Statistics routinely reveal that women’s advancement in the workplace lags behind men’s. For example, corporate employment pyramids show gender equity at lower levels with increasing gender imbalance through each advancing level. To explain these differences in workplace achievement, scholars and practitioners often point to sex differences in traits or talents—differences that better situate men for success in the workplace. Relative to men, women are thought to be less competitive and confident, and lack abilities to negotiate or tolerate risk. Recently, it appears rather commonplace to simply assert competitiveness as a gendered trait—that women avoid competitive compensation schemes in favor of fixed salaries, shy away from competitive games, and perform less-well in competitive situations.

The problem with this narrative, however, is that the idea of meaningful sex differences in traits and talents is not supported scientifically—at least not the sex differences that people discuss and that are presumed to be meaningful for workplace performance and advancement. Despite the ink devoted to the study of sex differences, several recent meta-analyses show that men and women are far more similar to each other than they are different on traits such as confidence or talents such as negotiating ability.

In this research we compare perceptions of sex differences to actual differences derived from recent meta-analyses. We predict that gender stereotypes (operationalized as the exaggerations of sex differences) will be most flagrant for differences that are most often discussed in both the popular and academic press. Building on the availability heuristic and confirmation bias, we predict that perceived sex differences in confidence, negotiation, and risk will be much greater than perceived sex differences in spatial rotation performance, facial recognition, gregariousness, and openness to change because the former are much discussed in the literature and the latter are not. Interestingly, the true sex differences in spatial rotation performance and facial recognition are large, whereas the true sex differences in confidence, negotiation, risk, gregariousness, and openness to change range from small to negligible.