INDUSTRY INSIGHT
WHEN ORGANISATIONS LEAN TOO HEAVILY ON CONFIDENCE AS A PROXY FOR READINESS, THEY SYSTEMATICALLY MISREAD TALENT.
Professor Ginka Toegel, Professor and Author
Against this backdrop, another powerful narrative has taken hold: if women would just project greater selfbelief, they would rise more quickly. This is the confidence myth. It suggests that gender inequality is driven mainly by something inside women – a lack of confidence – rather than by the systems in which they work. Sociologists, Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill, describe a wider‘ confidence culture’ in which women are urged to‘ believe in yourself’, buy confidence manuals and attend empowerment programmes that promise success if they fix their mindset. The story is appealing because it is simple and actionable. But a growing body of organisational research shows that the confidence myth is misleading.
What really matters is how organisations interpret and reward confidence signals. A largescale study by Christine Exley and Kirby Nielsen illustrates this clearly. Workers’ self-evaluations follow a familiar pattern: men are more likely to be overconfident about poor performance, and women are more likely to be underconfident about good performance. Evaluators in their experiments say they expect such a gap, yet when they update their beliefs after seeing self-ratings, they still infer a much larger gender performance gap than actually exists. Evaluators treat women’ s more cautious language as evidence of lower ability, even when objective performance is the same. The problem is not simply how confident women feel. It is how organisations read and reward confidence.
Here the gendered double standard comes into focus. Men are often socialised and rewarded for bold, certain behaviour, even when it goes beyond what the evidence justifies. Women who match that behaviour are more likely to be penalised, so they learn to present their views in a more qualified way. Instead of seeing this as a rational adaptation to biased reactions, the confidence myth labels it as a flaw. The result is that organisations mistake noisy overconfidence for leadership potential and misinterpret calibrated communication, particularly from women, as lack of confidence.
Assertiveness norms make this worse. Classic research by Daniel Ames and others shows that leadership effectiveness is related to assertiveness in a curvilinear way. Too little assertiveness and a leader is perceived as indecisive or passive; too much and they are viewed as domineering or abrasive. The most effective leaders sit in the middle, able to push when needed and step back when others should speak. Yet many models of‘ executive presence’ implicitly equate leadership with an always-on style of self-promotion and forceful advocacy. This pushes people, especially men, toward the excessive end of the curve. Women who mirror that style often face backlash, so they walk a narrower tightrope: assertive enough not to be dismissed, but not so assertive that they are judged‘ too much’.
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