The Confidence Gap Is a Myth. Here Is the Data to Prove It.

The idea that women lack confidence has become one of the most widely accepted explanations for leadership inequality. It appears in boardrooms, talent reviews, and executive coaching sessions. The logic is simple and appealing. Women do not rise because they hesitate. They doubt themselves. They do not reach for senior roles with the same certainty as men. The solution then seems obvious: train women to be bolder.

The data tells a very different story. More than four decades of research show that what is commonly labelled a confidence gap is not rooted in women’s psychology. It is shaped by situational design, biased evaluation systems, and uneven promotion criteria. When those conditions change, perceived confidence differences largely disappear. The problem is not women’s self-belief. It is how workplaces interpret, reward, and filter behaviour.

Early evidence already dismantled the myth. As far back as the 1970s, social psychologist Ellen Lenney challenged the assumption that women were inherently less confident. Her review of the academic literature showed that women’s self-confidence shifted depending on task type, the presence of clear performance feedback, and the degree of social comparison involved. Women underestimated themselves primarily when results were ambiguous and comparison pressure was high. When feedback was explicit and task ability was clear, women’s confidence did not lag behind men’s. That finding remains decisive today. Confidence does not decline because of gender. It declines when performance is evaluated in vague, socially comparative environments.

Long-term data reinforces this pattern. A large-scale study by Zenger and Folkman, drawing on thousands of leadership assessments, shows that young women begin their careers with lower confidence ratings than men. But that gap reverses dramatically over time. Between the ages of 25 and 60, women’s confidence increases by 29 percentile points while men’s rises by just 8.5 points. After age 60, women’s confidence continues to grow while men’s begins to decline. This trajectory alone should force a rethink of the confidence narrative. If women truly lacked confidence as a fixed trait, the gap would widen with experience. Instead, it shrinks and then inverts. What changes is not personality. What changes is opportunity, accumulated mastery, and exposure to leadership roles.

The early-career confidence gap is not explained by internal hesitation. It aligns precisely with how promotion systems operate. Men are typically promoted based on perceived potential while women are promoted based on proven performance. This structural difference is not theoretical. It has now been demonstrated at scale. A study of nearly 30,000 management-track employees in a major North American retail organization found that women consistently outperformed men in their current roles but were rated lower in future potential. These lower potential scores accounted for roughly half of the observed gender gap in promotions. Crucially, the potential ratings assigned to women were not predictive of future performance or retention. Women who were rated as having lower potential went on to outperform men who had been given the same rating. This is a profound systems failure. Women are being assessed more harshly before promotions and then outperforming their assessment after promotion, yet their perceived potential does not update accordingly. The inaccurate judgment becomes self-reinforcing. What gets interpreted as lower confidence is often the rational result of repeated underestimation from the system itself.

There may be one unintended consequence of this heightened scrutiny. Because women face steeper thresholds for advancement, many invest more heavily in their own development. Later-career data shows women rating themselves as more effective leaders than men in multiple competencies. This stands in direct contrast to the persistent stereotype that confidence remains a male advantage throughout the career lifespan.

Confidence, however, is only one part of the equation. Ambition is often misrepresented alongside it. If women truly held themselves back, we would expect to see lower aspiration. The evidence again contradicts the assumption. McKinsey and LeanIn’s Women in the Workplace reports consistently find that women and men report equal levels of ambition and effort to advance. In 2018, women negotiated for promotions at least as often as men. In the 2023 data, nine out of ten women under 30 expressed a desire to be promoted, and three out of four aspired to senior leadership. The same pattern holds at the director level. Women and men report equal interest in executive roles. Among younger cohorts, women’s leadership ambition is often higher. Women of color demonstrate particularly high ambition. Ninety-six percent report that their careers are important to them, and eighty-eight percent aspire to promotion. Yet they face compounded barriers created by the intersection of racial and gender bias, reduced access to sponsorship, and exclusion from critical networks. Their ambition is not lacking. Their opportunity is constrained.

So why does the confidence myth survive?

Part of the answer lies in how women interpret job fit. Research on job crafting shows that employees actively redesign their roles to align with personal values and life priorities. Some women rationalize themselves out of promotions not because they lack belief in their abilities, but because leadership roles are framed in ways that signal poor fit with family life, flexibility, or meaning. This is a response to cultural messaging, not self-doubt.

A strong statistical takedown of the confidence gap comes from a meta-analysis by Catherine Tinsley and Robin Ely. Across multiple large studies, the effect size for gender differences in self-confidence was just 0.10. In statistical terms, that difference is trivial. It is so small that it carries no meaningful predictive power in real-world settings. Risk-taking differences were similarly negligible with an effect size of 0.13. In practical terms, this means you cannot reliably predict confidence based on gender. The distributions overlap almost entirely. The persistence of the confidence narrative is not a reflection of data. It is a reflection of organisational storytelling.

For CEOs and executive teams, this presents a critical leadership test. If the confidence gap were real, leadership interventions would focus primarily on individual psychology. But if the gap is structural, then the responsibility shifts decisively to promotion systems, evaluation criteria, sponsorship allocation, and leadership modelling. When men are promoted on potential and women on proof, confidence diverges as a downstream effect. When performance feedback is vague, self-assessment gaps widen. When sponsorship flows unevenly, visibility compounds. When job design signals incompatibility with life, talented leaders self-select out. None of this originates inside confidence.

The cost of misdiagnosing the problem is not theoretical. It shapes who gets accelerated, whose risks are tolerated, and whose leadership is seen before it is validated. Over time, organisations that mistake perception for performance systematically distort their own talent pipelines. The confidence gap is not a leadership failure on the part of women. It is a measurement failure on the part of organisations. When performance standards are explicit, when promotion criteria are transparent, when potential is evaluated symmetrically, and when sponsorship is structured rather than informal, the confidence myth collapses. What replaces it is a far more accurate story: talent rises when systems permit it.

The data is no longer ambiguous. Women’s confidence is not deficient. It is responsive. It reflects how accurately organisations read, reward, and reinforce ability. The real leadership question is not how to make women more confident. It is how long companies can afford to confuse bias with insight.

Written by Professor Ginka Toegel.