The Double Bind of Confidence: Too Much vs Too Little

Women in professional environments routinely receive contradictory feedback about confidence. Be more confident, speak up more, assert yourself, project authority. But also: do not be too aggressive, too pushy, too direct. The balance being requested exists in a window so narrow that it is almost impossible to occupy consistently, and the window itself shifts depending on who is doing the evaluating.

This is the double bind of female confidence: the simultaneous demand to have more and the penalty for displaying it.

The Research Is Clear

Decades of research in social and organisational psychology confirm what many women already know from experience: women who display high-confidence behaviours, assertiveness, directness, self-promotion, are evaluated less favourably than men displaying identical behaviours. This is sometimes called the “backlash effect”: competent women who act in agentic, traditionally masculine ways are perceived as less likeable and less hireable than their male counterparts, even when their objective performance is equivalent.

The functional space between “not enough confidence” and “too much confidence” is genuinely narrower for women than for men. This is not a perception gap. It is documented.

The Lived Experience

In practice, many women become highly skilled at calibrating their self-presentation in real time — adjusting tone, volume, directness, and assertion to the specific audience and context. These adjustments are often effective in the moment. They are also, over time, a form of self-contortion that accumulates its own cost.

I have experienced this in my own professional life, moments of consciously softening a direct observation so it does not land as aggression, or adding a qualifying question to a clear recommendation to make it feel more collaborative. These adjustments work. They are also exhausting.

The Feedback Problem

The double bind is particularly visible in performance feedback. Women are more likely than men to receive vague feedback about interpersonal style, “too abrasive,” “could communicate more warmly,” “comes across as overconfident”, and less likely to receive specific, actionable feedback about the substantive quality of their work.

This vague stylistic feedback is often a proxy for the double bind. It is also a development dead end: you cannot improve from “you come across as overconfident” the way you can improve from “your analysis needs more quantitative grounding.”

What Would Actually Help

For organisations: structure feedback processes that require specificity and flag patterns across demographic groups. Audit whether the “confidence” feedback that women receive would be given for identical behaviour in a man. For individuals: seek sponsors who have seen your work directly and can speak to its substance, counterbalancing the narrative that stylistic feedback sometimes creates.