Gender and Self-Perception in Competition

In my first year of graduate school, I had the privilege of working for one of the most brilliant thinkers I have ever known — let’s call her Sarah. Sarah is objectively smarter than I am. She is also much better-credentialed and more knowledgeable. Yet, as we grew close over the course of the semester, Sarah confided that throughout her life she has often questioned her own intelligence. While this is likely a product of the hyper-intellectual circles she finds herself in, there does seem to be another component of this uncertainty that is socially-induced — one that may explain why Sarah has these doubts, while I tend not to.

Gender and Self-Perception of Intelligence

In an attempt to understand how self-perception of intelligence differs between genders, Hogan (1978) asked nearly 2,000 survey respondents to estimate their own IQs, as well as those of their parents and grandparents.[1] He found that female participants underestimated their own IQ scores, while males tended to overestimate theirs. More shockingly, without exception both male and female participants “projected higher IQs onto their fathers than their mothers.” Throughout the 90s, a number of follow-up studies successfully replicated these findings, and though some argued the effect is due to outliers rather than general differences (Reilly & Mulhern, 1995)[2], Furnham and Rawles (1999) demonstrated that these effects hold even after such outliers are removed.[3]

Expanding on these results, Rammstedt and Rammsayer (2000) showed that gender differences were not significant in overall intelligence, but rather in specific domains — with males overestimating “their mathematical, spatial, and reasoning abilities relative to females” and females rating their musical and interpersonal intelligence as higher than males.[4] The authors note that, because mathematical and spatial reasoning are often the traits most strongly-weighted when considering overall intelligence, these results may drive the differing perceptions of general intellectual ability.

From a behavioral economics standpoint, these gender differences are critically important. If one perceives herself (rightly or wrongly) to be less-qualified, she may also believe her academic or professional potential to be lower. Because elite academic and workplace environments tend to be thought of as highly competitive, self-perception may lead well-qualified candidates to not pursue such opportunities.