Tasha Eurich* says focusing on the role that self-awareness plays can give women, and those who champion them, tools to address leadership gender disparities.
Self-awareness is the foundational leadership skill of the twenty-first century.
Leaders who know who they are, and how they’re seen by others, are more effective, confident, respected, and promotable.
When I speak to business leaders about our five-plus year research program on self-awareness, one of the most common questions I get is whether we’ve found any gender differences.
First, the data: research has shown that women possess a slight self-awareness advantage over men.
Other research has shown that women are rated slightly higher in self-awareness by direct reports, as well as managers and peers.
Women are also better able to recognise the importance of self-awareness for their career success and advancement.
But despite these advantages, women continue to be underrepresented in senior leadership roles and are paid less than men.
While gender inequity has wide-ranging causes, focusing on the role that self-awareness plays can give women, and those who champion them, tools to address some of these disparities.
So why aren’t women’s self-awareness advantages translating into better representation in senior leadership roles?
Lesson 1: Women underestimate themselves, but not in the way most people believe
It is often said that women are less self-confident than men — yet surprisingly, current findings do not support this idea.
Though past researchers have documented differences in self-confidence between girls and boys, this gap shrinks dramatically by age 23.
And recent studies have shown that male and female leaders rate themselves similarly.
Yet even though the average woman isn’t underestimating herself as a leader, she has a slightly more nuanced challenge: she may lack the confidence that others value her contributions.
In one study, women and men’s self-ratings of emotional intelligence (EQ; a key leadership skill) did not differ.
Yet when asked to predict how their supervisor would rate their EQ, women’s predictions were three times lower than men’s, despite being rated slightly higher by their boss than men were.
Why do women underestimate their true value?
Researchers have suggested that persistent stereotypes about leadership being a male characteristic (whether implicit or explicit) can lead women to worry that they are validating negative stereotypes, which would cause co-workers to see them as less effective than they see themselves.
The ability to correctly predict how others see us, often called meta-perception, is an important aspect of self-awareness.
And indeed, when women underestimate how others view their contributions, they may unintentionally hold themselves back.
Therefore, to advance and thrive, women need to gain a more accurate picture of their contributions through the eyes of others.
It is vital for women leaders to understand what others see as their defining strengths and contributions.
Lesson 2: Women aren’t getting good feedback
Feedback is essential for a leader to understand her contributions, as well as the adjustments she can make to be more effective.
And even though women ask for feedback as often as men, they are less likely to get it.
Giving honest feedback is notoriously difficult.
It can become even more difficult when it crosses gender lines.
Researchers have coined the phrase “benevolent sexism” to refer to behaviours that shield women from difficult information.
In a work context, male bosses or colleagues may avoid giving women negative feedback because they don’t want to hurt or upset them.
When women do receive feedback, it’s typically less specific than feedback given to men.
This has profound consequences: studies have shown that when women receive vague feedback, they’re more likely to be assigned lower performance ratings.
Vague negative feedback tells a leader that her performance isn’t meeting expectations, but because it doesn’t identify the behaviours that aren’t serving her, she doesn’t know what to do differently.
A lack of specific positive feedback also puts leaders at a disadvantage.
It suggests that she is doing well, but because it doesn’t point to the actions or results that are valued, she doesn’t know what to continue doing.
When women can solicit and record specific positive feedback, this has been shown to effectively eliminate men’s overrepresentation in top performance categories.
The question then becomes: how can women obtain more detailed feedback?
Business school Professor Elle Bell Smith suggests that if feedback isn’t specific enough, women should ask follow-up questions like, “Can you give me an example [of] when I did that?”
“What was the impact you saw [of that behaviour]?”
“How often have you seen me doing this?”
Lesson 3: Women tend to take feedback to heart
Of course, no one should take every piece of feedback at face value, nor should they over-rely on others’ views to construct their self-concept.
In general, there are three types of information we use to form a picture of who we are: how we see ourselves, how others see us, and comparisons we make with others.
While men place more importance on their self-views and social comparisons, women tend to be more focused on how others see them.
What’s more, even though men and women possess similar views of their performance in the absence of feedback, women are more likely than men to modify their self-views in the presence of it.
Granted, it isn’t adaptive to ignore feedback from others, but by that same token, it can be just as dangerous to discount our self-views.
Placing greater importance on others’ evaluations of our performance can cause us to ignore our own standards and goals, which could make our behaviour less consistent with our values.
When we become over-reliant on others’ approval, we may ruminate more on our fears, shortcomings, and insecurities.
Self-awareness isn’t one truth — it’s a complex interweaving of how we see ourselves and how others see us.
For instance, we usually understand our motives better than others, but others typically see our behaviour more clearly than we do.
So even though we should take others’ opinions seriously, they also shouldn’t define us or override our self-image.
To overcome the tendency to rely too heavily on others’ views, women can work to further develop their own picture of who they are.
What are the principles by which they want to live their life?
What are their greatest aspirations?
What types of projects give them the most energy?
Women leaders can often benefit from an extra dose of self-reliance, especially when others can’t yet see what we’re capable of.
So if, for example, you receive negative feedback from on something you think you could excel at, don’t give up right away — think about what it would take to show them otherwise.
* Tasha Eurich is an organisational psychologist, researcher, author and principal of The Eurich Group.
This article first appeared at hbr.org.