Ask a man if he is qualified for a job he is sixty percent suited to and he will apply. Ask a woman the same question and she will spend three weeks wondering whether she is ready. This is not a stereotype. It is one of the most consistently replicated findings in workplace psychology, and it has a name. The gender confidence gap.
But the conversation around it has become muddied. On one side, the self-help industry has turned it into a personal failing to be fixed with morning affirmations and power poses. On the other, a growing number of voices argue that confidence is not the problem at all, that the real issue is a system that penalises women for the same behaviours it rewards in men. Both contain truth. Neither tells the whole story.
So here is what the research actually says.
What the Confidence Gap Is and Where It Comes From
The term was popularised by journalists Katty Kay and Claire Shipman in their 2014 book The Confidence Code, which drew on decades of psychological research to argue that women consistently rate their own performance lower than men, even when their actual performance is identical or superior.
This finding has been replicated across studies and contexts. A 2011 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that men overestimate their abilities and performance while women underestimate both. A Hewlett Packard internal report, widely cited since, found that men apply for jobs when they meet 60% of the criteria while women apply only when they meet 100%.
The roots of this gap run deep. Girls are socialised from childhood to be modest, cooperative, and careful. They are praised for being good rather than bold. They are taught that putting yourself forward is arrogant, that certainty is unbecoming, that waiting until you are absolutely ready is responsible rather than limiting. By the time they enter the workplace these messages have been internalised so thoroughly that most women do not even recognise them as external impositions. They experience them as personal truth.
The System Problem Nobody Wants to Ignore
Here is where the conversation has to be honest about something. The confidence gap does not exist in a vacuum. It exists inside a system that has historically punished women for displaying the same confidence it celebrates in men.
A 2019 study from Yale University found that when women expressed anger in professional settings they were rated as less competent and less worthy of status than men expressing the same emotion. Research on self-promotion consistently shows that women who advocate loudly for themselves face social penalties that men do not. The assertive man is decisive. The assertive woman is difficult.
So when we tell women they need to be more confident, we need to be clear about what we are actually asking. We are asking them to navigate a system that will reward their output while quietly penalising their audacity. That is not a small thing to ask.
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, professor of business psychology at University College London, has made the provocative argument that the confidence gap is not a female problem at all. It is a male problem. Men, he argues, are systematically overconfident in ways that lead to poor leadership decisions, unchecked risk-taking, and an occupancy of senior roles they are not equipped to hold. The women below them are not less capable. They are less deluded about their own limitations.
The gap, in other words, cuts both ways.
What Confidence Actually Is
One of the reasons the confidence conversation gets so muddled is that we rarely define what we mean by the word. Confidence is not the absence of doubt. It is not loudness, or certainty, or an unshakeable belief in your own superiority. Those things describe arrogance, and arrogance is not a virtue in any gender.
Real confidence, as psychologist Russ Harris describes it in his work on acceptance and commitment therapy, is the willingness to act in the presence of uncertainty. It is doing the thing while the doubt is still there. It is applying for the job before you feel ready. It is speaking in the meeting before you have rehearsed it three times in your head. It is putting the work out before it feels perfect.
By that definition, confidence is less about feeling and more about behaviour. And behaviour can be changed.
What the Research Says Actually Helps
If the confidence gap is partly structural and partly internalised, the solution has to work on both levels. Here is what the evidence supports.
Reframe failure. Studies on mindset by Carol Dweck at Stanford University show that people who view their abilities as developable rather than fixed are significantly more likely to take on challenges and recover from setbacks. For women who have been socialised toward perfectionism, this reframe is not small. It is foundational.
Track your evidence. Research on self-efficacy, the belief in your ability to succeed at specific tasks, shows it is built through accumulated evidence of past performance. Keeping a record of what you have achieved, the problems you have solved, the moments you delivered under pressure, gives your brain something concrete to draw on when doubt shows up.
Stop waiting to feel ready. A 2021 study in Psychological Science found that action consistently precedes confidence rather than following it. The feeling of being ready is largely a post-hoc rationalisation of having done the thing. You do not feel confident and then act. You act and the confidence follows.
Find rooms where you are reflected. Research on representation consistently shows that seeing women in senior roles increases the confidence and ambition of women below them. This is not just inspiration. It is neurological. The brain updates its model of what is possible based on evidence. Seek out the evidence deliberately.
The Structural Side
Individual work on confidence matters. And it is not enough on its own. Organisations that are serious about the confidence gap need to look at what their culture is actually reinforcing.
Are women being interrupted in meetings and nobody is naming it? Are performance reviews using different language for identical behaviours depending on who is being reviewed? Are promotion criteria written in ways that favour the self-promotional style more common in men? Are women being given stretch assignments at the same rate as their male peers, or are they being protected from risk in ways that quietly limit their development?
Confidence grows in conditions that support it. Companies that say they want more confident women while maintaining cultures that penalise female assertiveness are not actually serious about closing the gap.
The gender confidence gap is real. It is rooted in something structural, it has been compounding since childhood, and it has cost women opportunities, income, and visibility that they should never have had to forfeit. That is worth naming plainly before we move on to solutions.
And here is what is also true. The research is full of women who closed the gap. Not by waiting for the system to change first, not by fixing something broken inside themselves, but by deciding that doubt was allowed to exist without being in charge. Women who applied anyway. Who spoke anyway. Who launched anyway. Who put their hand up in the room before they felt ready and discovered, on the other side of that moment, that ready had been waiting for them all along.
You have more evidence of your own capability than you have been giving yourself credit for. The career you have built, the problems you have solved, the moments you held things together when everything was pulling apart. That is data. Your brain is allowed to use it.
The women who thrive are not the ones who never doubt themselves. They are the ones who stopped treating doubt as a stop sign. They learned to feel it, acknowledge it, and move anyway. And every time they did, the gap got a little smaller.
That is available to you. Not when you are more qualified, more prepared, more certain. Now. Exactly as you are. The next step does not require you to be fearless. It just requires you to take it.
Name: Emily Rose Hartley
Bio: Emily is a freelance copywriter and feminist writer. With 17 years of experience in mindset strategy and coaching, she brings both analysis and lived experience to her writing on gender justice and women’s rights. Based in Newcastle.
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