Sarah Harte: Confidence trick could explain the gender gap in our fear of failure

Maybe we women lack confidence and underestimate our abilities. Or maybe it's just that some men are staggeringly overconfident...

Sally Rooney delivering her TS Eliot Lecture at the Abbey Theatre in 2022. The author's success got up the noses of many older male writers, revealing deep-seated beliefs they held about their natural place in the canon. Picture: Mark Stedman

Leo Varadkar’s recent decision to resign was mainly attributed to the failure of the referenda. Observing him, I wondered how a super successful person like him deals with failure. My best guess is he turns failures into exercises in problem-solving and ‘fails forward’. Given the waterboarding he got from the media before he resigned, he deals with negative feedback well.

But then, he is male.