Laurie Heatherington and her colleagues had student experimenters ask hundreds of incoming college students to predict how they thought their first year at college would go by forecasting the grades they expected to get. In some cases, the predictions were made anonymously: They were put in writing and placed in an envelope. In others, they were made publicly, either orally to the experimenter or by writing on a paper that the experimenter promptly read. The researchers found that women predicted lower grades for themselves than men did — but only when they made their predictions publicly. The predictions the women students made in private did not differ from the men’s, just as the grades they actually earned as the year progressed did not differ from the men’s. In other words, their lower predictions evidenced not lack of confidence but reluctance to reveal the level of confidence they felt. The same researchers conducted a second study that captured women’s characteristic balancing act between their own interests and those of the person they are talking to. In half the cases, the experimenters told their own grade-point averages to the students they interviewed, and the grades they claimed to have gotten were comparatively low. Lo and behold, when women students thought they were talking to someone who had gotten low grades, they lowered their predictions of what they expected their own grades to be. Whether or not the experimenter claimed to have gotten low grades did not affect the predictions made by men students.
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Talking From 9 to 5 by Deborah Tannen, Ph.D., William Morrow and Co., Inc., New York, 1994, p. 37.