Gender and overconfidence: are girls really overconfident?

Abstract

Previous research finds that people are overconfident and that men are more overconfident than women. Using a very precise confidence measure, this article shows, however, that whereas boys are overconfident, girls are actually underconfident regarding their mathematics performance. We conducted a survey where 14-year-old high school students were asked what grade they thought they would get in a mathematics test a week later. These results were then compared with their actual grade. Boys were overconfident about their grades, whereas girls were underconfident.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Maud Lundmark, David Padel and Lennart Trillkott for permission to conduct the survey on their students and for providing the students grades on the exam. The authors also thank Anna Hellberg and Katarina Nordblom for useful comments.

Notes

¹For example, the Global Gender Gap Report 2008 ranks Sweden as the third most gender equal country in the world, see also Jakobsson and Kotsadam (2010).

²Using ordered logit regressions does not change the results (available upon request).