Why so many women still struggle to market themselves

Many women are highly capable, highly credible and quietly ambitious. Yet when it comes to marketing themselves, they hesitate. Not because they lack substance, but because visibility can feel uncomfortable, self-congratulatory or professionally risky. For years, women have been told to speak up, put themselves forward and own their achievements. But the reality is more complicated. For many, the reluctance is not irrational. It is learned, reinforced, and often rewarded.

The recognisable truth

There is no shortage of advice telling women to be more visible.

• Speak up
• Share your wins
• Put yourself forward
• Build your profile
• Be bolder about your value

On the surface, it sounds sensible. In business, visibility matters. People cannot buy from, promote, back or recommend what they do not properly see. Yet for many women, marketing themselves still feels deeply uncomfortable. Not impossible. Not irrelevant. Just harder than it seems to be for others.

This is often reduced to a confidence issue, but it’s not that simple!

For many women, the hesitation is more nuanced than a lack of self-belief. It is often a mix of learned behaviour, social conditioning and professional caution. Many have been raised to be modest, collaborative and not “make too much of themselves”. Later, in the workplace or in business, they find themselves operating in environments that reward visibility, self-advocacy and a confident personal narrative. The problem is obvious. The behaviours they were praised for early in life do not always serve them in systems that favour those who speak most clearly and most often about their achievements.

This isn’t an anecdote. It is a pattern documented from thousands of studies, spanning decades of research, and it is playing out in businesses of every size and sector right now. For those of you running seven-figure operations with ambitions to scale further, understanding why this happens — and what it costs — is not just a diversity issue. It’s a business performance issue.

The self-promotion gap is real, measurable, and nothing to do with competence

The most striking research on this topic comes from Harvard Business School and the Wharton School. Economists Christine Exley and Judd Kessler ran a series of controlled experiments involving over 4,000 participants, designed to isolate the gender gap in self-promotion from any difference in actual performance. Their finding, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, was unambiguous: even when a woman and a man achieved identical results, women consistently described their performance less favourably than men.

What made this study so significant was what it ruled out. The researchers expected that confidence might explain the difference. It didn’t. Even after accounting for confidence levels, the self-promotion gap remained. Women weren’t underselling themselves because they doubted their abilities — they were doing so despite knowing they had performed equally well. Something else was driving the behaviour.

• 8.3% lower ratings for “potential” given to women vs men at equal performance levels  (MIT study of 30,000 employees)
• 46% of women worry about being perceived as “bossy” when advocating for themselves at work

The likability penalty: when self-promotion becomes a liability

A landmark meta-analysis by researchers at Stanford and Emory, examining 71 studies on gender, dominance, and workplace backlash, found that assertive behaviours — asking for a raise, speaking up in meetings, claiming credit for achievements — carried substantial professional risk for women that men simply do not face. Dominant behaviour gave men a professional boost. For women, the same behaviour damaged how much people liked them.

This is what researchers call the “likability penalty.” And critically, likability — not competence — is often the deciding factor in promotion and advancement decisions. A woman can be entirely competent and still be passed over because she is perceived, however unfairly, as “difficult” or “not the right fit” the moment she advocates for herself.

The research into likeability bias confirms that women’s performance reviews are more likely than men’s to reference personality traits rather than measurable outcomes. In hiring, concerns about “cultural fit” can weigh more heavily against women than men — a bias that often comes down to how assertive they appeared in an interview.

“Professional women face a catch-22: they must overcome stereotypes by acting assertively, yet when they do so, they risk being penalised for violating gender prescriptions.”

A now-famous case study from Stanford illustrates this with uncomfortable clarity. Professor Frank Flynn took the real career story of successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur Heidi Roizen and divided his MBA class: half read it under her real name, half read the identical story with her name changed to “Howard.” Both were rated as equally competent. Howard was seen as a likeable go-getter. Heidi was seen as aggressive and someone you wouldn’t want to work with. Same story. Same achievements. Different gender. Entirely different reception.^[7]

Perhaps most surprisingly, research shows that women are not immune to applying this double standard themselves. Studies consistently find that women are more likely than men to rate other women who advocate strongly for themselves as “unlikable.” This conditioning runs deep!

Good-girl conditioning starts early 

The roots of the self-promotion gap are not found in the workplace. They are found in childhood. Research consistently shows that girls are socialised from an early age to be modest, communal, and other-focused — to share credit, to deflect praise, and to prioritise group harmony over personal recognition. Boys, by contrast, are encouraged to compete, to claim their victories, and to be visible.

By the time these children enter professional life, the behaviours are deeply embedded. Girls taught that celebrating their achievements is “bragging” become women who downplay results in performance reviews. Those raised to “be nice” become leaders who let their work speak for itself — even when the environment they operate in rewards those who speak loudest on behalf of their work. Women who deflect praise in interviews consistently lose out to men who confidently claim it, even when the underlying performance is identical or better.

What the MIT research found: In a study of 30,000 management-track employees at a major North American retail organisation, women received higher performance ratings on average than their male counterparts. Despite this, they received 8.3% lower ratings for “potential” — the metric that most strongly predicts promotion. The talent was the same, or better. The perceived future capability was not. Potential is, in large part, a story we tell about ourselves. Women are telling it less compellingly, and the consequences compound significantly over time.

The marketing problem is business-critical, not just personal

For the senior leaders reading this, the self-promotion gap is not simply a personal development challenge for the women in your team. It is a structural leak in your talent pipeline.

When women in your business systematically underpitch themselves in client meetings, decline high-visibility projects, or wait to be noticed rather than making the case for their own advancement, you end up with a leadership layer that rewards those who are best at self-promotion, not those who are best at the job.

McKinsey and LeanIn’s Women in the Workplace 2024 report — the largest study of its kind, drawing on data from hundreds of companies — confirms that

for every 100 men promoted to manager, only 81 women make the same step.

And the gap widens significantly further up the ladder.

At the entrepreneurial level, the picture is just as stark and considerably more consequential for the UK economy. Women now represent one in three UK entrepreneurs, a 36% increase in business ownership since 2015. Early-stage entrepreneurial activity among women has tripled since 2002. And yet in 2024, female founders in the UK received just 1.9% of total venture capital investment — a figure that has barely moved in a decade. Female-led companies received just 5.8% of all investment deals, despite data showing that women-led firms generate higher revenues on average than male-led ones.

That gap is not entirely explained by the quality of the pitches or the businesses. Research consistently shows that women are judged more harshly in investor settings, and are less likely to bring the kind of audacious, forward-projecting confidence that investment culture rewards. The problem is not the product. It is the packaging — and the packaging is shaped by the same societal forces that have been quietly at work since primary school.

What business leaders can actually do

The instinct — understandable, but ultimately insufficient — is to respond by coaching women to be more confident and more assertive. Run a programme. Hire a speaker. Encourage them to put themselves forward. And while skilled development support has genuine value, placing the full burden of change on women themselves misses the structural reality that the research reveals.

Harvard Business School’s Katherine Coffman is direct on this point: the problem is not that women aren’t speaking up enough. It’s that the systems businesses have built are designed around those who speak loudest. When your processes rely on self-nomination, on individuals pitching their own ideas in open forums, on “putting yourself forward” as the primary signal of readiness — you are, by design, filtering out a significant proportion of your best people before they have had a chance.

The most effective interventions flip this model. Use structured, criteria-based performance evaluation rather than subjective assessments that reward confidence over contribution. Build active sponsorship cultures in which senior leaders advocate explicitly for people who may not be advocating loudly for themselves. Go actively looking for talent, rather than waiting for it to arrive at your door with a polished pitch.

Time for change

The women in your business are not waiting to be discovered. Many of them have learned — rationally, based on lived experience and real professional consequences — that visible self-promotion carries risks for them that it does not carry for their male peers. They have adapted accordingly, and in doing so, they have made themselves less visible to the very people and processes that could advance them.

The question for business leaders is whether you are going to keep rewarding the loudest voice in the room, or build the kind of environment where the most capable one doesn’t have to choose between her ambition and her reputation. The businesses that close this gap won’t just be more equitable. They will be more competitive, better informed, and significantly better placed to scale. The evidence is there. The decision is yours.