It's Not a Confidence Problem. (But It's Not Not a Confidence Problem.)

Part 2 of 3 in the DaM Good Business series: The Profit Gap

If you're joining us here, start with Part 1 — we're looking at why the self-employed gender pay gap persists even when women are setting their own rates.

The most common advice given to self-employed women who are undercharging is some variation of: back yourself, raise your prices, know your worth.

It's well-intentioned, but it's incomplete.

Not because confidence doesn't matter — it absolutely does.

But because framing this entirely as a confidence issue puts the responsibility squarely on the individual woman to think her way out of something that runs a lot deeper than a mindset shift.

In my experience working with freelance and self-employed women, our relationship with money is shaped long before we ever thought about what work we'd be doing. We're socialised to be helpful, to put others' needs first, to feel uncomfortable taking up financial space. That conditioning doesn't disappear the moment you register as self-employed.

The double bind of negotiation

There's a well-documented phenomenon in negotiation research called the backlash effect. When women advocate assertively for themselves — ask for more, hold their rate, push back on a lowball — they are more likely to be perceived as difficult or pushy. Men displaying exactly the same behaviour are read as confident.

(You know, the men get called assertive, the women get called bossy...)

So the advice to simply ask for more doesn't account for the fact that asking more loudly can come with its own professional cost for women. It's a genuine double bind: ask and risk the relationship, or stay quiet and stay underpaid.

But here's what I find most telling. The biggest barrier usually isn't external.

It's internal.

Most of the time, it's not a client pushing back on a rate. It's a woman editing the number down before she's even said it out loud. Discounting before she's been asked. Absorbing the discomfort of the pricing conversation by simply making herself cheaper — before the other person has had the chance to respond.

That's not a negotiation problem. That's something much more personal.

What this means for you

If you recognise that pattern, I want to say two things.

First: it makes complete sense.

You didn't invent that response. It was built into you over years — probably decades — of messages, explicit and implicit, about what it looks like for a woman to talk about money, to want more of it, to ask for what she's worth.

Second: naming the pattern is useful, but it's not sufficient. Because even if you unpick every bit of conditioning, even if you get completely comfortable quoting a higher number and sitting in the silence after — you still need to know what number to quote.

And this is where the conversation gets interesting. Because a lot of the women I work with don't just lack confidence around their pricing.

They lack data.

They don't know their effective hourly rate. They don't know what each client is actually contributing to their income versus their profit. They don't know what their business actually needs to earn in order to support the life they're trying to build. They don't know what they'd need to be making to feel genuinely financially stable — not surviving, but stable, or comfortable even.

And without that information, "charge more" is just a feeling.

Feelings are a very shaky foundation for pricing a business.

Strategy requires information.

Where confidence actually comes from

Confidence is much easier to find when it has something solid to stand on. When the number you're quoting isn't based on what you think you can get away with — it's based on what you actually need. What your business genuinely requires. What the work is worth, evidenced by the maths.

That's the shift. Not from timid to bold. From unclear to informed.

Which brings me to Part 3, and to the reframe I mentioned at the end of the last piece.

Because I don't believe most self-employed women have a pay gap.

I believe they have a profit gap.

Part 3 — coming next: You Don't Have a Pay Gap. You Have a Profit Gap.

Before you move on, a question worth asking yourself: What number would actually make your business sustainable — not just busy?

FYI: I have a free tool - an hourly rate calculator to help you work out what rate would give you what you need, and then what you want.

Sign up to get the calculator here: Get the Calculator

And the free video on how it works is here