I loathe admitting this, but it’s true: women take rejection harder than men. Rather than bouncing back from a botched job interview or a less-than-stellar review, women are more apt to lick their wounds and think twice about placing themselves in the firing line next time.
That reaction is one reason women are underrepresented at the top, according to a recent study. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Raina Brands and Isabel Fernandez-Mateo of London Business School report that women are less likely to apply for a job if they had been rejected for a similar position in the past. Their study, which involved more than 10,000 senior executives competing for management jobs in the UK, finds that women took themselves out of the running 1.5 times more than men who had been rejected.
