This Throwback Thursday, Chiller's bringing you a Blair Witch twofer: the original horror classic The Blair Witch Project at 9pm, followed by its first sequel. The Confidence Gap - The Atlantic. For years, we women have kept our heads down and played by the rules. In the United States, women now earn more college and graduate degrees than men do. We make up half the workforce, and we are closing the gap in middle management. Half a dozen global studies, conducted by the likes of Goldman Sachs and Columbia University, have found that companies employing women in large numbers outperform their competitors on every measure of profitability. Our competence has never been more obvious. Those who closely follow society. In two decades of covering American politics, they have interviewed some of the most influential women in the nation. They were surprised to discover the extent to which these women suffered from self- doubt. The statistics are well known: at the top, especially, women are nearly absent, and our numbers are barely increasing. Half a century since women first forced open the boardroom doors, our career trajectories still look very different from men. Typically speaking, men have a propensity to be overconfident, leaving them irrelevant and exposed to failure more often than they should. If I had to pick, I'd rather be a witch than shut out. Maternal instincts do contribute to a complicated emotional tug between home and work lives, a tug that, at least for now, isn. Other commentators point to cultural and institutional barriers to female success. But these explanations for a continued failure to break the glass ceiling are missing something more basic: 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. Why did the successful investment banker mention to us that she didn? What did it mean when the engineer who? 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. By viewing our video content you are accepting the terms of our Video Services Policy. Find the latest sports news and articles on the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, NCAA college football, NCAA college basketball and more at ABC News. Those millions of Ashley Madison men were paying to hook up with women who appeared to have created profiles and then simply disappeared. Were they cobbled together. Discover a Bigger Life. And yet our experience suggests that the power centers of this nation are zones of female self- doubt. Comparing notes about confidence over dinner one night last year, despite how well we knew each other, was a revelation. Katty got a degree from a top university, speaks several languages, and yet had spent her life convinced that she just wasn. She still entertained the notion that her public profile in America was thanks to her English accent, which surely, she suspected, gave her a few extra IQ points every time she opened her mouth. QUIZ: Take the authors. And she, too, for years, routinely deferred to the alpha- male journalists around her, assuming that because they were so much louder, so much more certain, they just knew more. She subconsciously believed that they had a right to talk more on television. But were they really more competent? Or just more self- assured? We began to talk with other highly successful women, hoping to find instructive examples of raw, flourishing female confidence. But the more closely we looked, the more we instead found evidence of its shortage. The shortage of female confidence is increasingly well quantified and well documented. In 2. 01. 1, the Institute of Leadership and Management, in the United Kingdom, surveyed British managers about how confident they feel in their professions. Half the female respondents reported self- doubt about their job performance and careers, compared with fewer than a third of male respondents. The Jarring Reasons People Don. Americans have about an administration run by former First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is that she is not qualified. This despite the fact that her resume would make her easily the best- qualified Oval Office holder on paper since George H. W. At Manchester Business School, in England, professor Marilyn Davidson has seen the same phenomenon, and believes that it comes from a lack of confidence. Each year she asks her students what they expect to earn, and what they deserve to earn, five years after graduation. At the time, Dunning and a Cornell colleague, Justin Kruger, were just finishing their seminal work on something that. The less competent people are, the more they overestimate their abilities. They gave male and female college students a quiz on scientific reasoning. Before the quiz, the students rated their own scientific skills. The women rated themselves more negatively than the men did on scientific ability: on a scale of 1 to 1. When it came to assessing how well they answered the questions, the women thought they got 5. And how did they actually perform? Their average was almost the same. The women were much more likely to turn down the opportunity: only 4. Their performances do not differ in quality. Talking with Ehrlinger, we were reminded of something Hewlett- Packard discovered several years ago, when it was trying to figure out how to get more women into top management positions. A review of personnel records found that women working at HP applied for a promotion only when they believed they met 1. Men were happy to apply when they thought they could meet 6. At HP, and in study after study, the data confirm what we instinctively know. Underqualified and underprepared men don. Overqualified and overprepared, too many women still hold back. Women feel confident only when they are perfect. Or practically perfect. How . The actual performances did not differ in quality. Today, when she wants to give her students an example of a study whose results are utterly predictable, she points to this one. On the other side of the country, the same thing plays out every day in Victoria Brescoll. But although all of her students are top- of- the- chart smart, she. But not with such exacting and repetitive zeal, and they don. If anything, men tilt toward overconfidence. Ernesto Reuben, a professor at Columbia Business School, has come up with a term for this phenomenon: honest overconfidence. In a study he published in 2. We were curious to find out whether male managers were aware of a confidence gap between male and female employees. And indeed, when we raised the notion with a number of male executives who supervised women, they expressed enormous frustration. They said they believed that a lack of confidence was fundamentally holding back women at their companies, but they had shied away from saying anything, because they were terrified of sounding sexist. One male senior partner at a law firm told us the story of a young female associate who was excellent in every respect, except that she didn. His takeaway was that she wasn. He eventually concluded that confidence should be a formal part of the performance- review process, because it is such an important aspect of doing business. The fact is, overconfidence can get you far in life. Cameron Anderson, a psychologist who works in the business school at the University of California at Berkeley, has made a career of studying overconfidence. In 2. 00. 9, he conducted some novel tests to compare the relative value of confidence and competence. He gave a group of 2. Among the names were some well- disguised fakes: a Queen Shaddock made an appearance, as did a Galileo Lovano, and an event dubbed Murphy. The experiment was a way of measuring excessive confidence, Anderson reasoned. The fact that some students checked the fakes instead of simply leaving them blank suggested that they believed they knew more than they actually did. At the end of the semester, Anderson asked the students to rate one another in a survey designed to assess each individual. The students who had picked the most fakes had achieved the highest status. I Wasn't a Fan of Sheryl Sandberg. But deep down, we knew we. Within any given organization, be it an investment bank or the PTA, some individuals tend to be more admired and more listened to than others. They are not necessarily the most knowledgeable or capable people in the room, but they are the most self- assured. He mentioned expansive body language, a lower vocal tone, and a tendency to speak early and often in a calm, relaxed manner. Infuriatingly, a lack of competence doesn. True overconfidence is not mere bluster. Anderson thinks the reason extremely confident people don. They genuinely believe they are good, and that self- belief is what comes across. Fake confidence, he told us, just doesn. Studies Anderson is now conducting suggest that others can see the . Most people can spot fake confidence from a mile away. Women applied for a promotion only when they met 1. Men applied when they met 5. Once we got over our feeling that Anderson. You have to have it to excel. We also began to see that a lack of confidence informs a number of familiar female habits. Take the penchant many women have for assuming the blame when things go wrong, while crediting circumstance. Dunning has noticed that male students typically recognize the hurdle for what it is, and respond to their lower grades by saying, . Women tend to respond differently. When the course gets hard, Dunning told us, their reaction is more likely to be . Study after study confirms that it is largely a female issue, one that extends through women. We watch our male colleagues take risks, while we hold back until we. We fixate on our performance at home, at school, at work, at yoga class, even on vacation. We obsess as mothers, as wives, as sisters, as friends, as cooks, as athletes. Bob Sullivan and Hugh Thompson, the authors of The Plateau Effect, call this tendency the . The irony is that striving to be perfect actually keeps us from getting much of anything done. So where does all of this start? If women are competent and hardworking enough to outpace men in school, why is it so difficult to keep up later on? As with so many questions involving human behavior, both nature and nurture are implicated in the answers.
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