Lily: "I'm one of the women you traded for Waterford."
June: "I'm sorry I didn't do it sooner."
Lily: "I don't know how you managed it. Getting us out. And all those kids."
June: "I was lucky."
Lily: "Women always say that when they've done something extraordinary."- The Handmaid's Tale, S5E3 Border
In 1977, a well-known study was conducted by Kay Deaux and Elizabeth Farris, in which men and women completed tasks and then assessed their own results. Even when their actual performance was the same, men rated themselves more positively and credited more of their success to personal skill. Women, on the other hand, were more inclined to downplay their successes and chalk them up to luck.
In 2022, a Quarterly Journal of Economics study covering more than 4,000 adults and 10,000 school-aged participants, put equally performing men and women side by side—and the gap in self-perception was striking. Despite identical results on a math/science-based task, women scored themselves 13 points lower on a 0–100 scale, on average, than men who had done exactly as well. Even when the work was identical, the women were far less willing to claim credit for it.
Researchers then told participants exactly how well they had performed and exactly where they ranked. The difference shrank, but it didn't disappear—women still described the same objectively measured performance less favorably than men did, and the gap held even when the evaluations were completely private, with nobody watching and no strategic reason to act modestly.
When researchers switched from a stereotypically male math/science-based task to a verbal one, the gender difference disappeared entirely. Women weren't universally incapable of recognizing their own competence—but something about the gender expectations surrounding particular kinds of achievement was shaping how they evaluated themselves.
The evidence goes further than just showing that men express more confidence—it suggests men actually process self-relevant information differently, interpreting it in ways that inflate their own performance. In a 2021 experiment, Michael Thaler found that men engaged in significantly more performance-motivated reasoning. When given ambiguous information about how they'd done relative to others, men disproportionately read it in ways that supported the belief that they'd outperformed their perceived competitors. Women, by contrast, were considerably better calibrated on average.
Sound familiar? I think a pattern is emerging...
Woman succeeds: "I got lucky." "We had a great team." "They helped me so much." "It wasn't really that big of a deal."
Man succeeds: "I crushed it." "I killed it." "I earned that." "I'm just built different." "Called it."
Woman receives praise: Pressure to soften it, contextualize it, share credit, reciprocate warmth, or avoid appearing self-important. If she doesn't, others (typically men) rush in to "humble" her.
In my willingness to be seen as petty, I have found my power. I've stopped funding male mediocrity with silence. (Even calling it "male mediocrity" is being generous.)
Man receives praise: Has social permission to simply accept the positive evaluation without immediately restoring interpersonal balance—and often gets praised for things that shouldn't register as praiseworthy at all. A man who has a job is a "good provider." A man who pays his own bills, supporting no one but himself, gets called "exceptional." A man who feeds his own kids, bathes his own kids, or shows up to his own kid's school event is "helping out"—as if his children were someone else's project he's generously assisting with, rather than his own. (Parenting your own children isn't "helping out." It's parenting.) But the bar for male praise is set so low that clearing it at all gets treated as remarkable, while women are expected to clear a much higher bar and then downplay it when they do.
Woman self-promotes: Risks being judged not just on competence, but on whether she's still sufficiently likable, warm, and communal. Self-promotion puts her at risk of being labeled "narcissistic" or "vain." The same behavior that reads as confidence in a man reads as a character flaw in a woman.
Man self-promotes: Self-promotion is congruent with traditional masculine expectations of agency, confidence, and status. It's not read as a violation of anything—it's read as him simply doing what men are supposed to do.
Women didn't embody these behaviors out of nowhere—it was a rational response to a real social penalty. Laurie Rudman's research on self-promotion exposed a brutal catch-22. When women talked up their own accomplishments, people did rate them as more competent, but that same behavior often cost them likability and got them passed over for hiring. Men saying the exact same things about themselves faced none of that fallout.
A related finding from Wosińska and colleagues showed that in workplace settings, observers responded more favorably to modest self-presentation but specifically when the person who'd succeeded was a woman.
Moss-Racusin and Rudman later dug into the mechanism behind this. They found that women's fear of backlash didn't just make them modest—it actively disrupted their ability to self-promote effectively. That disruption was specific. It didn't show up when men talked about themselves, and it didn't show up when women advocated for someone else. Women could make the case for another person's competence just fine. It was only when the subject was themselves that the interference kicked in.
This is all fascinating because it suggests that what sometimes looks like an internal deficiency—like her not knowing her worth—is actually a learned adaptation to the social environment:
Know your worth, but don't say it t̶o̶o̶ ̶l̶o̶u̶d̶l̶y̶.
Be exceptional, but don't appear impressed with yourself.
Succeed, but distribute the credit.
Be confident, but not overly so.
These behavioral patterns don't just stay confined to the lab—they show up at scale, in the real world. One large-scale study tracked millions of social media posts about academic research and found that women scholars were roughly 28% less likely than men to publicly promote their own published work.
The gender gap in self-promotion has a mirror image in something more everyday: How men and women give and receive compliments. Even outside of any formal achievement, women tend to compliment and receive compliments differently than men do.
Holmes's foundational research documented substantial gender differences in compliment behavior, and later studies found that women use more intensifiers, more personal references, and more positively-framed language when complimenting others than men do. In other words, when women compliment each other, the compliment is rarely just a flat assessment of some trait or achievement—it's doing relational work. It's building and maintaining connection and not simply evaluating.
Someone says, "You look gorgeous." A woman replies, "Thank you! So do you! I love your hair!" For roughly half a second, the entire positive social spotlight rested on her alone—and then, almost reflexively, she redistributed it. The interaction shifts from an asymmetry (you are admirable) to something reciprocal (we admire one another).
That small shift is more revealing than it looks. The compliment stops being a one-directional act of praise and becomes an act of affiliation instead—something shared rather than something received. And I think that's the real answer to what this tells us about women. It isn't evidence of some innate biological humility. It's evidence of training. Women have historically been taught to stay extraordinarily attuned to interpersonal equilibrium—to the invisible balance of who holds the floor, who feels praised, and who might feel diminished by comparison. Women have been conditioned to take on the emotional labor of the entire room, of the entire world.
Don't take too much credit.
Share recognition, credit the group.
Don't occupy too much c̶o̶n̶v̶e̶r̶s̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶a̶l̶ space.
Don't make the other person feel inferior.
Always return warmth with warmth.
Temper pride.
Turn admiration into connection.
Where traditional masculinity has granted men considerably more permission simply to possess status, traditional femininity has trained women to circulate—or even deny—it. In the name of humility, of course.
A recent BYU study used heat-mapping to track where men and women look when imagining themselves walking through the same spaces at night. Men's attention went to the path ahead or a fixed point—a light, a garbage can, their destination. Women's attention scattered to the periphery—the bushes, the dark edges, the places a threat could be waiting.
Read the Room
This is the same instinct at work when a woman redistributes a compliment or downplays her own success so no one else feels diminished. "Reading the room." It's the exact same conditioning, just aimed at a different kind of threat. Where circulating status and compliments protects other people's feelings, scanning the periphery protects her own body. Though, even the first kind of protection isn't purely selfless. Keeping others comfortable is often its own form of self-protection, a way of heading off the social cost of being seen as cold, threatening, or "too much." Both are forms of vigilance women are trained into early.
We learn to anticipate not only physical danger, but other people's discomfort. Who might feel threatened if I sound too certain? Who might resent me if I take too much credit? Who might think I'm arrogant if I admit that I'm good at something? The vigilance changes form, but the underlying lesson remains remarkably consistent: Monitor everyone else's reaction to your presence, and adjust yourself accordingly.
And that is where humility stops being merely a virtue and starts functioning as a form of social regulation. There is a difference between genuine humility and being expected to continually diminish yourself so that other people never have to confront your competence, confidence, beauty, authority, or success. Women are routinely taught to blur that distinction.
This is why the language of "humbling" (negging) women matters. Men are not told that another man needs to be "humbled." Quite the opposite. But when a woman openly recognizes her own value, suddenly she is vain, narcissistic, conceited, "full of herself," or in need of being knocked down a peg or two. The offense is not that she lacks humility, it's that she has claimed status without first making herself smaller.
And this is where male insecurity enters the picture. Research on masculinity has repeatedly found that manhood is often experienced as something that must be proven, defended, and restored when threatened. In a revealing study of online gaming, lower-skilled men became increasingly hostile toward a female teammate as their own performance worsened. Yet the men behaved more submissively toward an equivalent male teammate. The pattern suggested that the woman's presence was especially threatening to men whose own position in the hierarchy was insecure.
That helps to explain why female confidence can provoke such disproportionate hostility. A woman saying, "I know I'm good at this," "I know I'm attractive," or "I earned this" is not merely communicating self-esteem. In the patriarchal hierarchy that has historically expected women to defer, she is also communicating refusal. She is refusing to provide the reassuring little asterisk after her own accomplishments. She is refusing to make herself smaller so somebody else can feel larger.
And sometimes the attempt to "humble" her becomes explicitly interpersonal. Negging works like this: Introduce doubt, withhold overt validation, destabilize her confidence, and reposition the man as the person whose approval she is supposed to seek. The woman who already knows her value is harder to control through validation, because his approval has less bargaining power. So, the goal becomes lowering her self-assessment until his opinion feels more valuable than her own.
Men aren't the only ones enforcing these rules. Women can absorb them and police other women on their behalf: Don't be so angry, don't criticize men so harshly, don't intimidate them, don't scare the "good ones" away, don't make yourself undesirable.
Centering men and seeking male approval is the throughline of all of it. This is part of what internalized misogyny looks like in practice. Male approval becomes the reward offered for acceptable female behavior, while the threat of losing that approval becomes the punishment.
But what happens when a woman no longer regards male approval as a prize? The disciplinary mechanism stops working.
You cannot frighten a woman into silence by warning her that men might not like her if she has already decided that being liked by men is not the organizing principle of her existence. You cannot threaten her with being "undesirable" if she does not consider universal desirability a goal. And you cannot successfully neg a woman into chasing your approval when she recognizes the maneuver for what it is.
And sometimes the "taking up of space" is not metaphorical at all—it's the same scanning instinct from the BYU heat maps mentioned earlier. Researcher Fiona Vera-Gray calls it "safety work". This is the constant, mostly unconscious labor women perform in public space to preempt other people's intrusions before they happen.
Watch what happens when two people approach each other in a grocery-store aisle or on a sidewalk. Women often learn, without consciously realizing it, to anticipate other people's trajectories—to step aside, turn sideways, make room, accommodate. We become so accustomed to yielding that we may not even notice we are doing it until we deliberately stop. Men, on the other hand? They just barrel on ahead like bulls in a china shop.
The physical habit mirrors the social one. Which is to: Move out of the way, lower your voice, soften the statement, add the qualifier, return the compliment, share the credit, apologize before disagreeing, et cetera.
Once you notice that script, you start seeing it everywhere. Which brings me back to the beginning of this article:
Spoilers ahead for The Handmaid's Tale
June, the main character, helped to get children out of Gilead. She also helped to liberate twenty-two women. She stands face-to-face with one of the women she helped to free. And when that woman confronts her with the magnitude of her own accomplishment, June's first instinct is: "I was lucky."
But Lily recognizes it immediately because she knows the script.
That may be one of patriarchy's most effective tricks. It does not have to stand over every woman ordering her to know her place if it can teach her to instinctively shrink herself before anyone asks her to. But when she finally stops shrinking?