Confidence on Men and Women and Its Implication for Elementary School

Below is a fascinating article summary from "The Confidence Gap" in May issue of The Atlantic, May 2014 

The summary quotes are longer than usual because there is a lot of interesting information here—both from a personal and professional standpoint.

As I read the article, I kept thinking of the different ways my wife and I approach situations and issues and to what extent our gender and our self-confidence influence our actions. As the article highlights, my wife is confident only when she feels she is perfect while I possess what the authors deem “honest overconfidence” in which me like me believe they’re better than they actually are.

The article also provides great recommendations for how we as elementary school teacher can develop confidence in girls.

Joe

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For years, women have believed that with enough hard work, our natural talents would be recognized and rewarded. And indeed, women have made tremendous gains: they are half the American workforce, earn more than half of college and graduate degrees, and are increasing their share of leadership roles in many fields. Yet, as we’ve worked, ever diligent, the men around us have continued to get promoted faster and be paid more.

What’s going on? Childrearing is part of the answer. So are cultural and institutional barriers to female success. But another contributing factor is women’s acute lack of confidence. And this is true of even the most highly accomplished women we have interviewed. Compared to men, women don’t consider themselves as ready for promotions, they predict they’ll do worse on tests, and they generally underestimate their abilities.

In one study, male and female college students took a quiz on science reasoning and scored virtually the same – 7.9 and 7.5 out of 10, respectively. Before they took the test, students were asked whether they were good at science: men rated themselves 7.6 on a 10-point scale, women rated themselves 6.5. Asked how they thought they would do on the quiz, men said 7.1, women 5.8. After the quiz (before they were told the results), students were invited to participate in a science competition for prizes: 71 percent of the men signed up – and only 49 percent of the women.

A similar finding emerged from a study at Hewlett Packard of employees applying for promotions: women applied only when they met 100 percent of the qualifications; men applied if they met 60 percent. Underqualified and underprepared men don’t think twice about leaning in. Overqualified and overprepared, too many women still hold back. Women feel confident only when they are perfect. Or practically perfect. Along with perfectionism go other tendencies: taking the blame when things go wrong, crediting luck or other people’s help when they succeed, concluding that they’re not good enough when they hit a rough patch, and avoiding risks.

Do men doubt themselves sometimes? Of course. But not with such exacting and repetitive zeal, and they won’t let their doubts stop them as often as women do. Men tend to possess “honest overconfidence” – they really believe they’re better than they actually are, which is why they don’t alienate people by coming across as arrogant or overconfident.

And this trait pays dividends in life: it turns out that confidence matters as much as competence. 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 – manifested in expansive body language, a calm, relaxed manner, and speaking early and often. For decades women have misunderstood an important law of the professional jungle. It’s not enough to keep one’s head down and plug away, checking items off a list. Having talent isn’t merely about being competent; confidence is a part of that talent. You have to have it to excel.

What explains the deficit of female confidence? There are some brain and hormonal differences that seem to tilt males toward risk-taking, conflict, and aggression – and females toward relationships, worrying, and dwelling on past negative experiences. But recent research on brain plasticity raises the chicken-and-egg question: is it nature or is it nurture? To explore the role of nurture, here are three arenas where confidence may be encouraged – or discouraged:

The elementary classroom:  It’s well-established that girls begin school with some developmental advantages over boys: they have longer attention spans, more-developed verbal and fine-motor skills, and are more socially adept. School is where many girls are first rewarded for being good, instead of energetic, rambunctious, or even pushy. Soon they learn that they are most valuable, and most in favor, when they do things the right way: neatly and quietly. In turn, they begin to crave the approval they get for being good. There’s certainly no harm intended by overworked, overstressed teachers (or parents). Who doesn’t want a kid who works hard and doesn’t cause a lot of trouble?

But the result is that many girls are learning to avoid taking risks and making mistakes – and mistakes are essential to building confidence. Stanford social psychologist Carol Dweck noticed that boys get eight times more criticism than girls in elementary classrooms. Boys get a lot more scolding and punishment, but it’s less damaging because of the way many adults express it: Boys’ mistakes are attributed to a lack of effort, while girls come to see mistakes as a reflection of their deeper qualities. Girls are praised for being perfect, and this comes back to haunt them when they mess up.

The playground: Boys also benefit from the rough-and-tumble of unstructured play. From kindergarten on they roughhouse, tease one another, point out one another’s limitations, and call one another morons and slobs. Many learn to let derogatory remarks slide off their backs and they become more resilient.

The sports field: Girls who play team sports are more likely to graduate from college, find jobs in male-dominated fields, and earn bigger salaries. But despite Title IX, girls are still not participating in athletics as much as boys, and they are nearly six times as likely to drop out of sports teams, especially during adolescence.

What a vicious circle: girls lose confidence, so they quit competing, thereby depriving themselves of one of the best ways to regain it. They leave school crammed full of interesting historical facts and elegant Spanish subjunctives, proud of their ability to study hard and get the best grades, and determined to please. But somewhere between the classroom and the cubicle, the rules change, and they don’t realize it. They slam into a work world that doesn’t reward them for perfect spelling and exquisite manners. And their confidence takes another beating.

What often happens when women do display confidence in the classroom and the workplace. Attitudes toward women are changing, and for the better, but a host of troubling research shows that they can still pay a heavier social and even professional penalty than men do for acting in a way that’s seen as aggressive. If a woman walks into her boss’s office with unsolicited opinions, speaks up first at meetings, or gives business advice above her pay grade, she risks being disliked or even – let’s be blunt – being labeled a bitch. The more a woman succeeds, the worse the vitriol seems to get. It’s not just her competence that’s called into question; it’s her very character. Which is why many accomplished women play down their competence and power – while men in similar positions tend to do the opposite.

Despite some early doubts, we believe all this can be changed. Confidence is not, as we once believed, just feeling good about yourself. A better definition of confidence comes from State University psychologist Richard Petty: Confidence is the stuff that turns thoughts into action. It turns thoughts into judgments about what we’re capable of doing, which affects the ability to execute. This suggests a “virtuous circle: Confidence is a belief in one’s ability to succeed, a belief that stimulates action. In turn, taking action bolsters one’s belief in one’s ability to succeed. So confidence accumulates – through hard work, through success, and even through failure.

There has been interesting research by University of Warwick psychologist Zachary Estes on men’s and women’s performance reorganizing 3-D images on a computer screen. When first tested, women did much worse than men, but when Estes looked at the data, he noticed that women hadn’t attempted many of the puzzles – they’d given up. He ran the test again, this time telling everyone that they had to at least attempt every puzzle. This time the women did just as well as the men. The experiment illustrates a key point. The natural result of low confidence is inaction. When women don’t act, when we hesitate because we aren’t sure, we hold ourselves back. But when we do act, even if it’s because we were forced to, we perform just as well as men do.

Estes then conducted two other experiments. First, he gave men and women different puzzles and asked them before they attempted each one how confident they felt about having the correct solution. Women’s scores dropped to 75 percent while men’s rose to 93. One little nudge asking women how sure they are about something rattles their world while the same gesture reminds men that they’re terrific.

These results could not be more relevant to understanding the confidence gap, and figuring out how to close it. What doomed the women in Estes’s lab was not their actual ability to do well on the tests. They were as able as the men were. What held them back was the choice they made not to try. The advice implicit in such findings is hardly unfamiliar: to become more confident, women need to stop thinking so much and just act… If we keep at it, if we channel our talent for hard work, we can make our brains more confidence-prone. What the neuroscientists call plasticity, we call hope.