Do Women And Men Have A Confidence Gap?

During a job interview, we are frequently asked, “what are your strengths?”

How you answer may depend on your gender.

That’s the conclusion of new research, which suggests that men are far more comfortable with self-promotion than are women. According to Christine L. Exley, who teaches at the Harvard Business School and Judd B. Kessler, who teaches at Wharton, “the gender gap in self-promotion is not driven by a gender gap in confidence.” They found that women consistently rated their performance on a test lower than did men — even though men and women had the same average score on the test, and even when women knew how they had done on the test.

In the study, 900 online survey participants were divided into three distinct experiments. All participants answered 20 questions from the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (sample questions here) test. They were then asked how many test questions they believed they had answered correctly as well as other questions designed to measure their levels of self-promotion.