Authority bias was on full display during the 2024 US election. Numerous news articles questioning if Kamala Harris had enough experience for the job ahead, despite her decades of work in California and as VP, yet very few were questioning the capabilities of her challenger. (Don’t get me started on Vance’s comment about Black female surgeons.)
We tend to assume men are qualified for the roles or projects they seek, but women need to prove they’ve got what it takes.
If you’re like me, you’ve felt gendered bias at work, sometimes overt, other times, it’s just a feeling. I worked in mostly male-dominated industries for the first twenty years of my career: first in management consulting, and later in tech. Being challenged to prove my ideas had merit was a recurring theme, so much so that my default wasn’t to trust my instincts or experience.
I got in the habit of sharing stats from McKinsey and Gallup, or quoting famous (usually male) authors at the time, like Dan Pink, Ken Blanchard or John Kotter. If I could find someone else who agreed with me, it was a shortcut to getting on with the decisions that needed to be made.
I needed the evidence to overcome the hardwiring of seeing men as the default expert.
What’s the best way to overcome authority and gender bias? Show your work. Stand out as an expert. Give your audience a new shortcut heuristic, with proof you know what you’re doing, so they don’t need to look elsewhere.
Let’s take a closer look.
What exactly is authority bias?
Authority bias is the heuristic or brain “shortcut” giving us one less thing to decide in a day. This comes from Daniel Kahneman’s work about the brain’s reliance on “System 1” thinking to make our daily mental load lighter.
For decades (centuries really), the only experts we heard about were men, so our brains became wired to assume that we could rely on men to know what needed to be done. Women, on the other hand, need to continue to prove their merits and value.
This is further compounded for female founders in commodity spaces, where buyers have lots of options or feel the label of “coach” or “consultant” means they can lump everyone together. They might subconsciously seek out male vendors if they are assuming they’re better qualified, or push for reduced prices because they believe they have lots of similar options.
Women can internalize an authority gap as well, known as the confidence gap. Research found men tend to overstate their abilities, while women understate them. This is why men are more likely to apply for jobs where they meet 60 percent of the criteria, while women only apply if they meet 100 percent of the requirements.
New research disputes this in women entrepreneurs though, showing we’re equally capable at assessing our abilities. We just need others to see it too.
How to build your authority? Show your work.
I see it all the time: founders who have deep, impactful, robust program offerings and also have generic, uninspiring websites and sales collateral.
Providing more details about your solutions, unique components, and evidence that your programs work can short-circuit any preexisting bias you might encounter and can make the buying process move more quickly.
This doesn’t mean giving away the farm—you don’t need to share the complete how-to of your IP. But it could include:
- Client stories with the measurable and intangible outcomes they achieved
- Research you used as you developed your programs
- Models, frameworks, or other visuals you use in your programs
- Stories highlighting your experience, perspective, or counterintuitive truths you’ve uncovered
- Share your point-of-view in blog articles and social media posts
Your buyers will be using both emotions and logic in their decisions, so find ways to share information to cover both angles.
An unexpected benefit of showing your work? You’ll feel a new level of confidence as you realize you are the expert they can count on.
