Title: Do Women Overestimate the Extent to Which They Are Underestimated?

Authors: Mana Saki, Marius van Dijke

Abstract:
In this study, we investigated whether women overestimate the extent people
underestimate their leadership abilities. Through an online survey of students
enrolled in a leadership development course we investigated participants'
perceptions of their teammate's leadership ability and their beliefs about how
their teammates perceive them.  After data cleaning we reached a sample of 254
dyads. We examined whether female participants' leadership meta-perception -
one's beliefs about what other people think about oneself (Kenny & DePaulo,
1993) - is lower than their peers’ perception of them using the algebraic
difference between meta-perceptions and teammates’ perceptions. To address the
methodological issues of using a difference score as a dependent variable, we
accompanied our analysis with a multivariate analysis of the components
(Edwards, 1995). Since some of the participants are members of more than one
dyad, we used cluster robust standard errors to adjust for possible
non-independence (McNeish, Stapleton, & Silverman, 2017). We found evidence
that women tend to overestimate the extent of underestimation of their
leadership abilities. Yet the overestimation of underestimation remains
unaffected by the gender of the perceiver and is not mediated by attention
bias towards negative feedback. 

Edwards, J. R. (1995). Alternatives to difference scores as dependent
variables in the study of congruence in organizational research.
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 64(3), 307-324.  

Kenny, D.A., & DePaulo, B.M. (1993). Do people know how others view them? An
empirical and theoretical account. Psychological Bulletin, 114, 145-161.

McNeish, D., Stapleton, L. M., & Silverman, R. D. (2017). On the unnecessary
ubiquity of hierarchical linear modeling. Psychological Methods, 22, 114-140.