When Women Play Down Achievements : Careers: Women often sell themselves short in job interviews, expert says. Men wouldn’t hesitate to take credit for their accomplishments.

After three years as an executive assistant with a Washington-based marketing firm, she decided it was time to move ahead. She figured she’d paid her dues. Her boss raved about her abilities, even said she was management material. Now, at 24, she wanted to be an account executive, maybe move to another company and make more money.

Despite the tight job market, contacts and a shining resume landed her an interview quickly.

“Looks like you’re qualified. You’ve done very well,” the interviewer said.

“The right place at the right time, I guess,” she replied.

Why the modesty?

“I don’t know,” she said weeks later, after getting the job offer she’d hoped for but not the salary. “I just felt like I couldn’t brag on myself, even in a job interview.”

Especially in a job interview, Cheryl Olson would correct her.

Olson, a social psychologist at the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio, has heard excuses for success from women before. A lot of them. They’ll say they succeeded thanks to luck, or because of a mentor’s help or because they tried harder. Otherwise successful and self-assured women typically sell themselves short in job interviews, she says, and in other situations where men wouldn’t hesitate to take credit for their accomplishments.

“It’s very much a tendency, even in high-achieving women,” says Olson, who specializes in attribution theory--the ways we account for our own and other people’s behavior.

Although some research suggests that women are becoming more aggressive as their roles change in the working world, Olson believes that women, particularly young women, still play down their achievements in favor of appearing to be modest and not driven by success. Not that women are less confident in their abilities, she says, but in social interaction they often project the traditionally feminine, non-competitive image.

“It’s a question of how women choose to present themselves,” she says, attributing the diminishing of one’s own importance and skills to gender socialization and other factors. “Women are taught that it is considered rude to account for their success the same way men do. It’s not attractive to be up front with their achievements.”

In a laboratory study three years ago, Olson instructed test subjects to write down how they accounted for their successes. She asked others to verbalize their accounts in job interviews where they faced a hypothetical prospective employer--the kind of situation that poses discomfort for many women, she theorizes, because its pressures are social and professional.

Of those who wrote their reasons for success, the women matched the men in taking personal credit, she says. But in the interviews, “when they had to face a person directly, the women were more likely to attribute their success to luck or some other external factor, while the men were more likely to attribute it to ability.”

What Olson doesn’t know is whether self-effacing feminine modesty fulfills job interview expectations and thereby helps women get hired or hurts their chances by de-emphasizing their abilities.

“Both possibilities exist,” she says, adding that her upcoming research will explore the question. “My suspicion is that they might be hired, but if they continue to make those explanations, they wouldn’t get the promotions and the good assignments. Attributing your success to unstable factors such as luck has no long-term benefit.”