Latest / Women at Work: Career, Leadership & Modern Work / How The Confidence Gap Starts Earlier Than You Think
Transcript
- Lucas: Luna, I want to start with a number that stopped me cold. A 2025 study from the University of Chicago tracked kids from fourth grade through eighth grade, and by age twelve, girls were thirty percent less likely than boys to volunteer an answer in math and science class — even when they knew the material. Luna: Thirty percent — that's huge. And we're not talking about teenagers, we're talking about fifth and sixth graders. Lucas: Exactly. The researchers controlled for actual test scores. So these weren't girls who didn't know the answer. They knew it. They just hesitated. And that hesitation, that pattern of self-editing before speaking — that's the confidence gap before it becomes the confidence gap. Luna: It's almost like we're training it into them. Or at least, we're not training it out. Lucas: Right. And by the time these girls enter the workforce, they've had a decade or more of practice holding back. Meanwhile, boys their age have been over-claiming — the same study found boys were forty percent more likely to raise their hand when they didn't actually know the answer. Luna: So it's a double inequality. Girls learn to undersell, boys learn to oversell, and both patterns carry right into the corner office. Lucas: Let's talk about what that looks like in practice. A 2024 survey by the leadership consultancy KNP found that women are sixty-five percent more likely than men to wait until they meet one hundred percent of a job's qualifications before applying. Men apply when they meet about sixty percent. Luna: I've seen that number before, but hearing it in the context of a twelve-year-old girl not raising her hand — it clicks differently. The pipeline starts in middle school. Lucas: It does. And the really interesting part is that organizations are starting to notice. I talked to a senior HR executive at a major tech company — she asked not to be named — who told me they're redesigning their promotion process because they realized women were consistently under-nominating themselves. Luna: What did they change? Lucas: They added a structured self-assessment stage where managers have to sit down with each candidate and walk through a list of concrete accomplishments. The woman doesn't have to volunteer them — the manager prompts her. That single change raised female promotion rates by eighteen percent in one year. Luna: So the fix isn't 'tell women to be more confident.' It's 'change the system so confidence isn't the gatekeeper.' Lucas: Exactly. Because telling someone who's been conditioned for a decade to hold back to 'just speak up' is not a strategy. It's a guilt trip. Luna: There's a story I love from a friend at Goldman Sachs. Her manager, a woman, told her she was being considered for vice president. My friend immediately said, 'Oh, I don't think I'm ready.' And the manager said, 'Write me a one-page letter as if you were applying for the job at a competitor. List everything you've done.' She did, and she got the promotion. Lucas: That manager understood the dynamic. She didn't say 'be more confident.' She changed the framing. Writing it down externalizes the evidence. It bypasses the internal critic. Luna: And that's a technique any manager can use. Just hand them a pen. Lucas: Let me bring in another angle. There's a 2026 study from MIT that looked at how teacher feedback differs for boys and girls in STEM classes. They recorded thousands of classroom interactions. Turns out, when boys gave a wrong answer, teachers were more likely to say 'good try, you're on the right track.' When girls gave the same wrong answer, teachers were more likely to say 'let's see if someone else can help' or they simply moved on. Luna: So boys get encouragement to persist, girls get a signal that their contribution wasn't useful. No wonder they stop raising their hands. Lucas: And that difference compounds. By high school, the girls who persist in advanced STEM classes are the ones who had a parent or teacher who explicitly told them that being wrong is part of learning. The boys don't need that message as much — they already got it implicitly. Luna: What about in the workplace? I feel like the same dynamic shows up in meetings every day. Lucas: Absolutely. A study by the Clayman Institute for Gender Research found that women in meetings are interrupted at a rate that's triple that of men. And when a woman is interrupted, she's less likely to re-enter the conversation. Men re-enter about seventy percent of the time. Women re-enter about forty percent. Luna: So the pattern from the classroom — being cut off, then staying quiet — it doesn't end at graduation. Lucas: It doesn't. And here's where it gets really structural. Some companies are now adopting what they call 'structured turn-taking' in meetings. It's simple — the facilitator goes around the room and each person gets a chance to speak without interruption. Google's People Analytics team piloted this in 2024 and found that it increased the share of airtime for women by twenty-two percent. Luna: That's a low-cost, high-impact fix. No training required, just a norm change. Lucas: Right. And it works because it doesn't ask women to change. It asks the environment to change. Luna: I want to push back just a little, though. If we only focus on systemic fixes, do we risk implying that individual women have no agency? That they're just victims of the system? Lucas: That's a fair point. I think the best approach is both-and. Yes, change the system. But also, give women concrete tools to navigate the system as it is right now. The writing exercise from that Goldman manager is a tool. Knowing the research on the confidence gap is a tool. Even just naming the pattern — 'oh, that's the twelve-year-old voice' — can be empowering. Luna: I like that. 'That's the twelve-year-old voice.' I think a lot of women will recognize it. Lucas: And here's something else from the University of Chicago study that I found hopeful. They did a follow-up experiment where they gave girls a five-minute exercise before class — they had to write down three things they were good at in math. That single intervention closed the volunteering gap by sixty percent. Luna: Sixty percent. So a five-minute writing prompt — essentially, a quick confidence boost — undid most of the gap. Lucas: It suggests that the gap is not fixed. It's situational. It's a response to cues. And if you change the cues, you change the behavior. Luna: Which brings us back to the workplace. Maybe managers should start meetings with a similar quick prompt. 'Before we begin, take sixty seconds to jot down one insight you have on this topic.' Lucas: That's exactly what some firms are doing. I know a consulting firm that now starts every brainstorming session with two minutes of silent writing before anyone speaks. They say the quality of ideas went up across the board, not just for women. Luna: So it's not a zero-sum game. Making space for women actually produces better outcomes for everyone. Lucas: That's the argument that tends to get buy-in from leadership. You're not just doing this for gender equity — you're doing it because you're leaving ideas on the table if you don't. Luna: Speaking of leaving ideas on the table — you know, this show really tries to dig into these dynamics every episode. And we keep it ad-free because we want the content itself to be the value. If you've found this series helpful for your own career thinking, listener support is what keeps it going. You can buy us a coffee at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Lucas: Yeah, and we appreciate that. It means we can keep doing deep dives like this without any sponsor influence. So thanks to anyone who chips in. Luna: Alright, back to the confidence gap. Let's talk about one more concrete tool: the 'failure resume.' Lucas: Oh, I love this concept. Tell me more. Luna: A failure resume is exactly what it sounds like — a list of your professional failures, rejections, and mistakes. Some academics use them. The idea is to normalize failure and reduce the fear of it. Because a lot of the confidence gap is really a fear of being wrong. Lucas: And the research backs that up. The University of Chicago study found that the girls who didn't volunteer weren't afraid of being wrong because they didn't know the answer — they were afraid of being seen as wrong. It's a social fear, not an intellectual one. Luna: Exactly. So if you've documented your failures and seen them for what they are — just data points — it takes the sting out. You realize everyone has them. Lucas: I think that's a great note to land on. The confidence gap isn't a personality defect. It's a learned pattern, and patterns can be unlearned — especially when the environment gives you permission to try. Luna: And maybe we all have a twelve-year-old self we need to tell: 'It's okay to raise your hand.' Lucas: Exactly. For Women at Work with Fexingo, I'm Lucas. Luna: And I'm Luna. See you next time.