Gender and confidence: are women underconfident?

Abstract

Previous research finds that schoolgirls tend to be underconfident with respect to their mathematics performance, while schoolboys tend to be overconfident. We asked Swedish university students (aged 18–35) what grade they thought they would get in a macroeconomics exam 1 week later. These results were compared with their actual grade and we find no evidence of men being overconfident, but women are underconfident about their test performance. These results suggest that the findings that schoolgirls are underconfident about their math performance also carry over to grown-up women studying macroeconomics.

Keywords:

• confidence
• gender
• underconfidence
• women

JEL Classification: :

• J16
• J71

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the participating teachers and students for permission to conduct the survey and for providing the exam grades. The author also thanks Christoffer Lomberg and Henrik Lundmark for collecting the data and Sara Ekstrand, Andreas Kotsadam and Siri Støre for their useful comments.