By now, many of you have seen the main Web video in the Dove "Real Beauty" campaign. In it, a police sketch artist creates a drawing of women's faces based on their own descriptions, then a second drawing based on other people's descriptions. The portraits based on the women's own descriptions are sadder, less attractive and more closed-off than those based on descriptions from others.


For me, the video raised questions that go beyond body image - questions about self-confidence. I was going to write a column about these questions, but I realized I didn't know the answers, and the studies I consulted weren't helping. So, I thought this might be a job for crowd-sourcing sociology. I'm going to throw out some questions. If you (women and men) send answers based on your experiences to, I'll quote them in future columns. Please describe personal incidents along with general observations.



That tracks with some of my experience. My perception in college was that more men were seminar baboons - dominating the discussions whether they had done the reading or not. But now, when I visit college classes, the women seem just as assertive as the men.

But I'm not sure that this classroom assertiveness carries out into the world of work or today's family and friendship roles. And I'm not sure we've achieved parity when it comes to elemental confidence. When you read diaries of women born a century or centuries ago, you sometimes see them harboring doubts about their own essential importance, assumptions that they are to play a secondary role on earth and feelings that their identity is dependent on someone else. How much does that mind-set linger?

Which leads to the second question: Are women still more likely to flow into different domains in your organization? For example, a study by the Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education found that, when working in groups, highly accomplished male students gravitated toward the technical tasks while highly accomplished female students tended toward the administrative tasks.

Some psychologists have observed that male self-confidence tends to be based on efficacy - how they perform tasks - while female self-confidence tends to be based on self-worth, on more general traits like integrity and compassion. If that's true, men may be more eager to prove themselves by leaping to do the hard jobs.




This leads to my final question: In society overall, are more problems caused by overconfidence or underconfidence? The financial crisis and the tenor of our political debates suggest that overconfidence and self-idolatry are by far the larger problems. If that's true, how do you combine the self-critical ability to recognize your limitations with the majestic confidence required to struggle against them?

I guess I'm asking how to marry self-criticism and self-assertion, a blend our society is inarticulate about. I guess I'm wondering, as we make this blend, whether most of us need more of the stereotypically female trait of self-doubt or the stereotypically male trait of self-promotion.


Brooks is a columnist for the New York Times.