In her 2014 eye-opening
article for the Harvard Business Review, author Tara Sophia Mohr discussed Why
Women Don’t Apply for Jobs Unless They’re 100% Qualified:
You’ve probably heard the following statistic: Men apply for a job
when they meet only 60% of the qualifications, but women apply only if they
meet 100% of them. The finding comes from a Hewlett Packard internal report,
and has been quoted in Lean In, The Confidence Code, and dozens of articles.
It’s usually invoked as evidence that women need more confidence. As one Forbes
article put it, “Men are confident about their ability at 60%, but women don’t
feel confident until they’ve checked off each item on the list.” The advice:
women need to have more faith in themselves.
Fortunately,
Mohr was skeptical of these findings and decided to survey over a thousand men
and women, predominantly American professionals. She asked them, “If you
decided not to apply for a job because you didn’t meet all the qualifications,
why didn’t you apply?” She discovered that the barrier to applying was not lack
of confidence, at least according to the self-reporting of the respondents. In
fact, according to the table below, “I didn’t think I could do the job well”
was the least common of all the responses for both men and women.
Although it
is certainly true that many of us could use an extra dose of confidence, if we
listened only to the advice from the Lean In/Confidence Code bull horn, we
would be doing ourselves a great disservice. We would be internalizing and
personalizing the problem, putting all the weight of this dilemma on our own
shoulders (sound familiar?), and assuming that the external environment, the
world out there, was a level playing field. The bottom line is that there is
more to it than just confidence (internal), and this missing societal component
(external) is fundamentally important.
