Unlock Editor’s Digest for free
FT editor Roula Khalaf selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is an associate professor at the Institute of Social Research, University College London.
When Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean on came out in 2013, it struck a chord with many women. In it, she posited along with the structural barrier, that women are “holding back” due to their low confidence.
My research supports Sandberg’s hypothesis. But it also tells us that the problem is much more complex. Women’s lack of confidence manifests itself long before they enter the workforce.
Using data from a Center for Longitudinal Studies survey of people born in the same week in Britain in 1970, my colleague Anna Adamecz and I constructed a measure of overconfidence and underconfidence. We looked at study participants’ performance on objective math, English, and IQ tests, as well as self-rated ability questions (e.g., How good are you at math?), which were administered at ages five, 10, and 16. . .
People who consider themselves higher than their position in the actual distribution of abilities are classified as overconfident. Those who rank lower are classified as insecure.
Perhaps not surprisingly, women are more likely to be classified as insecure. Thanks to the power of longitudinal data, we can follow these people into the labor market and track any gender gaps in their earnings when they are mid-career, at age 42.
Lack of confidence is not the only reason for the gender pay gap, but it plays an important role. It’s not simply that men are rewarded with higher salaries for being overconfident (and so are the few women who fall into that category), but that people who are underconfident, primarily women, face a salary penalty.
Why is that? There are several factors at play. People lacking confidence (both men and women) do worse on their school-leaving exams, are less likely to study high-yield subjects like science and law at university, and end up in less lucrative occupations.
Since women are more likely to lack confidence, they are more affected by this penalty, despite outperforming men at school and university. Therefore, introducing training to build confidence at work is too little, too late. The punishment for lack of confidence is already manifest in decisions about what to study in college and what professions to enter.
It makes sense, then, to think about when and why lack of trust arises. Using data on all twins born in England and Wales between 1994 and 1996, we have begun to analyze these factors. In this data set, boys and girls were asked to self-assess their mathematical ability at age nine. We also look at their actual grades in the subject.
If we take a boy and a girl with the same level of mathematical performance, the boy self-reports himself as much better at the subject than the girl. This difference is even more pronounced when we compare twins and take into account their shared genes and environment. Parents were also asked to evaluate their children’s mathematical ability: they also overestimated their sons’ ability and underestimated their daughters’. Within families, the boy tends to be seen as “the math person” and the girl is not, even if she is better at math.
Economists are good at modeling many things, but trying to fully capture the gender norms and stereotypes that fuel female lack of confidence is a challenge. Home, school, and the workplace are environments where boys may receive overly positive reinforcement, especially when it comes to high-performance subjects such as science and technology, and girls may not.
This situation has implications for the labor market, including the gender pay gap. Instead of putting the onus on women to “lean in” in the workplace, we as parents, teachers, and employers can do better by ending the passing of these norms to the next generation.