The Confidence Gap in Women Leaders Starts Long Before the Job
The confidence gap that holds women back in leadership does not begin at work. It begins around age 14, when a capable, high-performing girl quietly learns to tie her sense of worth to achievement and to read her own fear as a signal to stop. By the time she is a director or a VP, that pattern looks like hesitation: the qualified woman who will not apply until she meets every requirement, who waits to feel ready, who holds back in the room. The gap is real, it is expensive, and most organizations try to coach the symptom in adults without ever naming where it formed.
This is the throughline Kim Bohr, CEO of SparkEffect and host of Courage to Advance, drew out in a recent conversation with Jilyne Jarvis, co-founder and executive director of the youth confidence organization ZGiRLS. The insight that makes it useful for HR and executive leaders isn’t about girls. It’s about patterns: the same self-limiting habits that take hold in middle school show up, unaddressed, in the leadership pipeline. And because those patterns are learned, they can be unlearned, at any age.
What follows is a standalone look at the confidence gap, why the usual fixes miss, and what leaders can actually do about it. You don’t need to have heard the episode to use it.
🎧 LISTEN NOW: Hear Jilyne Jarvis’s Full Conversation
Want the full episode? Listen to Jilyne Jarvis on Courage to Advance, where she and host Kim Bohr break down why “fearless” is the wrong standard for leaders, why capable women wait to check every box before applying for a stretch role, and how the confidence patterns that form at 14 show up unaddressed in the executive pipeline.
About Jilyne Jarvis
Jilyne Jarvis is a seven-time NCAA All-American and a retired U.S. Ski Team member who turned her own experience of high-achievement self-doubt into a method for building confidence in others. She competed at the elite level, moved into tech recruiting, and kept noticing the same pattern in accomplished professionals that she recognized from her years in sport: external success sitting on top of an unsteady sense of internal worth.
In 2014, she founded ZGiRLS to teach girls 11 to 14 the mental tools elite athletes use to handle pressure, doubt, and fear.
- The program is delivered by Olympic, collegiate, and professional women athletes who share, out loud, that they feel afraid too.
- Over 84% of participants attend for free.
- Jilyne was named to the Puget Sound Business Journal’s “40 Under 40.”
- She took on the role of Seattle Sports Commissioner in 2025.
Confidence Is a Skill, Not a Trait
Confidence is a skill built through action, not a personality trait you’re born with or without. That single reframe changes what an organization can do about it: if confidence were fixed, development spend aimed at it would be wasted. Because it’s a skill, it can be taught, practiced, and measured, the same way any other capability is built.
Why the “born confident” myth is expensive
When leaders treat confidence as innate, they sort people into “has it” and “doesn’t,” and quietly stop developing the second group. The woman who reads as “not quite ready” is often not lacking capability. She’s running a decades-old script no one has helped her rewrite.
Why it matters for trust
SparkEffect’s Trust in Turbulence research frames trust as something built through deliberate practice, not declared. Confidence works the same way: treating capability as buildable, rather than fixed, signals that growth is expected and supported, one of the conditions that lets trust take hold. That’s the premise behind SparkEffect’s leadership development work: capability gets built on purpose, not assumed to be present or absent.
Why "Fearless" Is the Wrong Goal
Fearlessness is the wrong standard to set for your people, because the leaders and performers they admire aren’t without fear. They’ve simply learned to act while the fear is present. Holding up fearlessness as the bar teaches people to interpret their own nervousness as a reason to stop, exactly the wrong lesson for anyone approaching a stretch role.
What elite athletes actually do
The most useful thing ZGiRLS does is have accomplished women athletes stand in front of a room and admit the fear is still there. As Jilyne put it, describing what those athletes tell the girls:
“You think I’m standing there fearless. I’m not. And don’t think that if you’re afraid, you’re not ready either, because you are.”
The message reframes fear from a verdict into a normal companion of doing hard things. Bravery, not fearlessness, becomes the goal. Her shorthand for it: do it scared.
Why it matters for trust
Psychological safety is one of five domains in the SparkEffect Trust Score, and it’s built by what leaders model, not what they announce. A leader who says “I’m working on this too” or “I was wrong” shows the team what’s safe to say out loud, which does more for a team’s willingness to take smart risks than any stated value on a wall.
The Gap Does Not Close on Its Own
The confidence decline that hits girls at 11 to 14 doesn’t resolve with age or seniority. It follows them into the workforce and reappears as measurable hesitation:
- Slower decision-making
- Avoidance of visible risk
- Reluctance around self-advocacy
- The well-documented pattern of not applying for a role until every box is checked
The pattern in your pipeline
If you lead people, you’ve seen this:
- A high-potential woman passes on the stretch assignment.
- A capable candidate undersells herself in the promotion conversation.
Neither is a capability problem. Both are confidence patterns that formed long before she joined your organization, and both respond to development, coaching, and a culture that rewards trying over performing certainty.
Visible women in leadership change what the next person believes is possible. Representation connects directly to relational continuity and cultural belonging, another driver of trust in SparkEffect’s own research: when people see leaders who came up the way they did, the story they tell themselves about what they can do shifts. For organizations working to strengthen that bench, SparkEffect’s executive coaching addresses these patterns directly at the individual leader level.
The Labels People Put on Themselves
The labels people carry about themselves cap performance more quietly than any external barrier. Jilyne nearly shut down her own organization because she couldn’t see herself as a CEO, all while teaching girls to drop exactly that kind of self-imposed label. There was nothing wrong with her capability. The story she was telling herself was the block.
The question for leaders
What labels and self-built blocks are quietly capping your highest-potential people, and what would it take to help them name and set those down? Often the intervention isn’t a new skill. It’s permission to stop believing an old story. When a leader models that, catching their own fixed-mindset self-talk and reframing it out loud, they show the organization is a safe place to be in progress rather than finished.
Where to Start
- Name the pattern, not the person. Frame hesitation as a learned confidence pattern that development can address, not a fixed trait or a performance failure.
- Retire “fearless” as a standard. Replace it with bravery: reward people for acting while uncertain, and say plainly that fear doesn’t mean unready.
- Model the work out loud. Catch your own fixed-mindset self-talk and add the word “yet.” “I haven’t figured this out yet” teaches more than any pep talk.
- Make confidence a development target. Treat it as a buildable skill inside coaching and leadership programs, not a mood you hope people arrive with.
- Watch for the self-imposed label. When a capable person opts out, ask what story they’re carrying before you assume they’re not ready.
“Just because you think it doesn’t make it true.”
That line from Jilyne Jarvis is the whole idea in seven words. The thoughts that tell a capable person they’re not ready aren’t facts. They’re patterns, most of them decades old, and patterns can change. The confidence holding back your pipeline is addressable, once you stop treating it as a fixed trait and start building it like the skill it is.
Related Resource
Read the Research
Get the full SparkEffect Trust Study with detailed breakdowns by industry, organization size, and leadership level.
[Research link]
The Science of Trust in Coaching
Explore the neuroscience behind why trust is the foundation of every leadership breakthrough. Download the free ebook.
[Ebook link]
Leadership Development Programs
SparkEffect’s leadership development courses help organizations build the conditions where people actually stay, grow, and perform.
[Leadership Development link]
Executive Coaching
One-on-one coaching for leaders developing the awareness and capability to lead through complexity, have hard conversations, and address the self-limiting patterns that cap high-potential talent.
[Executive Coaching link]
ZGiRLS
Jilyne Jarvis’s organization teaches girls 11 to 14 the confidence tools elite athletes use to handle pressure, doubt, and fear, delivered by Olympic, collegiate, and professional women athletes.
[zgirls.org] | [LinkedIn]
Listen to Jilyne Jarvis on Courage to Advance
Hear the full conversation, including why “fearless” is the wrong standard for leaders, the self-imposed label that nearly made Jilyne shut down her own organization, and what it actually takes to build confidence as a skill.
[Listen to Jilyne Jarvis’s full episode]
Connect with Kim Bohr
[LinkedIn]
Work with SparkEffect
If confidence gaps are quietly capping your leadership bench, or you want to build a culture where people grow into readiness instead of waiting for it, we can help. Schedule a conversation to explore how:
[Contact link]
About SparkEffect
SparkEffect helps organizations build trust that bends without breaking. Our Trust Performance Index and consulting services give leadership teams the tools to diagnose trust gaps and build the infrastructure required for lasting transformation.
The Courage to Advance podcast features leaders building the organizations they wish existed, proving that business doesn’t have to be dehumanizing.
Looking for more on what effective leadership development actually looks like in practice? Explore these conversations on the Courage to Advance podcast.
