Fisrt, I want to take a moment to thank three inspiring organisations that recently invited me to deliver the following keynotes:

• ‘Shaping the Future of AI’ at KIA, where I presented evidence of why we need to diversify who designs and implements AI tools, the reasons behind the gender AI gap, and a blueprint to increase female representation in AI.
• “AI at the Crossroads: Driving Growth or Environmental Risk?” at Brabners Future of Tech conference where, drawing on research and real-world examples, I challenged the idea that AI progress must come at the planet’s expense and showed how leaders can deploy AI to drive sustainability, resilience, and smarter, more responsible decision-making.
• “Give to Gain: How Sponsorship Unlocks Potential for All” for the International Women’s Day event at Genio, a deep dive into what sponsorship is and what it isn’t, and proven strategies to find a sponsor, act as a great one, and be a good sponsee.

I was also delighted to deliver the guest lecture “Feminist Ethics in Action: Building Safer, More Sustainable AI Systems” to the students in the module “AI Ethics and Governance” at the University of Liverpool.

If you want an expert speaker in AI who leaves your audience energised and empowered to act, reply to this article.

Now, let’s shift to today’s article.

---

The Confidence Con

Recently, I had two back-to-back experiences with “confidence” that made me realise the huge gap between the promise and the reality surrounding this term, what I call the “confidence con.”

First, I delivered the keynote “The Confidence Paradox: Leadership, Culture, and Career Advancement for Women in Tech” at the virtual Women in Tech Global Conference 2026, drawing on insights from a survey of 500+ women in tech worldwide about their career satisfaction.

As I was preparing the talk, I asked myself two questions

• What do I know is true about confidence?
• Is our reverence for ‘confidence’ as both the culprit and the solution to the leadership gap in tech serving women in our sector?

In the same week, a conversation with a friend reminded me of a situation years ago in which mansplaining almost caused a security incident at the organisation where I was working.

A male colleague requested that the operations teams implement security changes to a client’s access to our software platform. The operations team referred him to my team, where a female teammate and I told him that our department was handling those changes. We asked him to instruct the client to contact us via a ticket, as the change needed to be made simultaneously at both the client’s site and ours.

He didn’t believe us. We confirmed in writing that our department was responsible for the process another two times, out of concern for the client’s deadlines.

He wouldn’t budge.

It took a man to convey the same information, for our male colleague to finally surrender and do as my female colleague and I had told him.

Were my female colleague and I confident in the information we provided to our male co-worker? Yes.

Did my female colleague or I express doubt at any moment? No.

Still, our confidence was useless.

This is my freshest thinking about confidence and my case for championing its demise at work.

The Marketing Of Confidence

We are told that confidence is all that’s required to succeed in our careers.

• Want a better job? “Just be confident” and apply.
• Want a higher salary? “Just be confident” and ask for a raise.
• Want a promotion? “Just be confident” and demand it.

In summary, if you’re confident, the sky is the limit.

And then we have the trope of the “confident leader.”

In politics, Trump, Putin, Kim Jong Un… but also Milei, Meloni, and even Macron, von der Leyen, and Starmer.

In technology, Jobs, Gates, Ellison and now Altman, Amodei, Thiel, Zuckerberg, Musk, and many others.

Confidence “sells” the mirage of future success and voters and investors buy it.

Confidence For Women In Tech

But confidence can also be a weapon.

Consistently, “the (lack of) confidence” and “imposter syndrome” are seen as both the culprit behind the inequities endured by women in tech and their fault.

• Lack of women in tech —explained as women are not confident in their abilities in STEM topics, conveniently sidestepping the fact that half (52%) of women in the tech sector in the UK leave because of a lack of sense of belonging.
• The pay gap — rationalised as women are not confident to negotiate salaries, even though research shows women now report negotiating their salaries more often, but they are turned down more often.
• The leadership gender gap — conceptualised as women not being confident enough to ask for a promotion, omitting that studies demonstrate that women’s leadership aptitudes are judged on their performance, whilst men’s are evaluated based on their potential. Moreover, women

And the list goes on…

The Costs Of The Confidence Con

Confidence may reassure us at the ballot box, when making investments, or when hiring somebody, but does it serve us well?

I advance that the gap between the advertised benefits of confidence and its negative impact on competent people – what I have called the “confidence con” – has dire consequences.

For Individuals

The price of self-identifying ourselves as “lacking confidence at work” has many costs:

• Rumination — We wear ourselves out through endless cycles of self-judgement and blame for our “lack” of confidence and the negative impact we perceive it to have in our careers (for example, a lack of promotions or a low salary).
• Analysis — paralysis — We make a habit of constantly second-guessing our decisions whilst waiting for “confidence” to appear and give us “permission” to do or say what we believe in.
• Perpetual fixing — As we believe “confidence” to be the magic bullet to achieve our professional goals, we are easily seduced by a web of “solutions” — courses, books, workshops — that promise to eliminate “imposter syndrome” and “fabricate” confidence at will.

For Organisations

Organisations are not spared the costs of the confidence con because confidence is a multi-player game.

As mainsplaining shows, you may be competent and feel confident, but that’s overruled by others who decide you don’t “look” competent or confident.

This is framed at a loss for individual success and human potential.

I posit that this is an overwhelming organisational risk.

And the Greeks realised it millennia ago. In Greek mythology, Cassandra was a priestess given the gift of uttering true prophecies by god Apollo, but was cursed so that her prophecies would never be believed:

• Casandra was confident in her visions.
• Casandra shared her insights with others to spare them the ill outcomes.
• Still, she was insulted and then ignored. As a consequence, people paid a high price for their lack of confidence in her. Over and over.

We now refer to a person whose valid warnings or concerns are disbelieved by others as “Cassandras”. There are innumerable cases of real-life Casandras in business and politics and, in spite of examples of the dire consequences, we keep weaponising “confidence” against women who obviously don’t lack it.

In summary, the “Casandra effect” shows how gendered our confidence in leaders is and how it puts organisations and states at risk. When women assertively push for governance, caution against overconfidence, and discuss risk mitigation, they’re told they’re not confident enough, their expertise is doubted, and their legitimacy is questioned.

Confidence Unpacked

So, after all the “fluff” about confidence, what’s actually real when we talk about confidence?

Confidence Is A Feeling

We don’t have any equipment that can measure confidence objectively — “confidometres” (?) — and there is a good reason for that.

Confidence originates from the Latin confīdentia, from confīdent-, confīdens “trusting in oneself.”

Self-confidence is defined as trust in oneself or one’s abilities.

As such, confidence is a subjective estimation of potential — or someone else’s — and it can be manufactured (e.g. Dr Amy Cuddy’s hypothesis that our pose influences our level of confidence) or destroyed (for example, following negative feedback) in seconds.

Moreover, confidence does not rely on hard evidence, as we’ll explore next.

Confidence Is No Competence

We conflate confidence with competence. As a result, we assume that “feeling” confident is a good predictor of success. SCOOP! It’s not.

This delusion has even a name:

The Dunning-Kruger effect is “a cognitive bias whereby people with low ability, expertise, or experience regarding a certain type of task or area of knowledge tend to overestimate their ability or knowledge. Some researchers also include in their definition the opposite effect for high performers: their tendency to underestimate their skills”.

Moreover, we have such confidence that we have made it a key prerequisite for any meaningful progression in our careers. I cannot recall how many times I’ve heard a hiring manager justify their choice of candidate because the person “looked” confident, even if the other candidate had a superior CV.

Unfortunately, I also know of many brilliant women who haven’t applied for a role because they felt they didn’t tick all the boxes.

For example, the real story of a brilliant female executive in the UK who had been mentored as the next CEO for the organisation she had been working for. To everybody’s surprise, she decided not to apply for the position once it was advertised. As a result, an external candidate — less qualified as per the board— got the role.

At some point, somebody asked her why she hadn’t applied for the job. She replied that there were some requirements on page 4 of the recruitment package she felt she couldn’t fulfil. Then, the same person asked the appointed CEO if he felt he met the requirements on page 4.

His answer? He never got to page 4.

We Are Born Overconfident

We’re told that we “build” confidence. In other words, with knowledge and practice, our confidence increases.

I disagree. We’re born overconfident.

Don’t believe me? Check toddlers:

• They try to speak before they know — or even understand — the language.
• They attempt to walk before they pass any “walking certification.”
• They keep trying to accomplish feats beyond their size and knowledge — e.g. driving cars, riding horses, using computers — despite being warned, discouraged, and reprimanded by “more experienced” people (aka their parents).

However, as we grow up, our societal expectations and life experiences shape our confidence. Boys are encouraged to try and they are forgiven if they fail, whereas girls are expected to be perfect and shamed if they stumble.

Confidence Is Not Binary

We’re told we’re either confident or not.

If you are — or deemed — confident, you are supposed to be right, you deserve to be listened to, you are leadership material.

Anything else that doesn’t exude 100% trust in oneself — or others — is considered a “lack”. Any hint of doubt is cast as a non-confident vote.

But does it serve us well to think about confidence as an absolute? To believe that our “trust feelings” are superior to data?

Unsurprisingly, research shows that confidence is the enemy of accurate predictions of future outcomes.

In their book Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, Phil Tetlock and Dan Gardner analysed the methods used by people with an extraordinary ability to predict the future with a degree of accuracy 60% greater than average — the “superforecasters.”

The authors uncovered that superforecasters embraced probabilistic thinking — assigning confidence levels to predictions and adjusting them as new data emerged. In other words, they were comfortable estimating probabilities of an event, for example, a 75% or a 25%, making their predictions traceable over the years.

The Checklist: How to Expose the Confidence Con

So, what if we finally ditched confidence as a predictor of success?

The truth is, we wouldn’t be missing anything. Moreover, I posit that we would be better off:

• As toddlers, we’d stretch ourselves out of our comfort zone more often.
• As thinkers, we’d rely more on data to make choices rather than letting our unreliable emotional assessments of our own and others’ abilities run the show.

Of course, it is easier said than done. We’ve been trained that confidence is our guide. The good news is that a different way is possible.

The key is to recognise when “confidence” is sabotaging your or your organisation’s goals.

Below is a checklist to identify such moments.

“I’m Not Confident”

When you hear in your head the voices calling you an “imposter”, berating you for not being confident, or telling yourself that you cannot do something because you don’t have enough confidence, pause and check:

• What is the reason you need “confidence” to give yourself permission to do something you want to do?
• What competencies do you already have to go ahead with your goal without needing to feel more confident?
• What are the probabilities of success if you go ahead?
• What are the probabilities that you regret it if you let your feelings of confidence stop you?
• What information — not feelings — do you absolutely need before moving along with your objective?

Additionally

• Move from identity — “I’m not a confident person” — to using a verb that identifies what you want or need to progress. For example, find out the reason you’re not feeling confident. Maybe you need to feel safe to fail. Maybe you need validations from others — i.e. [this person] trusted me — to validate your capabilities.
• Shift from talking about “confidence” —a generic trust in your capabilities — to “self-efficacy” — your belief in your ability to succeed in specific situations or accomplish particular tasks. For example, compare “I’m not confident enough to do public speaking” (general) with “I won’t be able to deliver a 30-minute presentation to my colleagues about the project because I’m sure I’ll forget” (specific).
  
  As self-efficacy focuses on distinct activities or situations, it is less alienating than confidence. It is also easier to boost through experiences of success, even if they are smaller than our actual goal.

“She Doesn’t Look Confident”

What about our assessment of others’ confidence as a predictor of their potential?

In those moments, ask yourself:

• What makes you believe that they have low confidence?
• Reflect on whether the person indeed appears to lack confidence or if it is your lack of confidence in their abilities that is making you believe they don’t have it.
• Why do you believe they have to be confident to do a good job or have a sound idea? In other words, are you confusing confidence with competence?
• Instead of trying to assess whether they are confident about their opinion, ask them practical questions, such as how they reached that conclusion, which data they relied on for their advice, and how they estimate the probability that their recommendation is correct.

Back to You

Are your beliefs about confidence serving you well?

Or do you think it is an outdated term that benefits charismatic, arrogant people and undermines competent, circumspect individuals?

Let me know in the comments!