Gender stereotypes dictate that men are more confident than women. Confidence, though, is a tricky concept.
Having confidence in your convictions is assumed to be a good thing, and it is… if you’re right. But is confidence the same thing when you’re wrong?
Results from a 2026 study published in the Journal of Political Economy get to the crux of this conundrum.
When the stakes were highest, women beat men – not because they were more confident, but because they were only confident when they were right - Photo credit: Getty
In the study, participants took a standard intelligence test, based on Raven’s Progressive Matrices, originally developed by English psychologist John Raven in the 1930s.
