Gender Differences in Climbing up the Ladder: Why Experience Closes the Ambition Gender Gap
研究发现，在政治领域，缺乏经验的女性比男性更不愿追求更高职位，但随着经验增加，这种性别差距消失，原因是经验提升了女性的自信。
Women are unequally represented in the highest positions in society. Beyond discrimination and bias, women are missing from the top because they are less likely to pursue high-ranking opportunities. We propose that experience is a critical moderator of gender differences in pursuing leadership opportunities, with low-experience women being particularly unlikely to seek higher level positions. We used field analyses of 96 years of U.S. senator and governor elections to examine male and female politicians' propensity to run for higher political offices. As predicted, among those with little political experience, women were less likely than men to run for higher office, but experience closed this gender gap. A preregistered experiment among U.S.-based adults replicated the field findings and revealed that it was the increased self-confidence of experienced women that reduced the gender gap. The findings suggest experience, and the self-confidence that comes with it, is one lever for closing the gender gap in seeking to climb professional hierarchies.