thing that we would have said.

One Princeton research team set out to measure how much less women talk. Male and female volunteers were put to work solving a budget challenge. The study found that in some cases women, when in the minority, spoke 75 percent less than men did. Do we believe our words are that much less valuable? Do we think they are just as valuable, but we don’t have the nerve to spit them out? Either way, we’re underselling ourselves. The kicker is that a man in a room with mostly women talks just as much as he always does.

“It’s so frustrating that we are typically so silent,” says Virginia Shore, the chief curator of the State Department’s Office of Art in Embassies and a leading expert on international contemporary art. “I certainly think of myself as confident. In my office, I’m a warrior, and I feel extremely comfortable in the world of art. But, when I step out of my office to go to weekly conferences at the State Department, it changes dramatically. It’s all men around the table. Usually thirty men, and maybe a few women.” She seemed comforted to hear that the research shows meetings just like hers happen everywhere.

Brenda Major, a social psychologist at the University of California in Santa Barbara, started studying the problem of self-perception decades ago. “In my earliest days as a young professor, I was doing a lot of work on gender, and I would set up a test where I’d ask men and women how they thought they were going to do on a variety of tasks or tests.” She found that the men consistently overestimated their abilities and subsequent performance, and that the women routinely underestimated both. The actual performances did not differ in quality.

“It is one of the most consistent findings you can have,” Major says of that test. And still, today, when she wants to suggest a study to her students where the results are utterly predictable, she points to this one.

On the other side of the country, the same thing plays out every day in Victoria Brescoll’s lecture hall at Yale’s School of Management. MBA students are nurtured specifically to project confidence in the fashion demanded by today’s business world. While she sees from their performance that all of her students are top-of-the-chart smart, she’s been startled to uncover her female students’ lack of belief in themselves.

“There’s just a natural sort of feeling among the women that they will not get a prestigious job, so why bother trying,” she explained. “Or they think that they are not totally competent in the area, so they’re not going to go for it.”

What often happens to the female students is that they opt out. “They end up going into less competitive fields like human resources or marketing, and they don’t go for finance, investment banks, or senior-track faculty positions,” Brescoll told us. And, as is the case with so many of our female experts, Brescoll used to suffer from the same syndrome herself—until she learned better.

“I’ve always had to make extra sure I was really, really good,” she admitted. “I felt I didn’t stack up unless I had more articles in prestigious publications than my male colleagues. But at the same time I would automatically assume that my work wouldn’t be good enough for a top publication, that I should aim just a bit lower.”

And the men?

“I think that’s really interesting,” she says with a laugh, “because the men go into everything just assuming that they’re awesome and thinking, ‘Who wouldn’t want me?’
 
”

What Are Men Actually Thinking?

Pretty much that they are awesome, and “who wouldn’t want me?” Brescoll is right. Most of the men we interviewed, in addition to our colleagues and friends, say they simply spend less time thinking about the possible consequences of failure.

David Rodriguez is the vice president of human resources at Marriott. For years, he’s been our go-to management guru. David has to do a lot of public speaking in his job and loves it. When he takes the stage, his dimples soften his corporate uniform (dark suit, power tie). He says he becomes numb to any criticism from the room. He isn’t questioning whether his content is good enough or whether he’s flubbed a line or two. He tells himself he’s going to ace the presentation, be witty, and impress his bosses. “I just get up there and perform,” he said. “The trick is not to overthink it.” And if things do go wrong, he shrugs them off. “I don’t dwell on stuff; when it’s done, it’s done.” We heard the same attitude from most of the men we talked with. Even when they aren’t natural performers, they just move through their challenges with less baggage.

Do men doubt themselves sometimes? Of course. But they don’t examine those doubts in such excruciating detail, and they certainly don’t let those doubts stop them as often as women do.

If anything, men tilt toward overconfidence. We were surprised to learn that most of the time they arrive at that state quite honestly. They aren’t
consciously
trying
to fool anyone. Columbia Business School even has a term for it now. They call it “honest overconfidence” and they have found that men on average rate their performance to be 30 percent better than it is.

When we raised the notion of a confidence gap with a number of male executives who supervise women, what we heard was enormous frustration. They believe that a lack of confidence is fundamentally holding women back, but they’re worried about saying anything, terrified of sounding sexist. Most don’t experience our lack of assurance, they don’t understand it, and they don’t know how to talk about it.

One male senior law partner told us the story of a young female law associate who was excellent in every respect, except that she didn’t speak up in client meetings. His takeaway was that she wasn’t confident enough to handle the account. But he didn’t know how to raise it as an issue without seeming offensive. He eventually came to the conclusion that confidence should be a formal part of the performance review process because it is such an important aspect of doing business.

David Rodriguez agrees that confidence, expressed or not expressed, even in the most subtle ways, can make or break a rise up the ladder. Among the very top corporate women he deals with, it’s not an obvious lack of confidence he sees, because the senior executive women in his organization are quite sure about their abilities. But there’s sometimes something he calls a “hesitation.” “There’s a higher likelihood the women will hesitate at key moments,” he suggested. “I think because they often aren’t sure what scorecard will be used to judge behavior. And they are afraid to get it wrong. I’ll ask later—‘what happened at that point in the presentation?’ It seemed as though there was a fork in the road. They’ll say ‘I couldn’t get a feel for the audience—how they were responding. I couldn’t decide whether to go right or left.’
 
”

A hesitation. It’s a fear of failure, perhaps. Or a desire to do it perfectly. Perhaps it’s the result of habits formed over decades as the top student. It’s also a sense, usually accurate, says Rodriguez, that women
are
being judged by a confusing and shifting yardstick. Or it could be the female brain at work, carefully assessing the emotion of the room. Whatever the causes, that hesitation has consequences. Rodriguez says it can affect whose ideas are adopted, or even who gets a promotion.

There is something so burdensome about the freight of being female that when asked to simply name our gender before a math test, we automatically perform worse. We were floored by the results of one experiment in particular. To explore the impact of “stereotype threat,” as it is known, Harvard University gave a group of forty-six highly gifted Asian-American female undergraduates one of three questionnaires, each calibrated to play into different stereotypes. One questionnaire emphasized the stereotype that Asians are good at math, the second emphasized the stereotype that women are bad at math, and the third questionnaire, one administered in the control group, was neutral, emphasizing neither stereotype. After completing the questionnaire, all the women took a difficult math test. The women who were reminded of their Asian heritage correctly answered 54 percent of the questions. Those in the control group answered, on average, 49 percent correctly. The women who were reminded only of their gender scored the lowest, 43 percent right.

We don’t really need to read a few paragraphs about women being bad at math in order to stereotype and handicap ourselves in more consequential ways. Hewlett-Packard conducted a study to figure out how to get more women into top management. These numbers say it all: The authors found that the women working at H-P applied for promotions only when they believed they met 100 percent of the qualifications necessary for the job. The men were happy to apply when they thought they could meet 60 percent of the job requirements. So, essentially, women feel confident only when we are perfect. Or practically perfect.

Underqualified and underprepared men don’t think twice about leaning in. Overqualified and overprepared, too many women still hold back. And the confidence gap is an additional lens through which to consider
why it is
women don’t lean in. Even when we are prepared to tolerate the personal disruption that comes with aiming high, even when we have plenty of ambition, we fundamentally doubt ourselves.

An Even Dirtier Secret