Who's feeling confident? A jarring gap now divides U.S. men and women

Dorothy Richardson meets a lot of anxious people these days. She runs career-related workshops for Florida’s Broward County, helping everyone from displaced CEOs to laid-off maids get their professional footing again. And she does some high-end career coaching on the side.

By most measures, she has an extraordinarily diverse clientele. But there’s one constant that Richardson notices each month -- regardless of the age, earnings power or native language of the people that she’s advising. “I’m definitely seeing more women,” Richardson says. “They’re around 60%, in all the groups that I work with.”

What’s true in South Florida is a new reality across the entire United States. The latest edition of LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence Index -- based on a survey of 4,659 U.S. respondents from Aug. 10 to Aug. 23 -- finds a substantial gender gap in respondents’ feelings about their current jobs, their finances and their longer-term careers. 

Men are relatively upbeat, while women have a lot more to worry about. Overall, male respondents are at +36 on a confidence scale that ranges from +100 to -100. Women are 9 points lower, at +27. The gap is widest when people are asked about their finances or long-term careers; it’s narrower when people are asked about their immediate jobs.

This confidence gap persists in every part of the country. It’s most pronounced in New England, the Southeast and the Far West; it’s less intense but still present in the Rocky Mountain and Plains states. 

LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence surveys began this past April, so we don’t know if surveys in pre-COVID times would have found higher male confidence as well. But we do see that among workers who experienced financial instability during the pandemic, men are still 9 points more confident about their personal finances than women. 

Digging deeper into the numbers, career specialists see three factors that are likely to have deepened -- or created -- the current gender disparities.

First, pandemic-related disruptions have hit hardest in fields where women are most likely to be working. Restaurant occupancy and employment has sagged since the pandemic hit; according to U.S. Census Bureau data, women usually hold 70% of server jobs. 

Similarly, women constitute 74% of teachers and library workers, putting them in the vortex of current struggles about whether to reopen physical classrooms or make do with virtual learning through online connections. Even something as basic as operating the buses that bring students to school is now a source of strain, the Chalkbeat education news site reports. 

Second, child-care concerns become much more complex when physical schools are closed, and when routine social activities become more perilous or impossible. With school-age children often stuck at home, “these responsibilities tend to fall disproportionately on mothers,” observes Leslie Forde, a Boston-area researcher who leads the Mom’s Hierarchy of Needs community. 

Many fathers are doing a lot to pitch in, Forde says, yet the overall planning of chores, children’s activities and schoolwork “is traditionally the responsibility of the mother.” That leaves less time and stamina to devote to a career. For single parents -- 81% of whom are female -- the challenges of holding it all together are even greater.

Among working parents, LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence survey found, roughly half of women (including 61% in the Great Lakes states) said they were unable to focus on work while their children were at home. Men reported a tough time focusing, too, but generally at rates 3 to 17 percentage points below what women indicated.

The Workforce Confidence survey also found that in industries such as finance, education and consumer goods, working parents were especially likely to be providing full-time child care at home. Education (11%) was the sector in which working parents were most likely to be taking unpaid leave to provide childcare at home. 

One final factor that speaks to the gender confidence gap may involve the labor force’s youngest workers. For people born in 1996 or later -- the so-called Generation Z -- the confidence scores for men (+37) and women (+21) are an unusually wide 16 points apart. By contrast, the gender gap for older cohorts ranges from 8 to 11 points.

Jonathan Javier, co-founder of the Wonsulting career-advising site, has an interesting perspective on Gen Z’s predicament. His organization coaches people from non-elite schools who are eager to have a shot at top-tier employers such as Goldman Sachs and Deloitte. 

Javier and co-founder Jerry Lee encourage participants to sharpen up their professional profiles -- and then reach out to dozens of hiring managers, even if the chances of connecting with any single one are small. As they observe, it only takes one success to make the whole exercise worthwhile.

Male participants often warm up to this approach. As Lee explains: “I had one guy who told me: ‘This is really working! I contacted 30 hiring managers, and five of them got back to me.” By contrast, he says, a female participant told him: “This isn’t working. I’ve tried five people and none of them have replied.”

Javier’s conclusion: “Men oversell themselves. Women sometimes undersell themselves.” 

Workforce Confidence Index Methodology

LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence Index is based on a quantitative online survey distributed to members via email every two weeks. Roughly 5,000+ U.S.-based members respond each wave. Members are randomly sampled and must be opted into research to participate. Students, stay-at-home partners and retirees are excluded from analysis so we can get an accurate representation of those currently active in the workforce. We analyze data in aggregate and will always respect member privacy.  Data is weighted by engagement level, to ensure fair representation of various activity levels on the platform. The results represent the world as seen through the lens of LinkedIn’s membership; variances between LinkedIn’s membership & overall market population are not accounted for. 

 Neil Basu and Ben Tjaden from LinkedIn Market Research contributed to this article.