Women Feel the Sting of Workplace Mistakes Most in Male-Dominated Finance Teams

Mistakes are inevitable at work, and decades of research suggest they can be one of the most powerful engines of professional growth. But a large new survey of UK financial-services professionals suggests that whether an error becomes a lesson or a source of dread depends heavily on who made it and where. The study, published in Frontiers in Organizational Psychology by Grace Lordan and Paris Will of the London School of Economics and Political Science, finds that women’s perceptions of their own workplace mistakes are significantly more negative than men’s, and that this gap widens sharply in male-dominated environments.

The researchers administered an online survey in September 2020, developed in collaboration with Women in Banking and Finance, a UK professional network. Of 1,692 responses, screening for current employment in financial services, disclosed gender, and completeness produced a final sample of 1,485 professionals, 81 percent of them women and 19 percent men. Respondents ranged from junior analysts to senior executives across banking, investment, insurance, and professional-services consulting, averaging roughly 44 hours of work per week. The deliberate oversampling of women was necessary, the authors explain, because general-population panels contain too few women in the most male-dominated corners of finance to support the subgroup comparisons at the heart of the analysis.

Each participant was asked to imagine a hypothetical mistake of moderate consequence at work, such as an error requiring colleagues to redo work or a missed small deadline, and to rate three outcomes on seven-point scales: how comfortable they would feel telling their company about the mistake, how likely they would be penalized, and whether mistakes in their company would be viewed as learning opportunities. The team then used ordinary least squares regression, with heteroscedasticity-robust standard errors, to relate these perceptions to the respondent’s gender, the share of men in their work environment, and the interaction of the two, controlling for hours worked, job seniority, and sector.

The raw descriptive results showed clear gender differences. Men averaged 5.850 on the comfort measure compared with 5.524 for women, a statistically significant gap. Men also expected less penalization (3.775 versus 4.066) and rated mistakes as learning opportunities higher (4.657 versus 4.422). But the most striking findings emerged when workplace composition entered the analysis. In heavily male settings, defined as those at least 75 percent men, women reported a mean comfort score of just 5.458, while men in the same environments scored 5.942. Women in those settings also scored lowest on the learning measure, at 4.196, well below the 4.711 reported by men in gender-balanced environments.

The regression models formalized this pattern. For comfort with admitting mistakes, the interaction between being female and the share of men in the workplace was negative and significant across all specifications, including the fully controlled model where it stood at −0.093. Men’s comfort, by contrast, varied little with workplace composition, with the share-of-men coefficient small and statistically indistinguishable from zero. For the learning measure the interaction was even larger: −0.174 in the fully controlled model, significant at the one percent level. In female-majority environments, women actually rated mistakes as learning opportunities more positively than men did, but their relative advantage eroded steadily as the male share rose. In linear-probability versions of the models, women in 75-percent-male environments were about eight percentage points less likely than men to agree that mistakes are learning opportunities.

One outcome broke the pattern. After accounting for controls, the researchers found essentially no gender difference in expected penalization, and no effect of workplace composition on that expectation either. The interaction coefficient for the penalization measure was near zero in every specification. The authors interpret this null result as evidence that the gender gap they document lives in the informal and psychological dimensions of error response rather than in anticipated formal penalties. Formal consequences in regulated professional settings tend to follow standardized procedures for everyone, they suggest, whereas subtle stigma, scrutiny, and the fear of confirming negative stereotypes operate in unwritten ways that the penalization item may not capture.

The theoretical framework behind the study draws on two complementary literatures. On the organizational side, the concept of error climate holds that shared norms about whether mistakes are discussed openly or punished shape how employees respond to errors. Role congruity theory suggests that women in male-typed roles face harsher judgment when they err, a finding supported by experiments showing that a female police chief’s mistake damaged her perceived competence and status more than the same mistake by a male counterpart. Meta-analytic evidence further shows observers tend to attribute women’s failures to lack of ability while excusing men’s failures as bad luck. Tokenism and tipping-point theories add that when women form a small minority, they experience heightened visibility and pressure, and laboratory work indicates that being a strong female minority affects leadership behavior itself.

On the individual side, the authors note several possible internal mechanisms, while cautioning that their survey did not measure them directly. Men take more risks on average, according to a large meta-analysis, and women ruminate more on negative events, with a small-to-medium effect size, which could make mistakes loom larger emotionally. Differences in cognitive reflection and decision consistency have also been proposed. The authors are careful to stress that their cross-sectional design cannot disentangle whether the gender gaps they observe stem from differential treatment by others, from dispositional differences, or from both acting in concert; the estimates should be read as the joint imprint of context and disposition rather than a clean causal decomposition, and self-selection of women into different workplace types remains possible.

The practical implications, the authors argue, extend beyond fairness to organizational performance. Psychological safety is a known precondition for learning from failure, and if a large share of the workforce feels less free to acknowledge errors, organizations lose valuable lessons. Women who feel on thinner ice may adopt defensive strategies, such as excessive double-checking or avoiding risky projects, which can slow the accumulation of expertise and confidence without reflecting any difference in underlying ability. The authors recommend that managers, particularly male leaders who set the tone in male-heavy teams, model vulnerability by openly discussing their own mistakes; that organizations build mentorship and peer networks for women; and that evaluation systems explicitly reward smart risk-taking and normalize well-intentioned errors. Notably, the compositional gradient was concentrated among women, but men in the most male-dominated environments also reported somewhat lower learning scores than men in balanced settings, suggesting that extremely male-heavy, high-pressure cultures may stifle growth for everyone.

The authors acknowledge several limitations. The sample, recruited through a women-in-finance network, is deliberately non-representative, the data are cross-sectional self-reports about a hypothetical scenario rather than observed behavior, and generalizability beyond finance is uncertain, though related evidence from engineering teams points in a similar direction. The survey also did not record what type of mistake respondents imagined. Even so, the study offers some of the first quantitative evidence that perceptions of one’s own mistakes are gendered and context-dependent, and it suggests that building a more forgiving error culture is not simply a women’s issue but a route to a more learning-oriented and resilient workplace for all.

Subject of Research: Gender differences in perceptions of workplace mistakes in the financial services sector

Article Title: Is it ok to make mistakes at work? Perceptions of differential treatment of mistakes by men and women in the workplace

Article References: Lordan, G., & Will, P. (2026). Is it ok to make mistakes at work? Perceptions of differential treatment of mistakes by men and women in the workplace. Frontiers in Organizational Psychology, 4, Article 1619562. https://doi.org/10.3389/forgp.2026.1619562

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/forgp.2026.1619562

Keywords: gender differences, workplace mistakes, psychological safety, financial services, error climate, learning from failure, male-dominated workplaces, organizational psychology, role congruity, tokenism, UK finance, survey research