If self-praise is no recommendation, then why do men get away with it far more often than women?
The sprog came home from school recently with a paper showing a test result of 90%, which she shoved meaningfully under my nose for comment. Idiot that I am, I made a joke about what happened to the other 10%. The face fell. The backtracking came too late. Another confidence boost opportunity missed.
The shame came back to me this week after news of a study that found male scientists are more likely than female ones to publish work they themselves describe as “excellent”, “unique”, or “novel”.
In the case of the word “novel”, a paper was 59% more likely to include the term if one or both of its authors were male.
The study didn’t consider whether or not the work was, in fact, more novel, or unique — the implication was that this did not matter. It was the confidence that counted.
More to the point, the study also demonstrated a greater likelihood that a scientific study would be used as a reference point in future studies if it contained at least one positive term about itself.
Meaning, if I can paraphrase, that bragging about your own work is actually an effective marketing tool, even in what we imagine to be the wholly factbased world of scientific study. And men are better at it.
Not that this is news, really. I once worked with someone who, no matter what his task was at any given time, routinely described his own work as being “incredibly important”.
And the remarkable thing to observe was this: he prevailed. Most weeks, his assessment of his task was accepted as being correct. It all goes to call into question the old adage: selfpraise is no praise. But is it?
The issue won’t surprise anyone who’s been paying attention to the way men and women present themselves in education, in their private lives and in their working lives.
Self-deprecation is not a uniquely female thing, of course, but it’s often at the core of women’s sense of humour in a way that you don’t see among men.
It’s not clear why there’s such a difference, but it seems pretty clear that there’s a gender confidence gap that seems to begin in childhood and that generally seems to get amplified as life goes on.
In 2011, the Institute of Leadership and Management surveyed British managers about how confident they feel in their professions. Half the female respondents reported self-doubt about their job performance. Fewer than a third of male respondents did.
More recent studies have suggested things may be even more complicated — that women in leadership roles essentially feel no less confident than men about their abilities, but are reluctant to demonstrate this openly, because when they do so, they are judged negatively in a way that men never would be.
This last point reminded me of the women I have worked with in the past whose outward confidence was no less than that of male colleagues.
They, too, ended up being successful, in some instances beyond the core merit of their work. But the difference was they were indeed often judged negatively, called bossy, full of themselves, arrogant.
They had to be tough to suck that up — and they were. But the basic unfairness of it is hard to overlook.
Awareness is, one might hope, half the battle here and there are grounds to hope that all of this is starting to change.
That said, my personal observations of the current swishyhaired generation of young women make me a little nervous for them.
Could it be that the confidence gap lies behind the results of a depressing study last week that found a pay gap between male and female graduates opens up within a year of leaving college and widens over time?
The research showed that men earn, on average, £12 per week more within a year of graduating and £100 per week more after eight years. We need to break this cycle.
And the next time the sprog brings home a great test result, I will do a celebratory dance.