Impostor Syndrome Is A Lie

My Note from last week has over 300 likes:

Let’s stop using the term “imposter syndrome” because there will be a whole generation of young women who saw an incompetent buffoon rise above two highly educated competent women to the highest office in the United States. There’s a reason we feel unworthy. When the benchmarks for excellence have been turned upside down, when women are continually told (or shown) that they are not good enough, it’s not syndrome.

My response to a positive comment below 👇 (I try to ignore the negative ones):

The seeds of self-doubt are sown into a system where women/BIPOC/LGBTQ+ have to work twice as hard to get half as far.

Imposter syndrome also came up as a future topic at the December Midstack Meet and Greet last Friday.

That was my cue to do a deeper dive!

The first thing I do when writing about any given topic is find a definition from a reputable source. When I Googled “imposter syndrome” (also known as imposter phenomenon) the first link led me to a WebMD article from April 2024:

Imposter syndrome is when you doubt your own skills and successes. You feel you're not as talented or worthy as others believe, and you're scared that one day, people will realize that. Although it's not a mental health diagnosis, imposter syndrome can cause real harm in different areas of your life.

While that seems like a definition most people would find agreeable, I wanted to find a scholarly source. The second link led me to a Wikipedia article, and while that’s not useful as an original source, it’s a good source aggregator. The first footnote led me to the article, Impostor Phenomenon Measurement Scales: A Systematic Review.¹

The impostor phenomenon is a pervasive psychological experience of perceived intellectual and professional fraudulence. Individuals experiencing impostorism believe others have inflated perceptions of their abilities and fear being evaluated. Thus, they fear exposure as “frauds” with a perceived inability to replicate their success. This fear exists despite evidence of on-going success. Such individuals also discount praise, are highly self-critical and attribute their achievements to external factors such as luck, hard work or interpersonal assets, rather than internal qualities such as ability, intelligence or skills.

Okay, that seems a little more thorough, but my jaw nearly hit the floor when I read a little about impostor syndrome’s origin story:

The impostor phenomenon was originally observed in clinical female populations and defined as a predisposition unique to successful individuals.²

The quote above can be found in the full article, The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention.³

Research is often about going down rabbit holes

Here’s the article abstract (summary):

The term "impostor phenomenon" is used to designate an internal experience of intellectual phoniness that appears to be particularly prevalent and intense among a select sample of high achieving women. Certain early family dynamics and later introjection of societal sex-role stereotyping appear to contribute significantly to the development of the impostor phenomenon. Despite outstanding academic and professional accomplishments, women who experience the impostor phenomenon persist in believing that they are really not bright and have fooled anyone who thinks otherwise. Numerous achievements, which one might expect to provide ample objective evidence of superior intellectual functioning, do not appear to affect the impostor belief. Four factors that contribute to the maintenance of impostor feelings over time are explored. Therapeutic approaches found to be effective in helping women change the impostor self-concept are described.

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I guess I’ll pay the American Psychological Association $17.95 to access the whole article, but it hasn’t been digitized. I’ll have to wait for a hard copy to be snail mailed.

I’m curious to learn the four factors the authors thought kept high achieving women feeling like phonies. They site gender roles as a significant contributor.

It would still be another two years before Ronald Reagan was elected president of the United States in 1980. Trickle-Down Economic Theory, every Republican’s wet dream at the time, coupled with industry deregulation, catastrophically redistributed American wealth.

At the time this article was published, Civil Rights victories were still fresh in the public’s memory, it was the height of second wave feminism (which had its issues, but still felt like progress), and Roe v Wade had decriminalized abortion five years earlier. I doubt the authors could have imagined that life under patriarchy and post colonial capitalism would only get exponentially worse in the twenty-first century.

In that context, it’s not surprising their therapeutic approaches were unsuccessful. “Impostor syndrome” became so prevalent that in the mid 1980s the definition was expanded to include average achievers and men.

I don’t know if authors Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Ament Imes are still alive, but if they are, I think they’d be wearing this t-shirt 👇

I can’t believe it either.

1. Mak, Karina K. L.; Kleitman, Sabina; Abbott, Maree J. (2019-04-05). Impostor Phenomenon Measurement Scales: A Systematic Review. Frontiers in Psychology.

2. Clance, Pauline Rose; Imes, Suzanne Ament (1978). The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice, 15(3), 241–247.

3. According to Google Scholar, the full article has been cited by 4,013. Adjusting for publication date (1978), it’s still one of the most cited articles, top 1%.