Women who communicate like men (e.g., confidently or assertively) are sometimes socially penalized for how they communicate. Listeners have been shown to take advantage of acoustic cues to confidence to interpret intentionality in women speakers. We extend this line of research to include listeners’ evaluations of confident speech as a function of socio-indexical cues to gender. We used a matched-guise design to digitally manipulate speaker gender and cues to confidence. Results indicated that listeners accurately interpret speaker cues to confidence, but listeners tend to differentially interpret the speakers’ acoustic cues to lack of confidence based on speaker gender. Findings suggest that conceptions about gender-specific communication styles may lead to misinterpretations of intentionality about women, potentially accounting for some of the barriers women face during communication.