Why Confidence Isn’t the Problem

Why Confidence Isn’t the Problem

What Actually Holds Senior Women Leaders Back

Confidence is not what holds most senior women leaders back. What holds them back is something deeper, more specific, and far less talked about: a set of internalised beliefs, structural patterns, and identity-level tensions that confidence alone — no matter how hard you work to build it — cannot resolve.

You have probably been told, at some point, that you need more confidence.

Maybe someone said it directly a mentor, a manager, a well-meaning colleague who watched you shrink in a meeting where your idea was the best in the room. Maybe you said it to yourself, on the drive home, replaying a moment where you stayed quiet when you should have spoken up, or deferred when you should have held your ground.

Confidence. The word lands like a solution. Build more of it, the logic goes, and the path forward will open.

But here is what years of working with high-achieving women has shown, and what the research is beginning to confirm: for most senior women leaders, confidence is not actually the problem. And treating it as the problem sends them chasing a solution that will never quite fit — because it misdiagnoses what is actually happening.

The confidence narrative and why it gets it wrong

In 2021, Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey published what became one of the most-read articles in Harvard Business Review’s history: “Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome.” Their central argument was simple and quietly revolutionary: the self-doubt many women experience at work is not a personal failing that requires individual fixing. It is a rational and often accurate response to environments that were not built for them.

As Tulshyan and Burey put it: “Imposter syndrome directs our view toward fixing women at work instead of fixing the places where women work.”¹

This reframe matters enormously. Because when we tell women that confidence is the missing ingredient, we imply that the limitation is internal. That if they just thought differently, spoke up more, took up more space, everything would shift.

Sometimes that is partly true. But only partly. And leading with it — as the primary explanation — puts the full weight of a structural problem on an individual woman’s psychology. That is both unfair and, more practically, ineffective.

What actually holds senior women back

The barriers that limit high-achieving women at the senior level are real, layered, and distinct from simple lack of confidence. Here are the four that appear most consistently.

1. Internalised conditioning, not absence of belief. From childhood, many women absorb messages about how much space they are permitted to take up. Be collaborative. Be humble. Do not appear too ambitious. Do not make others uncomfortable with how much you want. These messages do not disappear when a woman earns a degree, gets promoted, or builds a track record of excellence. They go underground. They show up as the instinct to soften a direct statement, to over-qualify an opinion, to frame an achievement as a team effort even when it was largely hers. This is not a lack of confidence. It is the residue of very effective social conditioning. And it requires something different from confidence-building to shift: it requires conscious unlearning.
2. Identity tension at the senior level. As women rise in organisations, they often encounter a specific and underexplored form of friction: the version of leadership they are being asked to embody does not match the version of themselves they want to be. Research by Herminia Ibarra at London Business School found that the higher women rise, the more risk-averse they become — not because of lack of capability, but because their visibility increases, the pressure to represent their entire gender intensifies, and the stakes of being wrong feel disproportionately high.² This is not a confidence gap. It is an identity gap. And it resolves not through positive self-talk, but through doing the deeper work of building a leadership identity that is genuinely, sustainably her own.
3. Structural bias that erodes accurate self-perception. A 2020 KPMG study found that three in four female executives had experienced imposter syndrome in their careers — and of those, 85% said it limited their willingness to share ideas or speak up at work.³ But here is the critical nuance: much of this self-doubt is not irrational. Women receive consistently less actionable feedback than men, are more likely to be evaluated on personality traits rather than outcomes, and are held to higher standards of proof before being considered for stretch opportunities. When your environment consistently sends signals that you do not quite belong, or that your contributions are less readily credited than your male colleagues’, the self-doubt that follows is not a cognitive distortion. It is a reasonable response to real data.
4. The permission gap. Perhaps the most persistent barrier of all is the one that lives closest to identity: many senior women are waiting, consciously or not, for someone to give them permission to fully step into their leadership. Permission to want more. Permission to take up space. Permission to lead visibly, to be ambitious openly, to say what they think without softening it first. This permission rarely arrives from the outside. And yet the waiting continues. The shift happens not when someone grants the permission, but when she realises it was never theirs to give.

Why this distinction matters

Confidence is an outcome of doing the deeper work — not a prerequisite for it.

When we treat confidence as the root cause, we send women on a particular kind of journey: read the books, attend the workshops, practise the power poses, repeat the affirmations. Some of this helps, in the way that treating a symptom helps. But it does not address the underlying pattern.

The women who make the most durable shifts at the senior level are rarely the ones who ‘built their confidence’ first and then moved forward. They are the ones who did the inner work — examined their conditioning, clarified their values, built a leadership identity rooted in who they actually are — and found that confidence followed. Not as a prerequisite. As a result.

McKinsey’s research found that corporate culture is twice as important as individual mindset in building women’s confidence that they can reach top leadership positions.⁴ This is a significant finding. It tells us that the environment matters at least as much as the individual. And it tells us that systemic change is essential. But it also tells us something useful for the individual woman navigating an imperfect environment right now: the work worth doing is not primarily confidence-building. It is building the kind of inner clarity, self-knowledge, and values-anchored leadership identity that can withstand environments that were not designed with her in mind.

Where to focus instead

If confidence is a byproduct rather than a foundation, what is the foundation? Three things, consistently:

Self-knowledge over self-improvement. The most powerful shift is not from less confident to more confident. It is from performing a version of leadership to embodying a genuine one. This requires honest, sometimes uncomfortable examination: What do I actually value? What kind of leader do I genuinely want to be? Where am I leading from my own centre, and where am I leading from fear of judgment or desire for approval?

Values clarity as a navigation tool. In complex environments, under pressure, in the moments when staying quiet is easier than speaking up — values are what hold. Not confidence, which can fluctuate with circumstances. Values, which are stable. Women who have done this work know, even in their most uncertain moments, what they stand for. And that knowledge is a form of inner authority that external validation cannot give and cannot take away.

Addressing the permission gap directly. This means naming the pattern: I have been waiting for permission that is not coming. And then making a different choice — not dramatically, not performatively, but in the small daily moments where the habitual response is to defer, to minimise, to wait. The permission gap closes through practice, not through insight alone.

The conversation about what holds women back is evolving. The most useful version of it has moved beyond the deficit model — beyond the idea that women need to fix something in themselves in order to succeed. Not because structural and systemic barriers do not need to change (they do, urgently) but because the women navigating those barriers right now deserve better than a prescription that misdiagnoses their actual challenge.

You do not need more confidence. You need to stop waiting for permission to lead from who you already are.

About the Author

Bhavna Toor is the founder of Shenomics, a conscious leadership platform for high-achieving women. Shenomics works with women across India and globally to develop the inner mastery and outer leadership capabilities that turn ambition into real-world impact.

Explore programmes and resources at shenomics.com

References & Further Reading

[1]  Tulshyan, R. & Burey, J. “Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome”  Harvard Business Review, 2021.

[2]  Ibarra, H. et al. “Why Women Stay Out of the Spotlight at Work”  Harvard Business Review, 2010 (research cited in subsequent work).

[3]  KPMG. “KPMG Women’s Leadership Study”  KPMG LLP, 2020.

[4]  McKinsey & Company. “Women in the Workplace 2024”  McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.Org, 2024.

[5]  Tulshyan, R. & Burey, J. “End Imposter Syndrome in Your Workplace”  Harvard Business Review, 2021.

[6]  Catalyst. “The Double-Bind Dilemma for Women in Leadership”  Catalyst.org, 2007, updated 2024.

[7]  KPMG. “KPMG Women’s Leadership Study: Moving Forward Together”  KPMG LLP, 2020 — 3 in 4 female executives experienced imposter syndrome; 85% said it limited their willingness to speak up.

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