SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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) by khallow on Sunday November 15 2015, @08:19PM
I think if anything we err on the side of overconfidence, not underconfidence.
Doubt has its points. Many times, I've seen overconfident loudmouths cause a train wreck. These glory hounds and showboaters push and elbow their way into positions of considerable responsibility, for which they are not competent. In the process, they sideline the quietly competent sort of person who was the best chance of guiding the project to a successful conclusion.
Sometimes it is overconfidence, sometimes it is just a different manifestation of underconfidence. For example, I've seen people (that includes me BTW) get in way over their head because they couldn't admit that they could fail either to others or themselves. Maybe a lot of that is two sides of the same coin.