A new study published in the Australian Journal of Labour Economics shows that, contrary to common advice given to women, increased confidence does not increase women’s success at work.

The study found that “while promotion rates do not differ significantly between men and women [in the group studied], the characteristics associated with job promotion do.” Confidence was linked to higher promotion rates among men, but not women.

This study’s findings suggest that “the path toward gender equality should be less about attempting to change women, and more about changing the ways that women are evaluated differently to men.”

The study’s author, Dr. Leonora Risse, is a Lecturer in Economics at RMIT University and a Women and Public Policy Program Research Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School.

Like many women throughout their careers, Dr. Risse was regularly told that she needed to be more confident.

So, dutifully, she read all the recommended self-help books like Lean In and Nice Girls Don’t Get The Corner Office. She confronted shelves of books that showed women striking a ‘power pose’ on the front cover, explaining that women typically get paid less than men because they’re not standing the right way. She went to self-promotion workshops and confidence training sessions that her employers offered.

This widespread advice – that women need to exhibit the confidence of men – is well intentioned. But it frustrated Dr. Risse: the more time she put towards these self-help sessions, the less time she could put towards her actual work.

So, as an economist, she asked herself: are these self-help career initiatives a worthwhile use of women’s time? Will improving women’s confidence help them advance in their careers?

Dr. Risse told me, “I was expecting that we’d be able to come up with a number and could say ‘if we could boost women’s confidence by, say, 10 percent, then we would see women’s seniority in the workforce increase by x percent.’ So I was genuinely surprised by the results. I didn’t expect the number to come out as no evidence of any effect at all.”

Dr. Risse’s findings turned out to be consistent with previous studies: women are generally evaluated more harshly than men for the same traits. This research calls into question “Be more confident!” as blanket advice for women at work.

There is no evidence that confident workers are more productive or better at their jobs. In fact, the evidence points the other way. Overconfidence can be a liability for organizations.

This study suggests that as a society, we need to stop telling women to “be more confident at work,” as if that alone will correct the gender pay gap and women’s underrepresentation in leadership. We need to stop putting the onus on women (and women only) to change. Instead, organizations need to be open to the ways that workplace practices exhibit and perpetuate gender bias, and then work to correct those underlying issues.

If you want to go deeper, you can take the Career Reset for personalized feedback from me on your career journey.