Should women fake confidence? Why the ‘girl boss’ character distracts from bigger problems – like why there’s a gender confidence gap in the first place

From the need to be bold at work or in our personal lives, or loving what we see in the mirror – even if that’s not how we feel inside – “confidence culture” aims to dictate our inner emotional lives.

The myriad books, self-help tools and “methods” directed at achieving confidence point to the notion that it has become the latest trend co-opted by capitalism.

Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill argue in their new book, Confidence Culture, that the importance of confidence, specifically in women, has been grossly inflated, distracting us from looking at the structural inequalities that caused the disparities in the first place.

The beauty industry is no stranger to capitalising on women’s insecurities – as soon as it locates what it deems a “flaw”, it offers a solution to “fix” these shortcomings in the form of the latest beauty trend.

The industry is forecast to grow 7.8 per cent this year, to US$579 billion, according to Statista, the fastest annual growth rate in at least 11 years.

Evidence shows that women are less self-assured than men. A recent study conducted by the United States’ National Bureau of Economic Research found that women consistently described their ability and performance to potential employers less favourably than equally performing men, indicative of an underlying gender gap in self-promotion.

The bureau found that the underlying gender gap proves persistent and arises as early as the sixth grade.

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For example, when asked to indicate agreement on a scale from 0 to 100 with a statement that read “I performed well on the test”, women provided answers that were 13 points lower than equally performing men.

Despite women performing better than men when given a maths and science test, results showed that they believed they performed worse.

While we’ve moved away from early-noughties directives to “look hot”, current discourse has shifted to “love yourself, no matter what”.

Although many can now sniff out the sappy corporate facade behind this kind of empty messaging, a call to embrace one’s vulnerability and speak openly about failure has become the mode of achieving the latest version of faux confidence.

Confidence Culture describes the toll this takes.

“Women are also urged to be excellent communicators, capable of asking for what they want, while simultaneously looking after their partner’s ego and displaying sophisticated emotional sensitivity,” it reads.

“In recent years, this emotional work has further extended to include the psychic labour of ‘confidence’.”

The biggest thing that women seem to overlook as they continue to blame themselves for failing to measure up is that the “girl boss” feminism that gets packaged within confidence culture is “troublingly individualistic, turning away from structural inequalities and wider social injustices”, Orgad and Gill write.

All of these methods establish a convenient formula to present your “authentic”, successful self to the world. But what is true, authentic confidence, away from the short cuts social media and society have led us to believe will heal us?

And how can we be accepted and successful in the world without exuding what society has defined as “confidence”?

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It’s precisely this point that organisations like Pure Girls are working towards. The US-based non-profit – Pure stands for “phenomenal, unique, remarkable and exquisite” – aims to help young girls from eight to 18 develop confidence through mentorship.

“I don’t think it’s told enough,” founder Najah Haskins says, noting that confidence often gets overlooked in school and at home.

Struggling with low self-esteem during her own adolescence, Haskins saw how its effects “trickled into the choices I made as far as education. I didn’t feel like I was good enough to do business or engineering, so I did the safe thing. I didn’t know that if you work hard at something, you can achieve it.”

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With the birth of her daughter in 2007, Haskins wanted to avoid perpetuating the same narrative.

“The day after she was born, I looked at her and said, ‘I never want you to feel like you’re not good enough,’” she says.

Now, nearly a decade later, Pure Girls continues to provide support to girls through community and sisterhood.

“I wished that I had an organisation and women that did not know me to encourage and uplift me,” Haskins says.

Once a month, Haskins meets with a group of girls in a room at her local church, where they participate in activities designed to strengthen confidence and self-esteem.

“It’s not about telling them ‘you’re beautiful, you’re strong, you’re smart’,” Haskins says. “I believe that through the activities we do, it starts to strengthen their confidence and mindset so that they can say, I never thought I could do something like this.”

Their meetings cover topics such as healthy eating, finance, planning and role models, and they engage the girls in volunteer work, STEM projects, and arts and crafts.

When asked how she develops her curriculum, Haskins explains that it comes innately, through “looking at my daughter grow up and seeing what she needs. I feel like she’s not the only one.”

Orgad and Gill have noted that generic advice to repeat affirmations as a way to boost confidence insinuates that insecurities are “trivial self-­generated issues that can be easily overcome through positive thinking”.

Haskins agrees that this alone isn’t enough to move the dial. Instead, the model for Pure Girls centres on the idea that providing adolescent girls with experiences they may not get in school has more impact on strengthening self-esteem and confidence from within.

While the negative effects of social media affect people at all ages, Haskins says it’s one of the biggest detriments to confidence in adolescent girls.

“If she’s on [social media], she’s constantly seeing things that she wants and desires and can’t have. It doesn’t allow them to create their own journey,” Haskins says.

“There were certain things that social media taught my daughter before her and I had the talk.”

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Dr Michaela Frischherz, an undergraduate professor who teaches sexual communication at Towson University, in the US state of Maryland, proposes ways to teach confidence authentically for future generations.

“Anytime somebody is using an injunctive norm about bodies, sex, pleasure, there’s always that comparative moment because somebody has said a ‘should’. And if you fall outside of that ‘should’, you’re like, oh s***, am I normal?’” she says.

One tangible action we can take, Frischherz advises, is for younger generations to curate a more inclusive social media platform.

“It becomes clear that if you’re following a bunch of normatively beautiful white influencers, that’s going to have a different impact on how you see the world than if you’re following the rad people doing really important work beyond that terrain,” she says.

While it’s easy to feel despair about the direction things are heading in, Frischherz says she has faith in her students, who are part of the next generation.

“Gen Zers are responding to the culture around them,” she says.

They seem much more able to recognise the surface-level, generic advice that Confidence Culture describes – one that “locates a lack of confidence about sex, dating or intimacy as women’s own fault” – for what it is.

“They can snuff out a tagline much better than we could when all you had was Cosmo,” Frischherz says.