Women are their own enemies

One of the things I observe with many women I work with is that they tend to be more reluctant to self-promote. They can do brilliant work but tell people that ‘it really was nothing’, while some men produce substandard work and still think they are god’s gift to the world. This lack of self-promotion has significant consequences for the career paths of women, as a new study demonstrates.

In a lab experiment, 350 participants completed a task consisting of 20 questions on science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM). The participants were then asked to self-evaluate their performance and guess their score. These self-evaluations were then sent to 1,750 other participants who acted as ‘career advisers’ to the participants and recommended them either a more ambitious next task or a less ambitious one.

On average, men got 11 out of 20 questions in the quiz right, while women got 10 out of 20 right, but no matter the result, men were consistently guessing a higher number of correct answers than women.

Average guessed score vs true score

This overconfidence of men in their abilities resulted in them presenting their work in a better light to the adviser. The result was that in this baseline scenario, advisers recommended 44% of men for the more ambitious task but only 31% of women.

When the actual score in the quiz was given as additional information to the advisers (the ‘objective’ setting), the gap between men and women declined. Now, more men (47%) were recommended for the more ambitious task, but significantly more women (37%) as well.

But if advisers were made aware of the fact that women tend to underpromote their skills and achievements while men overpromote them, the advisers adjusted their recommendations and flipped them. Now 47% of women were recommended for the more ambitious task, but only 37% of men.

Personally, I don’t think we should aim to flip the script. Neither the result in the objective setting nor in the nudge setting, where advisers were nudged to give women a leg up, are particularly fair, in my view. But what this experiment shows is that women can be their own worst enemies by not promoting their work. And women need to be aware of that and work on being more assertive in promoting their achievements.

Meanwhile, when it comes to objective tests, I think a good step would be to anonymise more of them while scoring. This is done in some exam settings already, but we clearly need to do this more often. If the adviser only sees the result but not who did it (i.e. not even a name or other information that gives a hint about gender), I think the evaluation could become fairer.

Recommendations for a more ambitious task