Katty Kay, the anchor journalist at BBC World News America, during an interview, quoted an experiment conducted by Professor Zachery Estes, during which he asked a group of individuals to solve the same set of spatial awareness problems. He went over the results post-experiment and noticed that women were skipping questions as they were unsure or thought they’d get it wrong. Men, on the other hand, who comparatively answered more questions, did better. He then repeated the experiment, this time mandating answering every question. This time women fared much better. This shows how women tend to overthink and underestimate themselves and are comparatively more afraid of getting questions wrong while men tend to overestimate themselves.

Confidence can be defined as the belief and/or faith in your capability or potential. Confidence is an incredibly vital component of an individual's life, it plays a significant role in paving the way for an individual's future and opportunities.

Confidence can facilitate advancements in several aspects of life. For example, confidence plays a major role in career advancement. It impacts the way that individuals perceive their potential, how they interpret challenges, solve problems, and seize opportunities. With higher confidence, individuals are more likely to step out of their comfort zone, propose innovative ideas, and step up for leadership roles or promotions. Naturally, with lower confidence, individuals tend to overthink their next steps, resulting in lower risk-taking decisions or competitive drive which often slows down career progression.

As well as that, confidence drives individuals to have the motivation and faith in themselves to approach other individuals, in forms of socializing or networking. Individuals who are more confident often socialize and network more willingly and so are perceived as more competent and likable - this helps with the better development of professional and personal relationships, which in turn facilitates the social enrichment, and often professional advancements of individuals.

Furthermore, Higher confidence also promotes a growth mindset. This allows individuals to be more open to change and trying out new things. This allows individuals to better deal with uncertainty and failure. Individuals with higher confidence are also likely to have lower amounts of stress and anxiety which facilitates satisfaction and happiness.

It’s no surprise that confidence plays a huge role in almost all aspects of life and without that confidence, individuals lose out on opportunities and places for growth. The Confidence Gap is one that exists between individuals, it is when certain groups of people develop a lower confidence level as a result of societal implications.

Natalie Torres-Haddad spoke about how people tend to under-exaggerate their accomplishments, to ensure that they don’t seem full of themselves or egoistic. In reality, this undermines the hard work of the individual/team/organization, which can be extremely detrimental to the progression of an individual or company because the audience or investor does not understand the true intensity of the accomplishment.

A study from Cornell University showed that men tend to overestimate their qualities while women tend to underestimate them. The confidence lack in women was also often described as the “Imposter challenge” as women often believed that they were imposters and didn't deserve good things that happened to them. Another finding was that women worry much more about being disliked or about disappointing others around them. This results in the confidence gap between women and men.

There are several reasons for why this confidence gap may develop:

Stereotypes: From an early age, children are often socialized differently as a result of their sex, race, or background. Perceptions such as, “boys are better at math and girls are better at language and literature.” tend to demotivate students from pursuing their choice of subject. This often leads to individuals feeling incapable of performing well in certain subjects.

Lack of Representation: The representation and presentation of like individuals within specific roles or positions often influence the internal belief of personal potential and capabilities. For example, with a lower representation of women as CEOs and within leadership positions in Fortune 500 companies, women working within these multinational corporations begin to internally believe that they aren’t meant for leadership positions, which often demotivates an individual to even strive for promotions or to do better.

Risk Aversion: Research shows that women are often much more risk-averse as compared to men. This is a result of societal expectations on women, which results in society inadvertently encouraging young girls to be much more perfectionist, and encouraging young boys to take more risks. An example of this is how from a young age, women are praised for remaining polite, neat, and well-behaved while misbehavior or chaos from young boys is often excused as “boys will be boys”. This results in women developing a mindset in which they begin to believe that remaining well-behaved is the pathway to success and glory, while men still take risks and challenge norms to strive for success.

This difference in confidence between men and women is a result of societal expectations and socialization attitudes imposed on them from a young age.

Another form of the confidence gap is one between privileged and less privileged members of society. People who come from more privileged sections of society tend to have a higher confidence as compared to those in the less privileged section. This can be due to several factors.

Lack of Resources: Individuals from privileged sections of society are often confronted with a lack of resources such as quality education and supportive networks which often results in the lack of exposure to opportunities for achievement and confidence building.

Stereotypes: Often due to socioeconomic background, race, or ethnicity, individuals develop internalized stereotypes and reduce the confidence and belief in the individuals.

Both these forms of confidence gaps highlight the true disparity in opportunities amongst segregated groups of individuals. These disparities manifest themselves as a result of the differences that we, as a society, encourage from a young age. The moment we take time to prioritize fair and equal education, representation, and distribution of resources without the endorsement of stereotypes, we would be able to streamline productivity and growth in all sectors - as the further inclusion and representation of different people with different kinds of problems promotes the development of more inclusive and effective solutions.