The Confidence Code (15 page)

Victoria Brescoll sees the flip side of this at work in the difference between male and female students hunting for their first job. When a young man applies for a position and doesn’t get it, she says, his reaction is to blame the process: “They didn’t review my application fairly,” or “This is a really tough season for job hunting.” The woman’s automatic reaction is personal: “Oh, no, they found me out, I wasn’t up to it.” In both these cases, who’s more likely to try again? The men Dunning and Brescoll observe have found a great way of dealing with setbacks. It may be emotionally unrealistic—it may be nothing more than denial—but next time there’s a challenge that is just beyond their reach, they will be in a far stronger psychological position to go for it. The women will tell themselves there’s no point in trying because their past failure proves they themselves aren’t good enough. The men will shrug that failure off as an inevitable consequence of external forces, which have nothing to do with their ability. The result is that their confidence remains intact.

But, of all the warped things that women do to themselves to undermine their confidence, we found the pursuit of perfection to be the most crippling. If perfection is your standard, of course you will never be fully confident, because the bar is always impossibly high, and you will inevitably and routinely feel inadequate.

Moreover, perfectionism keeps us from action. We don’t answer questions until we are totally sure of the answer, we don’t submit a report until we’ve line edited it ad nauseam, and we don’t sign up for that triathlon unless we know we are faster and fitter than is required. We watch our male colleagues lean in, while we hold back until we believe we’re perfectly ready and perfectly qualified.

It didn’t surprise us to learn that plenty of studies show that this is a largely female issue and that we manage to extend the perfectionist disease to our entire lives. We obsess about our performance at home, at school, at work, on holiday, and even at yoga class. We obsess as mothers, as wives, as cooks, as sisters, as friends, and as athletes. The irony is that perfectionism actually inhibits achievement. Bob Sullivan and Hugh Thompson, authors of
The Plateau Effect
, call it the “enemy of the good,” leading to piles of useless, unfinished work, and hours of wasted time, because, in the pursuit of it, we put off difficult tasks waiting to be perfectly ready before we start.

Even Professor Brescoll, well aware of the research, still has a hard time controlling her penchant for perfection. Academics are judged on how much they publish and in which prestigious peer-reviewed journals their work appears. Brescoll confesses that she often takes much longer than her male colleagues to submit a paper for consideration, determined to get things exactly right before pressing the send button. Sometimes she’ll aim lower, sending the paper to a lesser journal. “I need to be much more certain before I’ll take a risk of submitting my work. My male colleagues just send stuff like crazy, they take a chance. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t,” Brescoll says, “but in the end, their strategy is more effective, due to the sheer volume.”

With so many self-imposed obstacles for growing confidence, it’s a wonder we have any at all. But transformation is often so simple. Brescoll has learned, for example, that if she just puts her work out there, without obsessive thought, things happen. Either it’s accepted, or, if not, she’s learned to value the feedback that comes with rejection. It lets her make corrections, and then try again. That’s the cycle that breeds excellence and mastery, allows us to stretch our limits, and creates self-assurance.

It was at this point, just when we’d come to the encouraging conclusion that many of the reasons women have less confidence is actually due to factors we can control, and therefore diminish, that a friend of ours sent us in an unexpected direction. She’s a doctor, and suggested we look at gender differences in brain biology and operation. We quietly groaned. We hadn’t found overt differences between men and women in our investigation of some of the primary genetic influences on confidence. The gene variations we’d examined, which influence transmitters like serotonin and oxytocin, are dispersed in equal measure between genders, we were told. Frankly, we were happy to stop there. The idea that male and female brains might not function in exactly the same way seemed too complicated, and potentially loaded. But it seemed undeniable, too. Of course our brains work differently, as we thought about it. We’d just spent months investigating how. Women ruminate; we stew, we want to get everything right, and we want to please and be liked. The two of us realized we needed to broaden our look at the science behind confidence. We’d mapped out some key behavioral differences that affect confidence, but what is actually going on inside our heads that might play a role?

It Matters Where the Matter Is

The very suggestion that male and female brains might be built and function in unique ways has long been a taboo subject, largely because among women, it was generally thought that any difference would be used against us. That’s because for decades, for centuries actually, differences (real or imagined)
were
used against us. Based on no evidence at all, women were deemed to have an unbearable lightness of thinking. And it’s still a subject that can produce tremors. As recently as 2006, Larry Summers, then the president of Harvard, found himself embroiled in controversy after suggesting, based on his reading of research, that there may be innate differences between men and women when it comes to achievement in science. Eventually, the lingering anger over those remarks led to his resignation.

So let’s clear the air: Male and female brains are vastly more alike than they are different. You couldn’t stare at a scan of two random brains, and clearly identify male versus female. In terms of intellectual output, the differences are negligible. That doesn’t mean there are no differences though—there are, and some of those differences in structure and matter and chemistry may encourage unique patterns of thinking and behavior, patterns that can clearly affect confidence.

In terms of sheer size, men do have women beat. Their brains are indeed larger and heavier relative to their body size. Does that mean male brains are better? No. IQ tests are basically equal for the two sexes, though in some measures men tend to score higher on math and spatial skills, and women routinely outpace men on language arts.

One Harvard study found distinct differences in the distribution of our brain matter, which suggests vastly different methods of processing information. Women tend to have the bulk of their brain cell matter in the frontal cortex, the home to reasoning, and some in the limbic cortex, an emotional center. Men have less than half of all their brain cell matter in their frontal cortex. Theirs tends to be spread throughout the brain.

There are actually two types of brain matter, gray and white. Men have more of the gray stuff, useful for isolated problems, and women have more white matter, which is critical for integrating information. It’s almost as though evolution designed our brains to reach equally complicated destinations on completely different roads, neurologist Fernando Miranda, an expert on learning disorders, told us.

For Jay Lombard, the Genomind neurologist, the most compelling evidence that there are material differences in male and female brains comes from a series of studies involving DTI (diffusion tensor imaging) technology. These scans are seen as increasingly useful for studying function, because they can map the connectivity of our brains. Essentially, DTIs can study the integrity of our white matter, the essential tissue that fosters connections. A handful of studies have found that women tend to have better functioning white matter, and in some important places, like the
corpus callosum
, the central highway between left and right brain. Dr. Lombard thinks it might explain why women work with both sides of their brains more easily. Miranda thinks white matter might be why women are often faster at making multiple mental connections and are more adept at broad reasoning. “The work is in the early stages,” says Lombard, “but there is no question that there are significant differences.”

One leading psychiatrist, Dr. Daniel Amen, recently combed through 46,000 SPECT brain scans, which measure blood flow and activity patterns. He, too, found some notable differences between genders, and wrote a book called
Unleashing the Power of the Female Brain
. Amen, we should note, has made a successful and lucrative career out of popularizing theories about the brain. He’s the author of thirty books, including several best sellers, and is a regular guest on
The Dr. Oz Show
. Some critics think he overstates his findings. We carefully compared his work with other studies, talked with a number of experts about them, and discovered that even his detractors believe his research is important. Some of it was remarkably relevant to our investigation.

What Amen found is that female brains are more active, in almost all areas, than male brains—and especially in those two areas we mentioned, the prefrontal cortex and the limbic cortex. One study suggests that women have 30 percent more neurons firing at any given time than men. “The activity in these regions probably indicates female strengths, including empathy, intuition, collaboration, self-control, and appropriate worry,” Amen told us, “but women are also more vulnerable to anxiety, depression, insomnia, pain, and being unable to turn off their thoughts.” In other words, his scans seem to be showing, physically, all of our overthinking, our ruminating, in process. “When the prefrontal cortex works too hard, as it often does in women,” explains Amen, “it’s like the parking brake is always on and you can get stuck on certain thoughts or behaviors, such as worrying or holding grudges.” Dr. Amen believes his study is evidence that women
are
often thinking more than men. That can be a plus. It’s why we are better at multitasking, he says. But it can also lead to that snowballing of negative thinking and anxiety. “It’s useful in small doses,” says Amen, “but then it becomes worry and stress to the point where you can’t rest.” A confidence killer.

As we looked at other structural differences, we learned more about those primitive fear centers, the mysterious amygdalae. First, we all have two of them, not one, and they do rather different things. One is associated with taking external action as a result of negative emotions, and the other with using thought processes and memory in response to stress. And, yes, you guessed it, men rely more on the amygdala that deals with action, while women tend to activate the memory/emotion amygdala more easily. It’s a reflection, in our brain structure, of the notion that men seem to respond to challenging or threatening situations with action, while women favor internal mechanisms.

Add to that a new study from McGill University in Montreal, which shows that women produce 52 percent less serotonin in their brains than men do—remember that’s the critical hormone that helps keep our anxiety and amygdala under control. We started digging into women and serotonin levels and we learned a lot we weren’t eager to hear. While girls aren’t born with the short strand serotonin variation any more often than boys are, it turns out that girls and women respond differently to that variant. When women get the short straw, or the short strands, they are more likely to be prone to anxious behavior than men are. Likewise, some studies show the same result for women and the COMT variant that controls dopamine. When we get the “worrier” variety, we are more likely to be truly anxious.

We were coming to see that a woman’s thinking machine is far from perfect for generating self-assurance, when we uncovered one more physical difference that we found particularly loathsome. There’s a little part of our brains called the cingulate gyrus. It helps us weigh options and recognize errors—some people call it the worrywart center. And, of course, it’s larger in women.

Terrific, we thought. How wonderful to know we have a
special department
for that useful habit. How maddening to be proven to be exactly the picky worriers our husbands sometimes accuse us of being. There are, we should emphasize, many positive aspects of our brain’s behavior. In evolutionary terms, we needed to be the cautious worriers, always scanning the horizons for threats. We are built superbly for that. Today, however, those particular tools may not be as useful or enjoyable.

A crucial difference we have that
is
a clear advantage in our modern lives—women tend to use both hemispheres of our brain more regularly than do men, combining the left side, home of mathematical and logical skills, and the right side, where the artistic and emotional skills reside. That’s the science of female multitasking abilities. Laura-Ann Petitto told us that bilateral use of the brain is more effective, and, actually, more cognitively advanced. That news we liked (though we resolved not to toss out the theory at home).

Some of these life-determining brain differences begin before we are born. A study by Israeli researchers looking via ultrasound at male and female brains in the womb found differences as early as twenty-six weeks. In the largest ongoing study of brain development in children, the National Institutes of Health has documented that, by age eleven, there’s a large gulf not just between the way boys and girls think but also in their actual capabilities. Essentially, young boys are well behind their female peers in both language ability and emotional processing, but girls are almost as far behind the boys in spatial ability. The anatomical difference in capabilities is usually resolved by age eighteen, but that gap, if misunderstood, can easily reinforce stereotypes at a critical learning age. You can imagine why, at sixteen, a girl may conclude she’s bad at math, or a boy may declare that he will never get Shakespeare. And yet, if they just waited for their hormones to settle by their late teens or early twenties, the necessary brain functioning for both math and Shakespeare would be online in both boys and girls.

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