Gender and confidence: are women underconfident?

Previous research finds that schoolgirls tend to be underconfident with respect to their mathematics performance, while schoolboys tend to be overconfident. We asked Swedish university students (aged 18–35) what grade they thought they would get in a macroeconomics exam 1 week later. These results were compared with their actual grade and we find no evidence of men being overconfident, but women are underconfident about their test performance. These results suggest that the findings that schoolgirls are underconfident about their math performance also carry over to grown-up women studying macroeconomics.