In Male-Dominated Teams, Women Grow Reluctant to Admit Workplace Mistakes

Mistakes are an unavoidable feature of working life, cutting across professions, experience levels and gender. What differs is how employees feel about those mistakes and how they expect them to be received by colleagues. A new study published in Frontiers in Organizational Psychology suggests that for women, those feelings depend heavily on who else is in the room. Surveying more than 1,400 employees in the United Kingdom financial services sector, researchers found that the more men there were on a team, the less comfortable women felt admitting to having made a mistake, and the less likely they were to treat errors as learning opportunities. Crucially, women did not report expecting formal punishment any more than men did. The gap appeared not on paper, but in the informal culture of the workplace, a distinction the authors argue carries significant consequences for both employees and the organizations they work for.

The study was led by Dr Grace Lordan of the London School of Economics, who framed the central finding in striking terms. On paper, she noted, a mistake carries the same consequences regardless of who makes it, and that is exactly what the data showed. But formal rules, she argued, are not the same thing as culture. In teams that were three-quarters or more male, women reported feeling less comfortable admitting a mistake and less confident that it would be treated as something to learn from. Where women were in the majority, that gap vanished entirely. The finding points to a subtle but persistent mechanism: the psychological environment of a team can shape behavior in ways that formal policy neither predicts nor corrects.

The research design was straightforward but revealing. Participants were asked how comfortable they would be admitting mistakes at work, how likely they believed they would be penalized for making them, and whether they would consider mistakes to be learning opportunities. More than 1,400 employees in the UK financial service sector took part. Although the sector itself is heavily male dominated, the study population was composed of 81 percent women, giving the researchers a large sample of female respondents working across a wide range of team compositions. That variation in gender mix was the key analytical lever, allowing the team to compare how perceptions of error shifted as the share of male colleagues increased.

Two consistent patterns emerged from the data. First, being a woman was associated with viewing mistakes more negatively across the board. Second, working in a male-dominated setting was associated with more negative views of mistakes regardless of the respondent’s own gender. In other words, the environment itself appeared to darken everyone’s attitudes toward error, and women experienced that darkening most sharply. Lordan suggested that extremely male-heavy, high-pressure teams may foster a general climate of fear or perfectionism, along with an implicit norm that mistakes are simply not acceptable. Such norms, she noted, operate below the level of official policy, shaping what people feel safe to say and do.

The numerical contrasts were specific. Men reported more positive views of mistakes on every measurement than women, who felt less comfortable admitting errors, were more likely to think they would be punished for them, and were less inclined to see them as chances to learn. In teams where more than three quarters of members were men, women reported less comfort than men in the same settings, scoring 5.46 versus 5.94 on a seven-point scale. Women in those teams were also less likely to view mistakes as learning opportunities, scoring 4.20 versus 4.54. Yet in environments with a low share of men, women’s views were as positive as men’s, or slightly better. Men’s perceptions, by contrast, varied very little depending on the gender composition of their workplace, suggesting that the cultural burden of male-dominated settings falls asymmetrically on women.

One score, however, showed no gender difference at all: the expectation of penalization. In comparable roles and settings, women did not expect to be punished more than men, whether they worked in female-heavy or male-heavy environments. The researchers suggest this may reflect how respondents interpreted the term penalization, which likely evoked formal consequences such as a note on a personnel record or a concrete career setback. On those tangible, codified outcomes, women and men saw eye to eye. The divergence appeared instead in the informal dimensions of error culture, precisely where formal guarantees of equal treatment exert the least influence.

That distinction between formal and informal consequences may be the study’s most important contribution. Comfort with admitting mistakes and willingness to treat them as learning opportunities tap cultural currents rather than contractual terms, and it is there that bias tends to surface, Lordan explained. Women may fear being seen as less competent after an error, or worry that a mistake will be held against them in unwritten ways that never appear in an evaluation. Even with identical consequences on paper, women may feel they are standing on psychologically thinner ice. The result is a gap between what the rulebook promises and what employees actually experience, a gap that widens as the proportion of male colleagues grows.

The authors warn that the repercussions extend well beyond individual discomfort. Learning from failure is where innovation comes from, Lordan argued, and if women feel less free to admit mistakes, the organization does not merely lose their confidence; it loses the lessons those mistakes contain. Over time, she suggested, unequal freedom to fail could contribute to gaps in expertise, confidence and advancement, driven not by differences in ability but by unequal opportunity to learn. Employees who feel unable to acknowledge errors may compensate through excessive double-checking or by avoiding projects perceived as risky, behaviors that can quietly stunt career growth while depriving teams of candid post-mortems that improve collective performance.

The proposed remedies are, encouragingly, inexpensive. Leaders, and especially men leading male-heavy teams, can change the climate simply by being open about their own mistakes, modeling the admission of error as a normal and even valuable part of professional life. The authors also recommend peer groups for women, both inside and outside immediate teams, that offer safe spaces to discuss mistakes candidly. Such interventions target the informal layer of workplace culture directly, complementing formal anti-discrimination policies that, on their own, demonstrably fail to equalize how errors are experienced. An open and honest error culture, the researchers argue, is particularly vital in high-pressure work environments where the cost of concealed mistakes is highest.

The findings come with important caveats. Because of the gender-unbalanced sample, the authors caution that their results cannot be readily generalized to all workplaces. The conclusions apply most directly to high-pressure, low-tolerance fields such as finance, though other research suggests the pattern may extend to technology, engineering and some medical specialties. The data also relied on self-reports about a hypothetical scenario, which different participants may have imagined in different ways. Even so, the study adds rigorous quantitative evidence to a growing body of work showing that workplace culture, not just formal policy, shapes whose voices are heard and whose learning is enabled. A more inclusive error culture, the authors conclude, benefits everyone, and building it may begin with something as simple as a leader admitting a mistake out loud.

Subject of Research: Gender differences in perceptions of workplace mistakes and error culture in male-dominated teams

Article Title: Working around men may make women feel worse about mistakes, study finds

Article References: Working around men may make women feel worse about mistakes, study finds. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: error culture, workplace gender dynamics, organizational psychology, male-dominated teams, psychological safety, learning from failure, financial services, women at work, team composition, leadership, Frontiers in Organizational Psychology, survey research