The relationship between students' gender and their confidence in the correctness of their solutions to complex and difficult mathematics problems

Abstract

It is well established that men more frequently exhibit over-confidence than women in mathematics. Less is known about the relationship between gender and problem-specific confidence judgments and whether this relationship depends on problem difficulty. To investigate the relationship between gender, problem difficulty, and problem-specific confidence judgments, including how calibrated and under/over-confident men and women are, we examine data from 349 women and 279 men who were instructed to solve 13 difficult and complex mathematics problems and report their confidence in the correctness of their solutions. We find that men were more confident than women and that the gender gap in confidence decreases with increasing problem difficulty. Women were better calibrated than men and the gender gap in calibration increased with problem difficulty. As problem difficulty increased, women, but not men, transitioned from being under- to over-confident.