So That’s Why We Undersell

The research behind why expert women describe equal work in smaller words, and what to do about it.

There is an old idea that the goldfish never sees the water. It swims in it all day, so the water stops looking like anything at all. Expertise works the same way. After twenty or thirty years of solving the same kinds of problems, the way you think starts to feel like common sense, and common sense is a hard thing to put a price on.

I hear it in the words women use to describe themselves: instinct, intuition, being good with people, having an eye for it. Every one of those phrases is accurate, and every one of them makes years of developed judgment sound like a lucky personality trait.

The statistic everyone quotes, and the one worth quoting

You have probably heard that men apply for a job when they meet 60 percent of the qualifications, while women wait until they meet 100 percent. That number traces back to an internal Hewlett-Packard report, and it has been repeated in books, keynotes, and LinkedIn posts for more than a decade (Mohr, 2014). When Tara Mohr surveyed more than 1,000 professionals about why they skipped jobs they felt underqualified for, the most common answer from women and men alike was practical: they believed they would not be hired and did not want to waste the effort (Mohr, 2014).

The 60 percent line has traveled much farther than the evidence supporting it. So I went looking for stronger research, and I found it in a set of experiments by economists Christine Exley and Judd Kessler.

Same score. Smaller story.

Exley and Kessler ran experiments with more than 4,000 adults and more than 10,000 school-aged students (Exley & Kessler, 2022). Participants took a test, then described their own performance, the kind of self-assessment people write into applications, interviews, and performance reviews every day. Women described their performance less favorably than men who performed equally well. In one widely reported experiment, women rated themselves about 15 points lower on a 0 to 100 scale, even though their scores were essentially the same (Women in Academia Report, 2020).

The gap held even when participants knew how they had performed, which stopped me cold, and it held when there was no reward at all for promoting themselves (Exley & Kessler, 2022). The researchers traced it to how people evaluate their own performance in the first place, and they found that gap as early as the sixth grade.

A gap that shows in sixth grade started long before any of us wrote a proposal or set a price. It is a habit of self-evaluation many of us learned as girls and then carried into every room we built a business in.

Why it costs more the longer you’ve been at it

I write about this in Wickedly Branded® because the cost compounds with experience. Twenty years of work can make valuable knowledge easier to reach while you keep evaluating it conservatively. She can know nine things and give the tenth extraordinary power over whether she considers herself qualified.

In a business, that habit leaves fingerprints everywhere: website copy that describes a strategist as a helper, a proposal that undercharges for the part only she can do, a speaking bio full of credentials with the point of view edited out. And when employers in the study reviewed people’s self-descriptions, they favored the people who rated themselves higher (Women in Academia Report, 2020). The smaller story comes with a price tag.

Some of the habit started as social intelligence. Many of us learned early to read a room and adjust how much of ourselves it would welcome. I have been told I am a chameleon, and that skill served me beautifully in branding and leadership. It also taught me to trim my own expertise before anyone asked me to.

A better question than “What am I good at?”

Telling women to be more confident skips the real work. The research points somewhere more practical: the gap lives in how we evaluate our own performance, so start with better evidence than our own conservative ratings. Try this question instead:

What do other people consistently find valuable in the way I think, see, decide, or solve that feels almost ordinary to me?

Then gather the answers you already have:

1. Pull your last ten compliments, referrals, and thank-you notes, and write down the exact words clients used.
2. Circle what they credit to your judgment instead of your effort: the risk you spotted, the decision you made faster, the problem you named before anyone else could.
3. Compare that language to your website, your bio, and your last proposal. Wherever the client’s description is bigger than yours, use theirs.

Those client phrases are what the book calls Glimmers: outside evidence that your work is registering with people. They are often the most accurate self-assessment you will ever get, because someone else did the rating.

Your next Brave Step

Pick one place where you describe your expertise this week, whether it is a bio, a proposal, or your About page, and rewrite one sentence using your clients’ words instead of your modest ones. Then read it out loud and resist the urge to shrink it back.

Curious how your brand reads from the outside? The free Brand Magic Lens takes about four minutes and shows you where the perception gaps are. And if this finding sounds familiar, Wickedly Branded® has a whole chapter on the judgment you’ve stopped counting as expertise.

References

Exley, C. L., & Kessler, J. B. (2022). The gender gap in self-promotion. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 137(3), 1345–1381. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjac003

Mohr, T. S. (2014, August 25). Why women don’t apply for jobs unless they’re 100% qualified. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless-theyre-100-qualified

Women in Academia Report. (2020, January). Study finds a widespread gender gap in self-promotion that may impact hiring decisions and promotions. https://wiareport.com/2020/01/study-finds-a-widespread-gender-gap-in-self-promotion-that-may-impact-hiring-decisions-and-promotions/

About the author

Beverly Cornell is the founder of Wickedly Branded®, a brand strategy and authority positioning firm for established women business owners, and the author of Wickedly Branded®: Claim Your Voice, Visibility, and Authority in a World Not Built for Women. She brings fifteen years of Fortune 500 and tech startup brand experience to her work, a master’s degree in intercultural communication, and hosts the podcast Marketing, Magic, and the Messy Middle: Wickedly Branded®.