The "women don't apply" finding comes from an HP study that's been widely quoted.

The author states:

Men and women also gave the same most common reason for not applying, and it was by far the most popular, twice as common as any of the others, with 41% of women and 46% of men indicating it was their top reason: “I didn’t think they would hire me since I didn’t meet the qualifications, and I didn’t want to waste my time and energy.”

In other words, people who weren’t applying believed they needed the qualifications not to do the job well, but to be hired in the first place. They thought that the required qualifications were…well, required qualifications. They didn’t see the hiring process as one where advocacy, relationships, or a creative approach to framing one’s expertise could overcome not having the skills and experiences outlined in the job qualifications.

Based on a survey of 1,000 men and women ... the results for why people don't apply for jobs are pretty similar. I haven't checked for statistical significance, but what I'm not seeing is wildly divergent rationales by gender.

Of course, there's an obvious experimental design failure here: the question asked was "if you decided not to apply for a job...", which fails to capture any real sense of what response rates amongst candidates of roughly equivalent qualifications actually were.

And yet the author continues to describe the HP study as "useful".

I'm left questioning the validity of both HP's research and the author's own analysis.