In December 2018, Michelle Obama stood before three hundred students at an all-girls school in North London. She had just published Becoming, which would go on to sell more than seventeen million copies. She had been First Lady of the United States for eight years and had spoken at the United Nations, at G-summits, in front of the largest crowds on the planet.
A student asked how it felt to be a symbol of hope.
Obama’s answer was not what you’d expect. “I still have a little impostor syndrome,” she said. “It never goes away, that feeling that you shouldn’t take me that seriously. What do I know?”
She then asked the girls in the room how many of them felt they didn’t belong. Almost every hand went up.
I am sure you and I would have also raised our hands, if we were in that room.
Because, wherever we are in our lives, whatever we have achieved and all the battles we may have won in the past, we are always judging ourselves. We frequently feel we don’t deserve our job and are “imposters” who could be found out at any moment.
Seeing our capabilities through someone else’s eyes. Waiting for someone’s validation.
If you are a woman and reading this, am sure, you may be nodding in agreement.
Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman studied 360 degree performance reviews across decades, covering thousands of leaders. Their findings, published in Harvard Business Review in 2019 certifies that women outscore men in seventeen of nineteen leadership competencies. Initiative, resilience, integrity, driving results—all higher.
The same research found something else: women rated themselves lower on confidence.
That’s why, the most confounding paradox today is not the gender pay gap, the glass ceiling, or the motherhood penalty. It is – the confidence deficit despite achievement certificates.
McKinsey’s 2024 Women in the Workplace study puts the structural math to this. For every hundred men promoted from entry level to manager, only 81 women make the same step. Only 29% C-suite roles are filled by women and at the current pace, parity for women is nearly fifty years away.
“Over and over again studies have found that men overestimate their abilities and performance, and women underestimate both… while their performance is of equal quality.” Jane Benston wrote in an essay Find your place as a woman in leadership,
Understanding Women’s Confidence Gap
Simone de Beauvoir wrote the most famous sentence in feminist philosophy in 1949: One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. She meant that womanhood is not biology. It is a social construction—assembled, brick by brick, by culture, tradition, and the expectations of others.
The confidence gap works the same way. No woman is born apologetic. No girl enters a classroom already hedging her sentences with “just” and “sorry” and “I think” and “I might be wrong, but.” She becomes that woman through a thousand small corrections over decades. These are both external and internal, forcing fear and self-doubt to drive this mindset.
She edits the email four times before sending—stripping out the authority she earned, softening the ask she deserves to make. She never mentions her own achievements unless cornered into it, and even then, she wraps them in the language of luck or collective effort. She falls prey, again and again, to the stories the world weaves around her.
According to a 2022 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, close to 80% of women struggle with low self-esteem and shy away from self-advocacy at work. In other words, four in five women may be held back in their career advancement by a lack of confidence and visibility.
I once sat across from a chief marketing officer who told me she had kept a folder on her desktop labelled “Proof.” She had written down all her achievements, success stories and appreciation notes. “I started keeping it so I wouldn’t gaslight myself,” she said.
Let’s halt on that word – gaslighting. Dictionary defines it as a psychological manipulation of a person into making them question their judgments and power of reasoning. It’s the biggest catalyst of self-doubt.
The cruelty of institutional gaslighting is that it is invisible to everyone. The gaslighter rarely knows he is gaslighting. The system rarely recognises it. And the woman at the centre of it is left holding two contradictory truths: I am excellent at my job, but the world keeps telling me I’m not. She finally capitulates to the world.
Virginia Woolf saw this with devastating clarity nearly a century ago. In A Room of One’s Own, she noted that patriarchs derive their confidence not from innate superiority but from the manufactured inferiority of others. “Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle,” she wrote—and then showed how confidence is hoarded by one sex and systematically denied to the other.
Breaking the Wall of low Confidence
But here is the part of the story that matters most: some women break free. Not because the system changed around them but because they changed their relationship to it
The Capgemini Research Institute’s 2025 study, which surveyed 2,750 leaders across 11 countries, found that 58% of women now cite confidence as a key strength. The report acknowledges that “previous studies underscored that women often underestimate their abilities, whereas men almost never do. This lack of confidence can hold capable, talented women back…but now our research showcases a shifting trend, with an equal number of women identifying confidence as a key strength.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb built his philosophy around a deceptively simple idea: fragile things break under pressure, robust things resist it, but antifragile things actually grow stronger from the shocks meant to destroy them.
I was once told by a very senior editor that you need to be a man to run a newsroom. I failed several times – in exams, meetings and performance reviews – before I excelled in them. I was judged, and I was given names. They broke me, but then something within me gave me the power to brush it off and start all over.
Taleb’s another great philosophy is negativa—the principle that improvement comes from subtraction, not addition.
Chess grandmasters win by not losing, he writes. The wealthy become rich by not going bust. Applied to confidence: do not add affirmations. Subtract the poison – the self doubt, the need for validation and the fear of failure.
The Stoic philosophy is based on a similar power of mindset. Epictetus taught that it is not events that disturb us, but our judgments about events. It’s not a call to accept toxic positivity, but nourish a mindset you bring to those facts, which is the one variable that is entirely, incontrovertibly, yours.
No one can promote you into believing in yourself. No policy can legislate self-trust. No mentor can hand you the confidence you have not built with your own hands.
Your story is not what happened to you. Your story is what you did with what happened to you. And your story is what you told yourself.