Gender Differences in Self-Promotion: Understanding the Female Modesty Constraint

Individuals often need to self-promote for professional recognition and career success. In this paper, we investigate the existence of a gender gap in self-promotion and its causal link with modesty norms. Using a novel experiment, we show that women are significantly less likely to self-promote relative to men. We establish that the difference in behaviour across gender is determined by women’s social-image concerns of being perceived as immodest and not because of an underlying preference for modesty. We find that the provision of a justification to self-promote has two important consequences: (i) it leads to an increase in self-promotion by women and, (ii) contributes to a reduction in the gender gap in self-promotion behaviour.