The Confidence Code Read Online Free PDF

this for about seven years,” she said, “and every year there are massive differences between the male and female responses. The male students expect to earn significantly more than the women, and when you look at what the students think they deserve to earn, again the differences are huge.” On average, she says, the men think they deserve $80,000 a year and the women $64,000—a $16,000 difference.
    As reporters we are always thrilled to find precise measures, but still, the number is dismaying. Think about that for a minute. What Davidson’s findings really mean is that women effectively believe they are 20 percent less valuable than men believe they are.
    A more meticulous study by Cornell psychologist David Dunning and University of Washington psychologist Joyce Ehrlinger homed in on the perplexing issue of female confidence versus competence. At the time, Dunning and a Cornell colleague, Justin Kruger, were just finishing their seminal work on something called the Dunning-Kruger effect—the tendency for some people to substantially overestimate their abilities. (The less competent they are, the more they overestimate their abilities. Think about it for a minute. It makes strange sense.)
    Dunning and Ehrlinger wanted to focus specifically on women, and the impact of their preconceived notions about their ability on their confidence. They gave male and female college students a pop quiz on scientific reasoning. Before the quiz, the students rated themselves on their scientific skills. “We wanted to see whether your general perception of ‘Am I good in science?’ shapes your impression of something that should be separate: ‘Did I get this question right?’   ” Ehrlinger said. The women rated themselves more negatively than the men did in scientific ability. On a scale of 1 to 10, women gave themselves a 6.5 on average, and men gave themselves a 7.6. When it came to assessing how well they answered the questions, women thought they got 5.8 out of 10 right, men 7.1. And how did they actually perform? Their average was almost the same—women got 7.5 out of 10 and men 7.9.
    In a final layer, to show the real impact of self-perception, the students were then asked, having no knowledge about how they’d performed, to participate in a science competition for prizes. The women were much more likely to turn down that opportunity—only 49 percent signed up for the competition, compared with 71 percent of the men.
    “That was a proxy for whether women might seek out certain opportunities,” said Ehrlinger. “Because they are less confident in general in their abilities, that led them to be less confident when they are actually performing in an achievement-related task. This then led them not to want to pursue future opportunities.” It was a concrete example, in other words, of the real-world results of a lack of confidence.
    The data confirms what we instinctively already know. Another example: We know that most women tend to talk less when we’re outnumbered. We go into a meeting, study the layout, and choose to sit at the back of the room. We often keep our thoughts, which we decide can’t be all that impressive, to ourselves. Then we get cross with ourselves when the male colleague next to us sounds smart saying the same thing that we would have said.
    One Princeton research team set out to measure how much less women talk. Male and female volunteers were put to work solving a budget challenge. The study found that in some cases women, when in the minority, spoke 75 percent less than men did. Do we believe our words are that much less valuable? Do we think they are just as valuable, but we don’t have the nerve to spit them out? Either way, we’re underselling ourselves. The kicker is that a man in a room with mostly women talks just as much as he always does.
    “It’s so frustrating that we are typically so silent,” says Virginia Shore, the chief curator of the State Department’s Office of Art in