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Evidence shows that women are less self-assured than men—and that to succeed, confidence matters as much as competence. Here's why, and what to do about it.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/05/the-confidence-gap/359815/
-- submitted from IRC
The elusive nature of confidence has intrigued us ever since we started work on our 2009 book, Womenomics, which looked at the many positive changes unfolding for women. To our surprise, as we talked with women, dozens of them, all accomplished and credentialed, we kept bumping up against a dark spot that we couldn't quite identify, a force clearly holding them back. Why did the successful investment banker mention to us that she didn't really deserve the big promotion she'd just got? What did it mean when the engineer who'd been a pioneer in her industry for decades told us offhandedly that she wasn't sure she was really the best choice to run her firm's new big project? In two decades of covering American politics as journalists, we realized, we have between us interviewed some of the most influential women in the nation. In our jobs and our lives, we walk among people you would assume brim with confidence. And yet our experience suggests that the power centers of this nation are zones of female self-doubt—that is, when they include women at all.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 15 2015, @04:39PM
Not to claim anything against a gender difference on average here, but plenty of men lack confidence as well (plus there's currently no major campaign pushing the category of underconfident men into more assertive positions and public exposure), and the "impostor effect" is common in both genders as well. Even (perhaps especially) those exhibiting hubris may lack inward confidence or harbor counterintuitive insecurities along with it.
Meanwhile, that we give so much favoritism to outward signifiers of confidence is itself something of a pathological bias; rather than advocating that people get better at taking advantage of such perceptual biases, as many business/"success"-oriented articles shamelessly do for this and far worse, we ought to be actively counteracting and deprecating these memes. Just check out forbes (or similar) articles for a million variations of the theme "10 things deeply wrong with corporate culture and how to exploit them like a sociopath".
Of course none of this is to say that some of the rampant self-doubt isn't a problem as well, but it's not really a matter of faking or focusing on feelings of confidence (or humility); the whole underlying issue is actually the disconnect between perceptions and realities, which is most appropriately and easily remedied by exposing the consequential relationships in question. That is to say, apply the testing, or discover and promote the metrics, that reveal competency (or lack thereof) objectively, clearly, and frequently. Frequent, apt, and accurate feedback is always the core prerequisite for reliable improvement in any domain. When you know exactly how good you are at what, you don't need to harbor any illusory feelings about it on either side of the spectrum. Ignoring the evidence in favor of judging someone's mood or mannerisms is then all the more clearly seen for its contemptible foolishness.