Researchers once gave 900 workers a twenty-question aptitude test, the same kind of assessment used in military screening. It was straightforward. Every answer was either right or wrong. There was no room for interpretation or opinion.
After they finished, everyone was asked to rate how well they thought they had performed on a scale from one to one hundred.
The men gave themselves an average score of 61.
The women, despite getting the same number of questions right and performing just as well overall, gave themselves an average score of 45.
That is a fifteen-point difference between two groups of people who had just completed exactly the same task with the same level of success.
The researchers behind the study, Christine Exley of Harvard Business School and Judd Kessler of Wharton, wanted to understand whether the gap came from uncertainty. So they gave some participants more information. They told them exactly how many questions they had answered correctly and exactly how they ranked compared to everyone else in the room.
It still made almost no difference.
A woman could see, in plain numbers, that she had performed just as well as the man sitting beside her and still rated herself lower than he rated himself.
This was not a case of someone lacking information. The information was there. The evidence was there. Even with both in front of them, many women still discounted what they had achieved.
And this was not a one-off finding from a single group of participants.
Exley and Kessler repeated the study across more than four thousand adults recruited through online labor markets. Then they tested an entirely different group, more than ten thousand school-aged children.
The same pattern appeared there too.
Not after years of navigating workplaces, performance reviews, or office politics, but as early as sixth grade.
Girls who answered just as many questions correctly as the boys beside them were already describing their own performance as worse.
That matters because it tells us this is not simply something women pick up after entering the workforce. By the time many girls reach their first job, this habit of discounting themselves is already well established.
The researchers kept looking for simpler explanations.
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Maybe people were deliberately being modest. So they removed any reason to self-promote. The gap stayed.
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Maybe uncertainty was the problem. So they told participants their exact scores. The gap stayed.
Then they changed something surprisingly small.
Instead of asking people to evaluate how well they had done, they simply asked them to report their score.
Almost immediately, the difference between men and women became much smaller.
It means that the ingrained devaluation of self was never in what people knew, it wasn’t that knowledge was lacking but in how they interpreted what they knew.
The pattern does not stop with one test
If you have ever finished a piece of work you knew was good, only to find yourself saying, "I think it went okay," when someone asked how it went, then you have probably experienced this pattern yourself.
KPMG surveyed 750 female executives who were one or two career steps below the C-suite across more than 150 leading organizations.
These were not women just starting out.
These were leaders who had already been promoted, trusted with budgets, teams, strategy, and major decisions. Many had been nominated by their own CEOs to participate in the study.
Yet 75 percent said they had experienced imposter syndrome at some point in their careers.
These were women whose organizations had already decided they belonged in the room. Many of them had years of measurable results behind them. Yet a large majority still questioned whether they had really earned their place.
More than half, 56 percent, said they worried about not living up to other people's expectations.
Another 47 percent said the feeling came from reaching a level of success they had never actually expected to achieve.
Those two numbers are revealing when you read them together.
Many of these women have more evidence of their ability than almost anyone around them.
The problem is that success itself somehow becomes something to explain away instead of something to accept. Instead of proving they belong, each new achievement can feel like something they now have to keep justifying.
The higher they climb, the more they fear someone will eventually decide they never deserved to be there in the first place.
The survey also showed that these women understood this was not simply a private struggle unique to them.
Eighty-five percent believed imposter syndrome affects women in corporate America more than it affects men.
Eighty-one percent believed women place more pressure on themselves not to fail than men do.
In other words, the people living through this experience can see the broader pattern just as clearly as the researchers studying it. They know this is bigger than individual personality.
And for more than half of them, that doubt translated into working harder than necessary, taking on extra responsibilities, saying yes more often, and trying to outrun a feeling that never seems fully satisfied by achievement alone.
Most of the research on self-assessment and imposter syndrome has been conducted in North America and Europe. Africa does not yet have the same depth of research on this specific question. But broader workplace studies across the continent point in a similar direction. South African research by Deloitte, for example, shows women reporting heavier workloads, greater caregiving responsibilities, and declining optimism about their careers. Those pressures do not create self-doubt on their own, but they can reinforce it, making it harder for women to see their own achievements as clearly as the evidence suggests.
What this is not
This is not another article telling you to simply be more confident. That advice sounds nice, but it has never solved the problem. Confidence is not something you can manufacture by repeating encouraging words to yourself. It grows when you consistently allow yourself to count the evidence that is already there.
The women in the Exley and Kessler study were not missing evidence. They had the facts. The shift happened only when they stopped judging themselves and started reporting what had actually happened.
When the question changed from How well do you think you did? to What was your score?, the gap became much smaller.
The difference was not in the performance. It was in the story people told themselves about the performance. Which means the goal is not to feel different before you speak. The goal is to describe your results more honestly.
A practical reframe
The next time you finish something important, resist the urge to immediately explain what it means. Instead, write down only what happened.
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Not your interpretation.
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Not your doubts.
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Just the facts.
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The result.
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The number.
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The outcome.
The thing someone with no emotional investment in your self-image would write down after looking at the evidence. Then ask yourself one question.
If a friend you genuinely admire showed you this exact result with her name attached to it instead of yours, what would you tell her?
Most women answer that question remarkably quickly.
They can see another woman's achievement clearly.
They can celebrate it without hesitation.
They can call it excellent, impressive, or well deserved in a matter of seconds.
It is only when their own name appears beside the same evidence that the story suddenly becomes more complicated.
That difference between how you interpret someone else's success and how you interpret your own is not a character flaw. It is a well-documented pattern that has appeared in aptitude tests, executive leadership studies, performance reviews, and classrooms full of children as young as eleven or twelve.
Recognizing that matters.
Because the next time you catch yourself turning a clear result into a hesitant "maybe," you can pause and ask whether you are looking at the evidence or simply repeating a familiar pattern.
Those are not the same thing.
And that distinction is exactly what Style Vault was built to help women practice.
Not by asking you to become more confident overnight.
But by helping you build the habit of recognizing your own evidence, putting words around your achievements, and stating your value with the same fairness and clarity you would naturally extend to someone else.
Sources
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Christine L. Exley (Harvard Business School) and Judd B. Kessler (Wharton), The Gender Gap in Self-Promotion, The Quarterly Journal of Economics (2022).
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KPMG, Advancing the Future of Women in Business: A KPMG Women's Leadership Summit Report ("Mind the Gap"), survey of 750 female executives.