Free The Confidence Code by Katty Kay, Claire Shipman Page B

world) in Italy, at the University of Milan. There we tracked down psychologist Zach Estes, who’s long been curious about the confidence disparity between men and women.
    A few years ago, Estes did a series of tests that involved getting five hundred students to reorganize a 3-D image on a computer screen. It looked like a simplified Rubik’s cube. He was testing a few things—the idea that confidence can be manipulated and that, in some areas, women have less of it than men.
    When Estes had the students, men and women, solve a series of these spatial puzzles, he found that the women scored measurably worse than the men. But when he looked back at their actual answers, he found the reason the women were doing less well was that they didn’t even attempt to answer a lot of the questions. They simply ducked out because they weren’t confident in their abilities. He then told them they had to at least try to solve all the puzzles. And, guess what: The women’s scores shot up, and they did as well as the men. Crazy. Maddening. Yet also hopeful.
    Estes’s work illustrates, in a broad sense, an interesting point: The natural result of under-confidence is inaction. When women don’t act, when we hesitate because we aren’t sure, even by skipping a few questions, we hold ourselves back. It matters. But when we do act, even when we’re forced to act, to answer those questions, we do just as well as men. The women in Estes’s experiment skipped questions because they didn’t want to try something at which they thought they might fail. In truth, they had no need to worry. They were just as good at manipulating those computer images as the men. But fear of failure led to inaction, thus guaranteeing failure.
    Using a different test, Estes simply asked everyone to answer every question. Both men and women got 80 percent right, suggesting identical ability. He then tested them again and asked them, after each question, to report their confidence in their answer. Just having to think about whether they felt certain of their answer changed their ability to do well. Women’s scores dipped to 75, while the men’s shot up to 93! Are women really that susceptible to seizing any chance to think badly of themselves? One little nudge asking us how sure we are about something rattles our world, while with men, it seems to just remind them that they’re terrific.
    Finally, Estes decided to attempt a direct confidence boost. He told some members of the group, completely at random, that they had done very well on the previous test. On the next test they took, those men and women improved their scores dramatically. It was a clear measure of what confidence can do—fuel our action, and substantially affect our performance, for better or for worse. And we can all imagine, without much trouble, what this suggests about women and confidence in our everyday lives.
    Life’s Enabler
    Think about it. We are all capable of imagining how great it would be to write that novel, apply for that new position, or just introduce ourselves to that interesting stranger. But how many of us actually do it?
    Confidence is life’s enabler—professionally, intellectually, athletically, socially, and even amorously. The man you met at a conference is cute; you’d like to call him and arrange a date. But what if he thinks you’re boring, unattractive, or too forward? All normal worries and, if you lack confidence, they’re paralyzing. You will sit home, nursing a desire to act/call, but not doing anything about it. Confidence propels you to pick up the phone.
    Other traits encourage action, as Richard Petty noted. Ambition, for example, which drives us to pursue measurable success, can work in tandem with confidence toward a goal. Courage routinely compels action, is very much inclined to push for action, and early on we almost thought of courage as another confidence cousin. But confidence provides the basic groundwork for action based on a belief in