Honestly, is there anything that men’s overconfidence can’t ruin?

A new report highlights how men think they make better drivers than women, but cause far more crashes – and that baseless bravado explains a lot about the world in which we find ourselves, says Sophie Heawood

This might sound more like sexism than science, but it is, in fact, both – men think they’re good at everything.

A headline caught my attention this week. It read: “Men ‘are more confident drivers but cause most big crashes’, referring to a study that showed – shock – that men are more likely than women to say they are very good at driving... while at the same time being responsible for more of the serious accidents on the road.

Some 86 per cent of male drivers feel confident behind the wheel, even though 76 per cent of UK road deaths, and 61 per cent of serious casualties, happen while they are driving. For women, such bravado is in shorter supply: only 78 per cent feel like confident drivers, despite being involved in significantly fewer accidents and participating far less in risky activities like speeding or drink driving.

The funny thing is that men say this sort of thing in surveys a lot. “Do you think you could safely land a passenger airplane in an emergency situation, relying only on the assistance of air traffic control?” a US YouGov survey asked in 2023. Some 46 per cent of men were confident they could land it – almost half! Merely a fifth of women believed themselves capable, even though the rest of the data suggests they’d be more likely to achieve it, if anyone unqualified could.

And of course there were those one in eight British men in 2019 who thought they could win a point against Serena Williams – the same Serena Williams who had a serve that once topped 128mph, won 23 grand slam singles titles, and is regarded by many to be the greatest female athlete of all time.

A new report found that 86 per cent of male drivers feel confident behind the wheel, even though 76 per cent of UK road deaths and 61 per cent of serious casualties happen while they are driving (Getty)

In fact, there are various studies that show that if a task reads as masculine, women have significantly lower confidence when doing it, even when this does not remotely correlate with their ability. Then there is the fact that more men than women think they could defend themselves from an attacking grizzly bear, even though, need it be said, none of us could? (Grizzlies can charge faster than racehorses! They’re eight feet tall! They can weigh over 60 stone!)

This, I think, tells us something about why the world is the way it is. Jeez, but what a time to look at the men running the world and realise that they’re there because – alongside a certain degree of attainment – they believe they should be.

Think of that recent Middle East summit photo containing precisely one female world leader. All her peers were very confident men who no doubt believed themselves capable of solving the world’s problems, even though, from my humble viewpoint, the Middle East doesn’t seem all that solved? But then, perhaps they’re very busy, what with their fantasy lives steering Boeing 787s from a 3,000ft altitude into Heathrow, beating Serena in straight sets at the US Open, and fighting off any number of Paddington’s vicious cousins.

I’ll say this about the broligarchy (Elon Musk and his pals even have their own word now, the lucky chaps) – they are exactly the sort of people who might believe they were driving us all smoothly in the right direction when, in fact, they were steering us into the mother of all pile-ups.

I mean, I don’t want to discourage the maverick, have-a-go attitude that many men seem to enjoy. As the mother of a teenage daughter who is constantly doubting her own abilities, I’d buy gallons of the stuff, if only they could bottle it. But in the interests of health and safety, not to mention security, it does seems crucial that men start to realise that they can’t do all of it. Or, sometimes, any of it at all.

Fools have always rushed in where angels fear to tread – something that will be familiar to anyone who has witnessed a heterosexual couple trying to build an Ikea flatpack. I know it’s annoying to make such sweeping generalisations, but having seen this happen so many times, it’s my firm belief that if you want a flatpack building, you should ask a woman.

We’re unlikely to imagine we could work on a construction site, so we’ll look at the instructions over and over before so much as daring to pick up a piece. Men, on the other hand, will plough straight into Bob the Builder mode rather than checking a stupid diagram, thus not realising that they’ve put the panels on back to front.

And FYI, the panels are always on back to front. Then there are the screws, which will run short because of the panel mistake, at which point every man I’ve ever known will blame the famous Swedish furniture retailer for not putting enough in the bag. I must have built at least 20 large flatpacks over the years, and let me tell you, they’ve never come with any screws missing. It’s strange!

Yes, just my anecdotes, but once again, research backs it up. In 2023, UCL’s Centre for Longitudinal Studies published research that found that the systemic barriers faced by working mothers were the biggest contributor to the gender wage gap, but after that, the next factor in pay discrepancy arose via men’s “overconfidence” in believing themselves capable of doing the top jobs.

So what’s the solution? Short of taking girls out of primary school to be trained in fighting off wild mammals, I would usually say that the best way forward is for women to be encouraged, and even trained in self-belief; for women to find a way to move on from all this self-doubt, and to stop second-guessing ourselves.

But for the safety of all of us out on the roads, trying to put up a bunk bed, keeping the world from the precipice of armageddon, or even planning a camping holiday near to some very deep woods, the answer is clearly the opposite. Men simply need to believe in themselves, and their unproven skills, a whole lot less.