 Leaning in: Is higher confidence the key to women's career advancement?Leonora Risse ()
Australian Journal of Labour Economics (AJLE), 2020, vol. 23, issue 1, 43-77 Abstract: Women’s lack of confidence is commonly regarded as a key reason why women lag behind men’s career outcomes. This paper interrogates this claim by examining the empirical link between an individual’s confidence and job promotion prospects through a gender lens. We use nationally-representative data for 7533 individuals collected in the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey in 2013. Confidence is captured by a psychometric survey instrument, Achievement Motivation, which is dually comprised of ‘hope for success’ and ‘fear of failure’. Using Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, we detect that higher hope for success is linked to a higher likelihood of job promotion, but only amongst men. This finding provides no evidence to support the widespread advice commonly given to women that they need to ‘lean in’ and show more confidence as the mechanism to close gender gaps in the workplace. Keywords: job promotion; gender; discrimination; personality traits; non-cognitive traits (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ozl:journl:v:23:y:2020:i:1:p:43-77 Access Statistics for this article More articles in Australian Journal of Labour Economics (AJLE) from Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre (BCEC), Curtin Business School Contact information at EDIRC. |
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