One more time : why aren't women making it to the top? An investigation of the relationship between sex, self-confidence, and feedback

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of externally mediated feedback on task self-confidence. The fundamental hypotheses were that providing the same performance feedback to men and women working on an identical ambiguous task would result in similar levels of self-confidence.

Hypotheses were tested within a completely randomized 2x3x3 repeated measures mixed design. There were two levels of sex (male and female), three levels of feedback (positive, negative, and none) and each subject was measured at three separate times for self-confidence. All experimental subjects were students in the College of Business at Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts.

An unweighted means ANOVA and planned comparisons were conducted to test the hypotheses generated for the dependent measure. Significant results were obtained for sex differences in self-confidence in the absence of feedback with males consistently reporting higher scores than females. However, no support was found for the hypotheses that feedback could mitigate these sex differences. In the presence of both positive and negative feedback, men gave significantly higher confidence estimates than women.

Two major implications were drawn from the study: first, sex differences in self-confidence may be greater than has been previously recognized; and, second, while feedback does have the ability to influence one's expectancy of success on a task, it does not appear to equalize the self-confidence levels of males and females.