The Effect of Gender Roles on Self-Confidence

The feminist movement began to create its own terminology to understand the nature of gender inequality in the 1970s. In this process, masculine power relations were examined by taking the concept of "gender" as the center. With the increase of feminist studies, many new concepts have entered the literature. Among these concepts, “Gender confidence gap” was used to explain the self-confidence gap created by gender norms between men and women. Although it does not have a complete equivalent in Turkish yet, this concept relates the lack of self-confidence in women with their social oppression. Let's take a closer look at the concept of "gender confidence gap".
The idea that women are less self-confident than men first came to the agenda in 1978.
In 1978, Suzanne Imes and Pauline Rose Clance, in a study they conducted, introduced a phenomenon they called the imposter syndrome. According to the study, individuals suffering from this syndrome continued to see themselves inadequate even though they had achieved numerous successes throughout their lives. They thought they came to their position by chance, not by their own abilities. This increased the anxiety level of the individuals, resulting in their isolation from the social sphere. According to the interesting result of the study, women were mostly affected by this phenomenon.

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