Nina Rapoport

Women put themselves forward for leadership roles less often than men. To study the role of confidence in one’s judgment as a driver of this pattern, we conduct two controlled laboratory experiments in which leaders provide nonbinding advice that can shape collective outcomes. In Study 1, we introduce a two-stage design that allows us to relate several dimensions of confidence to willingness to lead (WTL), while accounting for objective performance. Relative confidence—participants’ beliefs about how their performance compares with that of others—stands out among these dimensions: it predicts WTL for both genders and accounts descriptively for approximately one third of the performance-adjusted gender gap in WTL. Building on these findings, Study 2 identifies the causal effect of relative confidence on WTL using noisy performance feedback. We find that relative confidence has a positive and statistically significant causal effect on WTL: a one-standard-deviation increase in relative confidence raises WTL by 0.41 standard deviations. Overall, our results position confidence as a determinant of WTL and as a potential mechanism contributing to the gender gap in leadership representation.