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To Seem Confident, Women Have to Be Seen as Warm
By Margarita Mayo
Why are there so few women in leadership roles? My research collaborators (Laura Guillén of ESMT and Natalia Karelaia of INSEAD) and I believe we have shed some new light on this conundrum. But first, some background.
One frequently cited reason has to do with confidence. In a previous study, my colleagues and I found that women tend to rate their abilities accurately, while men tend to be overconfident about theirs.1 Thus, one argument goes, women are less confident than men, which hurts their chances of promotion.
Previous research has measured how women see themselves, but we wanted to know how outside perceivers—bosses, subordinates, colleagues—rate women’s confidence, and what influences those ratings.
Susan Fiske and her colleagues have shown that people seem to universally use two dimensions to judge others: competence and warmth.2 We decided to test for both of those in addition to confidence. As a proxy for the likelihood of being promoted, we also tested for influence, on the theory that people who are seen as influential are more likely to be promoted to leadership roles.
We conducted a study analyzing the judgments that colleagues made regarding the competence and warmth of 236 engineers working in project teams at a multinational software development company.3 As part of their performance evaluation, the engineers were evaluated online by their supervisor, peers, and collaborators on competence and warmth. A total of 810 raters provided this confidential evaluation. A year later, we collected a second wave of data on the same 236 engineers about their apparent confidence at work and their influence in the organization. This time, a total of 1,236 raters provided information.
Our study shows that men are seen as confident if they are seen as competent, but women are seen as confident only if they come across as both competent and warm. Women must be seen as warm in order to capitalize on their competence and be seen as confident and influential at work; competent men are seen as confident and influential whether they are warm or not.
In other words, for male engineers, competence and perceived confidence go hand in hand. The more competent male engineers are, the more confident they are seen as being (and vice versa). The more confident they are seen as being, the more influence they have in the organization, regardless of whether others like them. It seems that warmth is irrelevant to men appearing confident and influential, at least when they are performing a typically male job like engineering.
For women, in the absence of warmth there was virtually no relationship between competence and confidence ratings. When women were seen as both warm and competent, they were also seen as more confident—and thus more influential. Competent but less-affable female engineers were evaluated by their colleagues as less confident in their professional roles. These female engineers were, in turn, less influential within the organization. In sum, women’s professional performance is not evaluated independently from their personal warmth.
Personal experience and empirical research suggest that it’s not enough for women to be merely as gregarious, easygoing, sociable, and helpful as men. To get credit for being warm—and to have their other strengths recognized—they might need to be even more so.
I still remember my first performance evaluation as an assistant lecturer: I was told to be more “nurturing.” I had gone to just as many social events as the men had, had been just as gregarious with my students. But women simply are expected to show more warmth. Studies show, for example, that women’s performance reviews contain nearly twice as much language about being warm, empathetic, helpful, and dedicated to others.4
To us, this study suggests that if women are to succeed in a biased world, encouraging them to be more confident is not enough. To get credit for having confidence and competence, and to have the influence in their organizations that they would like to have, women must go out of their way to be seen as warm.
We wish this were not the case. We wish women and men could be evaluated according to the same meritocratic standards. But as our research shows, we seem to be a long way off from those days.
MARGARITA MAYO is Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at IE Business School in Madrid. She was featured on the Thinkers50 Radar as one of 30 thought leaders to watch in 2017. She is the author of Yours Truly: Staying Authentic in Leadership and Life.
Notes
1.Margarita Mayo et al., “Aligning or Inflating Your Leadership Self-Image? A Longitudinal Study of Responses to Peer Feedback in MBA Teams,” Academy of Management Learning and Education 11, no. 4 (2012): 631–652.
2.Susan T. Fiske et al., “Universal Dimensions of Social Cognition: Warmth and Competence,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11, no. 2 (2006): 77–83.
3.Laura Guillén et al., “The Competence-Confidence Gender Gap: Being Competent Is Not Always Enough for Women to Appear Confident,” working paper (Berlin: ESMT, 2016), https://margaritamayo.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/The-competence-confidence-gender-gap.pdf.
4.Shelley Correll and Caroline Simard, “Research: Vague Feedback Is Holding Women Back,” hbr.org, April 29, 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/04/research-vague-feedback-is-holding-women-back.
Adapted from content posted on hbr.org,
July 8, 2016 (product #H03036).