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.
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.
Previous studies have generally found little difference between men and women on these tests, although some have reported a small male advantage.
In the recent study, however, researchers adapted the test to take into account participants’ confidence in their own ability, based on how much they were willing to bet on their answers being correct.
Those taking part had to solve 36 nine-piece puzzles. Each puzzle consisted of a 3x3 matrix of symbols with one symbol missing, and eight possible options for the missing piece.
Participants who chose the correct piece every time could earn up to $72 (£50 approx). However, in some cases, they got just one virtual token to bet on their choice of the missing piece being correct, while in others, they got 80.
So, if they weren’t sure about their answer, they could hedge their bets by spreading their tokens across all eight options for the missing piece and still earn a small reward.
Overall, providing financial incentives boosted accuracy – on average, people got 14 per cent more questions correct when they were asked to bet a single token for rewards compared to the same single-token test when there was no money at stake.
However, when researchers analysed the women's results separately, they performed worse than average in the no-reward scenario.
What was interesting was that their performance improved when a financial incentive was offered for placing one token and improved further when they could wager 80 tokens.
In fact, when it came to the 80-token scenario, women outperformed men, suggesting that, when they knew the correct answer, they were more certain about it, and would bet more of their tokens.
The researchers say the results support the idea that society encourages men to be “overconfident”, a term that reflects the fact that confidence can be misplaced.
By contrast, they suggest, it’s not that women lack confidence – they just know when it’s appropriate to be confident because they’re right.
Of course, people love to speculate about how a study like this translates to real life.
And while we can surmise that women are probably more confident than scientists once thought when it comes to financial decision-making and risk-taking, it’s not helpful to assume that every woman is better at knowing when she’s right compared to every man.
The results only represent an average. Though, should you want to use these results to support your purchase of a new car/house/gym membership, no one here is going to stand in your way.
This article is an answer to the question (asked by James Galbreath, Chesterfield) 'Who is more confident – men or women?'
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