The Gender Minority Gaps in Confidence and Self-Evaluation

A rich literature explores gender differences between men and women, but an increasing share of the population identifies their gender in some other way. Analyzing data on roughly 10,000 students and 1,500 adults, we find that such gender minorities are less confident and provide less favorable self-evaluations than equally performing men on a math and science test. We find that these "gender minority gaps" are robust, are as large as—or larger than—gender gaps between men and women, and are domain specific. Administrative data reveals that our confidence and self-evaluation measures are highly predictive of academic performance.