When was the last time you asked for a pay rise? If the answer is a long time ago, then it’s more likely than not that you’re a woman.

New statistics from Bank of Ireland have uncovered a shocking discrepancy between the way women and men conduct their financial affairs. The survey found that men report higher confidence than women in a gap that is particularly evident when it comes to asking for a pay rise.

Around 32 per cent of men compared to 17 per cent of women feel confident when asking for a raise. And while 35 per cent of men feel confident when it comes to changing jobs for a better salary, only 26 per cent of women feel the same way.

The new Bank of Ireland research sheds light on confidence levels in various aspects of life, from personal finances and employment to life goals.

The research supports the launch of the Bank’s new Right With You platform, which is built on the insight that confidence is the spark that sets progress in motion, in an effort to show the bank’s ambition to help customers build financial confidence.

But women are already at a disadvantage when it comes to aspects of life, financially and otherwise, the survey found.

Men tend to report higher levels of confidence than women, with 80 per cent of men saying they are confident in themselves compared to 64 per cent of women, according to Professor Ian Robertson, emeritus professor of psychology and co-director of the Global Brain Health Institute at Trinity College, Dublin, and the author of How Confidence Works.

‘Confidence is the greatest resource that anyone can have, both individually and collectively, because it acts like a self-fulfilling prophecy because of its effects on the brain and the mind,’ says Professor Robertson.

‘Any group which has higher levels of confidence automatically has an advantage which then, because of the way human relationships work, can undermine people who have less of it.

‘So there are multiple reasons why women are lacking advantages. One of the main ones is that women are much more accurate about their self-perception than men are. Men on average are slightly overconfident and that’s one reason why more men become compulsive gamblers and addicts than women do. Men overestimate both their abilities and their chances of success.

‘That fuels the whole gambling industry, for example, but also makes them more likely to start up a company because if you were basing on pure statistical reality, nobody would ever do a start-up because most of them fail.’

Confidence has six main effects on a person.

‘It lifts your mood, lowers your anxiety, it makes you more motivated, makes you a wee bit smarter, and makes you more persuasive and influential, and it gives you status in other people’s eyes,’ says Professor Robertson.

‘That makes you more likely to get success, and when you get a small success, you have a greater chance of getting a subsequent one.

‘So boys are on this advantageous rollercoaster at an early age and the thing about confidence is that it’s exponential. It’s like compound interest, it multiplies with time.

‘So because it gives you status as well and because status is a dominant signal, it means that women can often feel dominated in a group, particularly if the majority of that group are men.’

The idea that men are capable and confident has now been ingrained in us.

‘We tend to judge the competence of a person ad we make a judgment in less than a couple of seconds, and it’s based on how masculine the face is,’ he says. ‘There were studies done in Switzerland and in France getting children to predict from photographs who would win an election out of people they’d never heard of in a different country, and they were 70 per cent accurate.

‘What the neuroscientists discovered was happening was the children were making judgments of competence based on very primitive structures of the face, and masculinity of the face.

‘It’s true that, among women, the more masculine the face, the more competent they’re judged to be, up to a point. In men, it goes up linearly. In women it’s a U-shaped curve and it starts to go down when they start to look too masculine. So it’s that terrible two-edged sword that women experience if they’re assertive. If a man says something assertively he’s seen as, “oh, he’s assertive,” whereas when a woman does exactly the same, she’s seen as aggressive.’

Professor Robertson saw another example while judging the Young Scientist Competition, which 14-year-old boys from Ballincollig in Cork had entered with some brilliant research.

‘They were intrigued why so many fewer girls did Stem subjects – engineering, maths, etc – than boys. So what they did was they took a group of five- and six-year-old girls and they asked them to draw an engineer and a doctor and a nurse and to give the drawing a name so they knew what gender they were allocated.

‘The girls drew engineers and gave them names and 50 per cent of the time the engineers they drew were men and 50 per cent of the time were women. The boys, when they drew them, 95 per cent were men.

‘So that built-in bias at a horribly early age in boys, of course, communicates itself to girls.’

According to the data from Eurostat, the gender pay gap in Ireland has fallen to eight per cent in 2025 from 9.6 per cent in 2022. However this still means that men are earning €11,000 more on average than women.

According to Professor Robertson, studies show that women are more averse to competition and shy away from it more than men.

‘Financial matters and asking for a pay rise, that’s part of a competitive world and women are less likely to engage in that competition,’ he says. ‘The upside of that is women are more realistic and more accurate and so are going to be more risk-savvy.

‘They also assess their own knowledge and abilities more accurately than men.

‘If you give a group of men and women a general knowledge test and you score them, and then you ask them what score do you think you got, the men on average will have got seven out of 10 but will think they got eight out of 10. Women on average will have got seven out of 10, but will say on average six out of 10. So women slightly underestimate their true abilities but they’re more accurate than men are.

‘That means when it comes to making financial decisions, possibly because of their greater self-awareness, women are more likely to seek advice, more likely to consider the risks and the downsides, and not make bets on the market that could go the wrong way,’ he says.

This is all very well but what about getting a pay rise? How do you change how you think so that you can be one of the lucky percentage with the confidence to ask for what you deserve? Well, Professor Robertson says the age-old adage of ‘fake it until you make it’ is actually true.

Calling out the sabotage that goes on when it comes to gender stereotyping and making yourself aware of it is one way to build your confidence.

‘The critical thing for women is to start behaving more confidently, even though they don’t feel it,’ he says.

‘Most confidence is either a habit or it’s faked. Most apparent confidence is just the security of having done this 1,000 times before or being in a dominant position.

‘Confidence is really only needed when there’s uncertainty – if you are unsure what the response will be to asking for this pay rise, or unsure of the outcome if you change your job. The confidence is what bridges that uncertainty, and the way that you build confidence is by slightly stretching yourself to do things before you feel quite ready, as Marissa Mayer, the first female chief executive of a big tech company, Yahoo, said.

‘Confidence comes from many successes, particularly successes that you have in spite of feeling uncertain and a little anxious about doing the thing you were successful at. So to build confidence you have to stretch yourself a little bit.

‘You have to set goals where you say, Okay, I am going to ask for a pay rise even though my stomach’s in a twist and I’m feeling really nervous about it. If you do these things, you’re more likely to get a success.

‘When you get a success, particularly in the context of anxiety and uncertainty, that will boost your confidence a little more and it will be easier to get a subsequent success. So the critical component of confidence is action, setting goals for yourself that stretch it.’

Confidence, or faking it until you make it, helps you cross what Professor Robertson describes as the bridge of uncertainty.

‘When you see someone who seems confident in uncertain situations, they will be feeling doubt but they will speak confidently, they will stand or sit confidently,’ he says. ‘They will express themselves slowly and confidently. They will smile. They will not show self-doubt, they won’t be anxious, they won’t cry. But inside there is the possibility that this could be wrong.

‘But confidence helps you thrive in uncertainty and learn to live with the anxiety that goes with it, turning your mental state into one of edgy anticipation or edgy excitement rather than knowing anxiety and focusing on the downsides.’

Goal-setting, says Professor Robertson, is particularly effective for women.

‘There is evidence that women’s confidence can be lifted when they’re in a mindset of focusing on a goal, as opposed to thinking, what should I do?’ he says.

‘So that’s called a deliberation or a deliberative mindset, when you’re not sure what you want to do, when you haven’t selected a goal – should I move house, should I change job or invest in this? The deliberative mindset makes you more vulnerable to anxiety and doubt, and that undermines confidence, especially in women.

‘So when you’ve selected a goal – for example, I am going to investigate that new job – you’re now focused. Rather than your attention being scattered, this narrows your attention to a future potential success. That’s really valuable for women because that boosts your confidence. Your attention is not wandering to potential downsides, you’re focused on a goal and that’s why it’s so important.’

So the bottom line is, if you want a pay rise you need to ask for it – wear something that makes you feel confident and simply ask, making sure you have legitimate reasons why you deserve one. While asking, you should speak in a clear and confident manner that’s open, smiling and friendly because if you hide the fact that your insides feel like jelly, then you’re more likely to succeed in increasing your wage packet.

However, watch out for the saboteurs, especially those who might be sitting round your dinner table.

‘Men are uncomfortable if our partners are more successful than us,’ says Professor Robertson. ‘Our well-being goes down. While success is the greatest source of confidence, successful women are often sabotaged by their partners. Certainly older men, people of my generation, want to feel dominant and, of course, your salary is a signal of your dominance.’

* The new Bank of Ireland research sheds light on national confidence levels across different aspects of life from personal finances and employment to life goals. The research supports the launch of the Bank’s new Right With You platform, which is built on the insight that confidence is the spark that sets progress in motion, in an effort to show the bank’s ambition to help customers build financial confidence at every stage of their lives