Expectations Mean a Lot

Via The Juggle comes word of new research showing that many women hamper themselves at work by underestimating their job performance and their standing with supervisors and colleagues. In contrast, men tend to slightly overestimate how their supervisors would rate them, according to the study, which will be presented at the Academy of Management’s annual meeting this month.

The Juggle’s Sue Shellenbarger, in The Wall Street Journal, notes that “over all, averaging all the ratings, the gap between prediction and reality was three times greater for women than for men.” Not surprisingly, the gap was most pronounced for women 50 and over, whose estimates averaged 11 percent below the actual rating.

The good news, says Scott N. Taylor, an organizational-studies professor at the University of New Mexico, who conducted the study of 251 managers, is that “women rated themselves just as highly as men rated themselves,” which means the findings can’t simply be chalked up to low self-confidence among women. The bad news is that women may be “so accustomed to decades of being ‘disappeared’ and hearing histories of women whose contributions went unnoticed that they assume these conditions exist to the same extent today. As a result, women in our sample predicted others would not notice their work, when in reality others rated them higher than men on a whole range of emotional and social competencies basic to leadership.”

And, unfortunately, as Shellenbarger points out, such lowered expectations lead many women to settle for smaller paychecks than they otherwise might.

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