The Gender Confidence Gap Myth
Episode 425 | Author: Emilie Aries
It’s not confidence women are lacking…
Today we are talking all about the supposed confidence gap.
Now you've probably heard this pseudo-statistic thrown around that women only apply to jobs when they meet 100% of the qualifications, whereas men apply to jobs when they meet only about 60% of the qualifications.
And what we're supposed to deduce from this “fact,” which has circulated widely for over a decade now, is that women are simply lacking confidence. Entire books have been written about cracking the confidence code, basically telling women to fake it till you make it.
debunking the confidence gap myth
Well, I am delighted to share that I can now join so many other feminists in debunking this myth, because the fact of the matter is, this supposed statistic that has been splashed all over headlines and led to countless clickbait-y articles and entire books full of women's career advice telling us to just have more confidence, originated from a never-published, internal, non-peer-reviewed, non-academic paper from Hewlett Packard, from way back in the eighties or nineties. If you follow the footnotes and try to track this data down, you can't find it.
But what I find even more interesting than the fact that this factless information has become so widely known and so widely shared by people, is that it did really did resonate with so many people, including many women. There’s part of this pseudo-statistic that kind of gave some explanation for women as to why the rules of the game at work are not fair. It was reassuring to women navigating a patriarchal world to think that maybe, just maybe, there was something we individually could do about that fundamental unfairness by flouting the rules a little bit more.
But at the same time, this presumption that women are simply lacking in confidence and just need to “go for it” more often, also conveniently puts the blame on women themselves. It’s a convenient way out for employers, who can now shirk responsibility for the structural ways in which our world is dominated by men.
Is it confidence? Or clarity?
One article I've often turned to when breaking down this myth is a piece in Harvard Business Review written by Tara Sophia Mohr, who did a survey asking men and women professionals who had decided to not apply for a job, what the reasoning behind passing on that job opportunity was.
Here's what she writes:
men and women gave the same most common reason for not applying, and it was by far the most popular, twice as common as any of the others. With 41% of women and 46% of men indicating that it was their top reason. It was, “I didn't think they would hire me since I didn't meet the qualifications and I didn't want to waste my time and energy."
In other words: people aren't applying for jobs if they don't meet the qualifications because they presume that employers are, in fact, serious about these qualifications being required!
What is most interesting about this highest survey response is that ending part, “I didn't want to waste my time and energy.” If you look further into the research, this might also be due to the fact that women don't have a lot of time.
According to a report by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) in the UK, '“Men spend on average five more hours a week engaged in leisure activities than women do. And that adds up to roughly two hundred and sixty more hours per year.”
This is not just in the UK, either. This leisure gap appears worldwide. So if women's time is especially limited, and we are perceiving qualifications on a job description as actual qualifications that are required, of course women are going to have less time to ‘throw a 'hail Mary’ of a job application for a position for which they truly don't feel qualified.
Or has the gap been ExAGGERATED?
The other study worth mentioning here is a newer academic report from 2022 with a sample size of over 10,000, in which scholars found barely a gender gap in job application confidence at all.
According to the report, Gender Differences In Response to Requirements in Job Adverts, men apply for a job when they reach about 52% of the qualifications, whereas women apply if they meet 55.7%.
First off, this means that everyone's applying not even meeting 60% of the qualifications, which by the way, may be part of the reason the modern job search is such a nightmare right now. All of my job search clients in the HIRED Job Search Accelerator feel like victims of an absolutely overwhelming hiring process these days. To be clear, being a hiring manager is no cakewalk either, because the sheer volume of applicants per open position is absolutely bonkers. So maybe we all should up the ante here.
Second, 52% to 55.7% - while not nothing - is not an enormous gender gap that can be held responsible for the seemingly intractable, larger gender gaps we see in leadership across industries.
Best practices for equitable hiring
The fact of the matter is: if we are more clear in terms of the rules of engagement in the hiring process, this wouldn’t be such a guessing game.
Everyone benefits when the hiring process is clear:
Hiring teams get more qualified candidates who are better fit;
Employers who are trying to recruit more women candidates would get more women applying when the rules of the game are clear because women don't have time to apply to jobs they aren’t qualified for;
Women benefit when we know what it’s going to take to get us to the next level in our careers, or take on a new opportunity altogether.
And men benefit, too! Non-women candidates of all kinds benefit from knowing what the rules of the game hiring process are.
So what can you do?
First, make sure job descriptions that come out of your organization or that you are asked to pass on to your networks clarify required versus desired skills and characteristics associated with any open position.
Then, if you are looking to get more underrepresented candidates, go the extra mile to recruit actively not passively. That means tapping into networks of women and folks of color and other underrepresented groups in your industry and asking not only for their support in sourcing candidates, but maybe asking for their feedback on how you can be more attractive to their community.
And finally, keep in mind that diversity in hiring doesn't matter if the candidates you bring into your workplace feel like they aren’t welcome and don't belong. So if you actually want to retain a diverse workforce, you need to cultivate an inclusive culture, too.
