The fiscal quarter just wrapped up. Your boss comes by to ask you how well you performed in terms of sales this quarter. How do you describe your performance? As excellent? Good? Terrible?

Unlike when someone asks you about an objective performance metric (e.g., how many dollars in sales you brought in this quarter), how to subjectively describe your performance is often unclear. There is no right answer.

Yet, requests for such self-assessments are pervasive throughout one’s career. You are asked to subjectively describe your own performance in school applications, in job applications, in interviews, in performance reviews, in meetings — the list goes on.

How you describe your performance is what we call your level of self-promotion.

Since self-promotion is a pervasive part of work, those of us who do more self-promotion may have better chances of being hired, being promoted, and getting a raise or a bonus. As researchers interested in gender gaps in earnings, negotiations, and firm leadership, we wondered whether gender differences in self-promotion also exist and might contribute to those gaps.

We found a large gender gap in self-promotion — with men rating their performance 33% higher than equally performing women. To understand what’s driving this gap, we looked at two factors that might influence one’s level of self-promotion: confidence (you may be unsure of your actual performance) and strategic incentives (you may talk up your performance to get a raise or promotion). 

We ran our study on the labor-market platform Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), recruiting 1500 MTurk workers. We measured performance by having each worker complete a test with 20 analytical questions that relate to subjects such as math and science. We evaluated their confidence by asking them to predict how many questions they answered correctly on the test. And we evaluated their self-promotion by asking four subjective questions they might be asked on a performance review. For example, they were asked to rate their agreement with the statement “I performed well on the test” on a scale from 0 to 100.

We created four different versions of the study and randomly divided participants among them. To give our participants incentives like those faced by workers in practice, workers in the Public version of our study were told that one of their answers to the self-promotion questions would be communicated to an employer (another MTurk worker) who would use that answer — and only that answer — to determine whether to hire the worker and how much to pay the worker if hired. Employers also had an incentive to hire workers with better performance, as they were paid based on the test scores of any workers they hired.

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Women as well as those to whom they report really should check out the compolete article by clicking on this direct link.