A recent study compares the ability of men and women to take risks in their professional life. The results indicate increased anxiety in women.
Take up a challenge, make a difficult decision … at work, stressful situations are numerous and not always easy to manage. Especially for women. This is what suggests a study presented on the occasion of the 108th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.
The risk: source of anxiety for women
Susan Fisk, the lead author of the study, was based on two experiments conducted on American adults between the ages of 18 and 81. The first consisted in making the participants imagine a “risky” professional situation, that is to say unusual and likely to generate losses for the company and another “not risky”.
They had to write two scenarios expressing their state of mind in the face of these situations as well as their attitude to manage them. At the end, each participant was subjected to a test aiming to measure the level of anxiety: the stress of the women increased by 13.6% when they worked on a scenario including a “risky” situation. In men, the anxiety rate did not increase. A difference that Susan Fisk explains by “a lack of confidence of these women in their skills and a decrease in their performance.”
Decreased performance
The second experiment, on which Susan Fisk relied, concerns the assessment of these adults’ confidence in their own performance. Confidence tests were thus carried out in addition to those for an engineering school entrance exam. The principle is simple: if the candidates are sure that their answer is correct, they must tick a box indicating this assurance. If the answer is correct, they double their points. If it is not, the loss of points is as great as the profit. At the end of this test, the results of the men were identical to those obtained during the initial tests. In contrast, that of women fell by 4%.
The study tells us that a man and a woman have the same skills but that the man seems to have a considerable advantage over the latter: self-confidence and risk appetite.
These results could partly explain the sociological problem of gender inequity in the field of work. “We operate in an economic society where taking initiative and diversity of opinion are essential. Encouraging companies to decrease the prevalence of risky environments would allow employers to get better ideas and better performance. And everyone would be a winner, ”concludes Susan Fisk.
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