Confidence Isn’t a Proxy for Competence, and Other Research-Backed Insights Employers Can Use to Narrow the Gender Gap

Woman standing in group of people

BiGS Actionable Intelligence:

BOSTON — When the leaders of the storied network of academic medical centers that make up Mass General Brigham created an innovation office to help medical professionals bring their breakthroughs to market, they had everyone across their enterprises in mind.

But 14 years later, they realized the majority of people getting a boost from their innovation office were men.

That’s when they called on Harvard Business School’s Katherine Coffman. The associate professor, an experimental economist, has earned a reputation for exploring new ways to close the gender gap. The research she undertook at Mass General Brigham led to an overhaul in how its innovation office sought and selected ventures to support.

Today, a greater percentage of them are woman-led and the innovator community initiative better supports women innovators, in skills ranging from learning how to network with external stakeholders to honing the processes to commercialize their work.

“We knew we had a problem, and it was something we were motivated to address,” Diana Schwartzstein, manager director for innovation at Mass General Brigham, told HBS’s The BiGS Fix. “Instead of just jumping in and assuming we knew how to do so, we partnered with a researcher who is really top in her field, who gave us a data-driven approach to help us figure out what the barriers were.”

A Strategy for Shrinking the Gender Gap: Listen to Women

Coffman’s work with the medical center is one example of how her research is helping dismantle barriers for women in the workplace. Most research into the gender gap has focused on what women must do to be heard. Coffman turns the tables on that thinking: Her research shows that instead of putting the onus on women to speak up, employers must listen more to women.

“The models have relied on a person coming into the office and saying, ‘I’m great. I have this great idea,’” Coffman said of workplace assumptions that women fail to assert themselves. Such assumptions, she said, are based on the mistaken premise that women have the same opportunities as their male peers to promote themselves in male-dominated spaces. In fact, they often don’t.

To address that built-in inequity, Coffman said, her data demonstrates that employers could benefit if they “turn that arrow in the other direction, and spend more time trying to find candidates, rather than having those people just identify themselves.”

Coffman’s conclusions draw on years of study. By meticulously designing environments that mimic the workplace in a controlled setting, she uses experimental economics models to move beyond the questions that traditionally have been posed about how gender differences influence behavior in professional environments. Informed as well by principles developed for psychology and sociology research, her work advances the field of workplace inquiry, connecting it with women’s actual experiences.

“The best ideas don't always come from those who are the most likely to speak up,” Coffman said. “And so, if you're a manager who's actually interested in best ideas, best candidates, then … the argument is that there is a distortion, where you might be missing out on some really good efficiency, on increasing productivity, increasing great ideas, because they're not being volunteered.”

It was as a graduate student working toward her doctorate in economics that Coffman said she first began to believe that the solutions offered to close the gender gap in the workplace needed to be rethought. Compiling surveys as part of her studies, she noticed that while men answered every question they were asked, women were “so much more likely than men to admit they didn’t know an answer.”

“It’s not that they were rushing, or they were less interested in the research. Sometimes they were very thoughtful,” Coffman said. “But they were more likely than men to say, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know.’ That was, for me, a lightbulb moment.”

The point, Coffman said, was not that the women were necessarily less self-confident than the men, but that they were believed to be, because they didn’t handle the situation in the same way as men. That realization, she said, has informed her research ever since.

Some Steps To Attract Talented Women

So, how can employers attract and support qualified women employees? Coffman’s work reveals a few relatively simple steps:

  • Seek out talented candidates for openings, rather than waiting for them to apply.

  • Make job descriptions more precise, and include clear, concise descriptions of what you are looking for.

  • Actively try to get information about all qualified candidates, not just about those who appear more qualified at first glance.

  • Award competence, not confidence, by soliciting the opinions of applicants and employees who may not put themselves forward immediately, but who may have a deeper base of knowledge than those who do come forward.

  • Anonymize applications where possible, at least in the initial stages of the hiring process, when it is not necessary to attach the gender of an applicant to the data or information you are evaluating them on.

Finally, how can women applicants and employees navigate their way through a still-inequitable workplace world? Here is some advice, mined from Coffman’s research:

  • Volunteer ideas and put yourself forward.

  • Seek advice from other people and arm yourself with a range of perspectives and information before entering a negotiation.

  • Be deliberate in decision-making, without overestimating the risks.

  • Seek allies who can help you amplify your status or your voice, even in a discriminatory situation.

HOW TO ENGAGE WITH HBS BiGS

Actionable insights in your inbox

Get the latest from BiGS