Actually, we're not really worth it.

I think there is a lot of truth in this. I do earn more than 50k but would never have dreamt of applying for my current job had my DH not pushed me to do so. Likewise for one of my previous roles. On both occasions, I felt I was punching above my weight, but he clearly had more belief in my abilities than I did myself.

I think that it is important to act in an assertive way with regard to salary and career negotiations - people will often use how much you appear to think you are worth as a way of judging how much you are worth, which probably isn't very accurate, but does mean that it is important to behave assertively.

Another example of this - I was once in a situation where my manager tried to give me a lower paid role at work, and when challenged about this said that another (female) colleague didnt mind, but maybe that was because her husband earned enough to support her! I am now her line manager

I'm pretty sure that I've read somewhere that the trope about women earning less because they don't ask for raises is a pernicious myth, which is not true. (Could it have been Delusions of Gender?), but that there are other reasons for pay disparity

In my experience the men who work for me are way more likely to push for more money/signs of status earlier.

The men may apply for the jobs they're under-qualified for, but the more interesting question is whether they get them. Or whether the appointment is of someone who actually meets the job spec.

I hate these sorts of gender-stereotypes: they always think I'm a man. I'm not.

I was talking to a ski instructor a few years ago and he told me that with most of the women he taught, he felt his job was to bring their confidence up to their ability and with the men it was to bring their ability up to their confidence

I recognise this both with myself and with other women I manage/have managed. I don't know why, I don't think it's just biology or just culture though.

I think there are 2 other things going on in work environments though - firstly, in my experience women are more risk averse, and don't push themselves forward/ask for bigger salaries as much. It's frustrated me with my staff when the more competent woman just wont put herself forward, so I have to give a role/task to a man.

The second thing I have noticed is that men learn new skills by pushing outside boundaries long before they have mastered an area, whereas women like to master everything in a boundary before moving onto the next thing. For most tasks that makes the man more useful, sooner as quite often being 2/3 competent at a wider range is more useful than 90% of a smaller skillset.

I'd bet both of those have an evolutionary element but I doubt it's inbred insecurity, I'd bet it's all to do with keeping small children alive.

I don't know how best to fix this but I do think that women who wen to single sex schools seem to be more confident.

I'm pretty sure that I've read somewhere that the trope about women earning less because they don't ask for raises is a pernicious myth, which is not true. (Could it have been Delusions of Gender?), but that there are other reasons for pay disparity.

No solutions here, but recognize the 'men have mortgages' scenario. I had a boss who had the choice between a male colleague and myself for a contract extension (of years). I had been there longer and was more experienced. He extended the bloke because he had a wife and baby to support.

He actually explained this to a mutual colleague, who was so horrified she offered to back me if I wanted to take legal advice. I figured I didn't want to work there anyway if that was the ethos.

I'm now being called as a witness in someone else's gender discrimination tribunal.

'chimp paradox' makes me want to run for the hills.

Personally speaking, however, I'm not even getting to the interview stage, so I'm going to reassess my cv in light of this thread.

The skiing instructors may have seen the overconfidence as a problem, but as service workers they had to aim, or say they were aiming, to improve male skills to meet male confidence, rather than reduce confidence to meet the skills - which to me, should be the more achievable job.

To reduce male confidence is to be called 'emasculating' still - despite the fact that few men would now call themselves Freudians.

p.s. got to sleep.

I remember an old boss who justified the salary inequality with the mantra, 'Men have mortgages.'

It's got fuck all to do with evolution, and everything to do with culture, agency, contingency, context, prejudice, upbringing, culture, expectations and tradition. Which are very recent, evolutionarily speaking.

Mary Men will always big themselves up. I worked on the trading floor and some of the crap they came out with was priceless. No one calls them up on it. I learnt from the boys to ask for pay increases on a periodic basis (every 6 months). No one said no to me within the department but I had a hard time with HR. While I was paid less than the others on my team I earnt more than those with the same experience level as myself.

I will also say that HR was a nightmare when it came to salary neigotiations. I saw them say yes to men far more than women. Women who asked were seen as arrogant, pushy and overtly assertive if we asked for the same. The men never had this issue.

But I still think that overconfidence is more of a problem than lack of it. I accept totally that this is a cultural attitude of its own, but it is one of the reasons I don't actually spend much time with men if I can manage it. I would rather than men were applying for jobs they actually felt they could do, rather than women were suddenly bullshitting their way into higher salaries. Having so many jobs that are effectively performances, judged on your 'confidence', rather than requiring actual proven competence at anything, is a cultural issue again IMO.

I think my scepticism is partly informed Triffid by not understanding why there would be any evolutionary benefit in men being overconfident (I am renaming the problem here in a culturally loaded way in the interests of at least having a balance of distortions). I can see the point in a primary carer being highly aware of potential threats, but I can't see any evolutionary point in any adult of a species being less aware of potential threats/overconfident in their ability to deal with them - IMo this trait would disappear fairly fast from an evolutionary perspective.

This would suggest to me that levels of 'insecurity', IF they vary significantly according to a group (which I don't necessarily accept), are culturally determined.

I was looking at a few job applications recently - a friend asked me to look at them. There were external assessments of the candidates, and then individual questionaires.

It was quite scary really. Even the women with phenomenal qualifications rated themselves as "good" at best. The men bigged themselves up at every opportunity.

There were four people (two men and two women) who I reckoned could do the job really, really well. If a computer had been picking, using a combination of all the information given, the two men would have come out well on top.

I talked to the people doing the assessment afterwards and asked would it be better to grade them on their self-assessment vs others of the same sex, but apparently that would be sexist and unfair (even though the two women I looked at would probably have been in the 99th percentile of women, they came up as only about the 85th percentile overall, because of the disparity of their answers).

What I couldn't work out was whether the men's apparent conviction that they were good at everything (and they were good, and qualified, but so were the women) would give them an advantage in the workplace over the women who were independently evaluated as just as good, but who talked themselves down.

It was an interesting experience, looking at all the bumph.

'Chimp Paradox' isn't a title that naturally attracts me, but I'll give it a go.

Anyway you asked what are we going to do about the issue. Any ideas? I'm quite assertive, myself. I wasn't when I was younger; which was a quite horrible time tbh.

Darwinism isn't the problem, triffs, it's the people making a buck out of stuff like 'Chimp Paradox'.

For 'more insecure' could we read 'feel less entitled'? There's an important difference, even if the end result looks very much the same.

joan, yours is an entirely supported opinion that evolutionary biologists are full of bullshit and peddle the most appallingly poor science to support the most appalling cultural views.

"I wonder if this is a "way different genders are viewed" thing as well? Because women tend to get negative reactions if we are too confident or forward whereas these are seen as positive attributes in a man, and he would likely to be found lacking if he was not confident or forward enough."

Think you've probably got something there, I mean if you look at things like what language is used to describe women in high paid jobs, or how (sorry) female candidates on the Apprentice are described. The women are often derided for being too pushy etc, when the men are congratulated for the same behaviour.

Triff, it's true that women need to be on a level playing field with men, or men with women, economically - but please chuck that evolutionary sociobiology shite in the bin.