Women in Male-Heavy Finance Teams Feel Less Safe Admitting Mistakes. Fear of Formal Punishment Was Not the Gap.

Picture a small mistake at work. Nothing dramatic: an error a colleague has to redo, or a missed deadline. Now rate, from 1 to 7, how comfortable you would feel telling your employer. In September 2020, 1,485 people working in UK financial services did exactly that. The results appeared October 8 in Frontiers in Organizational Psychology. Women on teams that were at least 75 percent male averaged 5.46. Men on similar teams averaged 5.94.

A mistake nobody actually made

The study comes from Grace Lordan, a behavioral scientist at the London School of Economics, and her colleague Paris Will. Nobody had to botch anything, the one mercy of a hypothetical error. Respondents rated three statements: they would be comfortable admitting the mistake, they would be penalized for it, and their employer would treat it as a chance to learn. Each person also reported what share of their colleagues were men.

About 44 percent of the sample sat in teams that were three-quarters male or more. In that group the paper counts 565 women and 86 men. The comfort gap between them was 0.48 points. On whether mistakes get treated as lessons, women averaged 4.20 and men 4.54.

The flip side matters as much. Where women were the majority, the gap disappeared, and women were, if anything, slightly more positive than men. Men's scores barely moved with team makeup. Lordan told Earth.com that this is hard to square with the idea that women are simply more anxious about errors by nature.

The question that showed no gap

The third measure, expected penalization, is the one a cynic would expect to light up. It did not. Women's raw average was a little higher than men's, 4.07 versus 3.78, but once the authors accounted for job level and sector, the difference vanished. In the male-heavy teams specifically, women scored 4.22 and men 4.01, a difference the paper's own table shows is not statistically significant.

“It is not 'will I be disciplined?' but 'will this be held against me in ways nobody writes down?'”

Her reading is that formal rules treat everyone alike, and culture does not. The authors suggest the word "penalized" may call up written consequences, like a note on a file. Comfort and learning capture the unwritten side. Think of being seen as less competent, or having a slip held against you quietly.

Read the sample size before the headline

Worth noting what the 1,485 people were. The survey went out through Women in Banking and Finance, a UK professional network, which also funded the study. The paper says the authors kept full academic freedom. So 81 percent of respondents were women, 1,205 of them against 280 men. The paper itself warns that the men who answered may be unusually engaged with diversity efforts. Per figures the paper cites, women are under half of UK financial-services employees and well under 20 percent of senior roles. The sample is not a picture of the sector.

There is a causation problem too. The authors say they cannot rule out self-selection, meaning women who are uneasy about mistakes may drift toward, or stay in, male-heavy teams. They controlled for job satisfaction and intention to leave finance, and the link held. Gender and team makeup together explain only about 4 percent of the variation in comfort scores before controls are added. Most of what separates one respondent from another lies elsewhere.

Earlier work the paper cites points the same direction without settling it. A 2010 experiment by Brescoll and colleagues found people judged a manager's mistake more harshly when the job did not match the manager's gender, a female police chief being the example. A 2023 study by Cole and colleagues found women in tech teams reported lower psychological safety when outnumbered. The paper itself calls it an open question whether finance is special.

What readers asked first

On Reddit's r/psychology, where the study's press release had drawn more than 1,500 upvotes and 567 comments by Friday morning, several top replies went straight to the design's blind spot. One asked whether women feel worse because of how men actually treat mistakes or because of what they expect. Another wanted the mirror-image study, men working in female-majority teams. The authors say real-world behavior is exactly what this survey cannot show, and they call for studies that track actual errors and how managers respond.

Lordan's proposed fix is cheap. She says managers can shift the climate by being open about their own errors, and she singles out men who run male-heavy teams. The authors also suggest peer groups where women can discuss errors safely, and warn that excessive double-checking or avoiding risky projects can stall careers. Whether a 2020 survey of mostly women in one industry can carry that advice to every office is unproven. What it does show is that the same imagined slip feels different depending on who is in the room.