The Gender Gap in Self-Promotion

In applications, interviews, performance reviews, and many other environments, individuals are explicitly asked or implicitly invited to assess their own performance. In a series of experiments, we find that women rate their performance less favorably than equally performing men. This gender gap in self-promotion is notably persistent. It stays just as strong when we: eliminate gender differences in confidence about performance, eliminate incentives to self-promote, provide information about the average self-promotion of others, and make environments more ambiguous. Because of the prevalence of self-promotion opportunities, this self-promotion gap may contribute to persistent gender gaps in education and labor market outcomes