The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: Why Capable People Suffer from the Impostor Syndrome and How to Thrive in Spite of It

by Valerie Young

  So what can you do? First, know that it’s not you. There really are well-documented and important differences between how men and women in the workplace tend to communicate, assert authority, negotiate, use humor, and navigate organization politics. Understanding these differences can help you recognize when a perceived slight may be more a matter of style than of sexism. In these situations a sense of humor can go a long way.

  If you are a person of color working in a predominantly white environment, you may have had to figure out how to navigate within the dominant culture. At the same time, embracing your own culture can actually serve as a powerful buffer against self-doubt, with one study finding that high-achieving women of color who drew collective self-esteem from being a member of their racial or ethnic group felt less like impostors.16

  Other things you can do are actively build relationships with people of any ilk who support your academic or professional goals. Join or form a professional network within your workplace or community. If you do not live or work in a racially or ethnically diverse setting, make the effort to attend conferences and other networking events outside your area.

  Last, don’t confuse the discomfort caused by feeling outnumbered with the idea that you’re not smart enough or are in some way not worthy of being there. You are where you are because you deserve to be. Being one of a token few can be stressful. Which makes it all the more important that when impostor feelings do strike, you give yourself extra points for performing as well as you do. You may be expected to represent your entire social group, but you need not accept that responsibility. You have as much right to fall as flat on your face as the next person; assert it.

  The Bottom Line

  There are seven perfectly good reasons you might feel like a fraud: family expectations and messages; being a student; working in an organizational culture that feeds self-doubt; working alone; working in a creative field; being or just feeling like a stranger in a strange land; and having to represent your entire social group. Once you recognize that many people in similar scenarios experience these same self-doubts, you can put your own impostor feelings in less personal and more situational terms.

  What You Can Do

  Step back and examine how family messages and expectations may contribute to your impostor feelings.

  Note which situation(s) discussed here you identify with. For each one complete this sentence: How I feel is perfectly normal given the fact that____________________________________.

  Make a note of any aha moments you had when reading about your situation.

  If you still believe you are the only one who feels like a fraud, seek out opportunities—in person or online—to connect with others in your situation and raise the topic of the impostor syndrome. I guarantee that you will not feel alone for long.

  What’s Ahead

  There is an undeniable connection between how you are perceived from the outside and how you feel on the inside. For women the impostor syndrome is as much a shared experience as it is an individual one. As you are about to learn, another critical piece of the impostor puzzle is societal assumptions about female competence—assumptions that go a long way in explaining why impostor feelings are more prevalent in women.

  * * *

  *Boys will distract you from your studies.

  [3]

  It’s Not All in Your Head

  Women are considered just a little less competent. Their problems are just that much less urgent. Their experience is not quite as valid.

  —Dee Dee Myers, former White House press secretary

  An executive at an international investment bank invited me to deliver a talk on the impostor syndrome at her company. Sandra had talked with a number of female managers who she knew would benefit, but her motive was not completely unselfish. Despite her impressive title and even more impressive salary, with every new promotion she thought, Don’t these people realize I’m just winging it here? It had to be reassuring, then, when within twenty-four hours more than two hundred people signed up to attend.

  Among the responses Sandra received was an email from another executive. His reply read simply: “I don’t need this. I really am smarter than people think I am.” My client marveled at the mirror-opposite responses between her and her colleague. “Where does he get that kind of confidence?” she asked. Not long afterward I received an email containing a strikingly similar story from a highly regarded research scientist who’d attended an impostor workshop the previous day.

  My husband is a nice guy who is successful and pretty far up the executive ladder. Last night at dinner, I was telling him about the impostor syndrome. He said to me completely sincerely and non-arrogantly that he could not relate at all because he feels like he is genuinely smarter than anyone gives him credit for. LOL!!:-) I just have to laugh at our differences. It is funny.

  You know, it really is funny how so many presumably intelligent, capable men exude this level of confidence while as many equally bright, competent women struggle to do the same. How women find it so hard to recognize their own competence while men feel unacknowledged for their brilliance by others. How research consistently finds that in fields ranging from finance to teaching to athletics, males regard themselves to be more knowledgeable, secure, or capable than women rate themselves. The question, of course, is why.

  In the last chapter you learned seven perfectly good reasons why you—or anyone—might come to feel like a fraud. Some, like being a student, working in a creative field, being one of the few people who look like you in your workplace, working alone, or studying or working in a different country, are highly situational, which means that it’s conceivable that you could avoid the impostor syndrome altogether if you steered clear of these triggering scenarios. Others—how you were raised or being a first-generation professional—you really can’t get around.

  There is one more all-permeating situation that you can’t avoid: your gender. That’s why we’re going to shift our view from situational factors to how society can make you feel less competent than you really are. Factors that also help explain why impostor feelings are more commonly expressed by women. As we explore the ways in which certain social realities compound female self-doubt, keep in mind that not all women have the same experience. If you happen to have been on the early front lines breaking down barriers that kept women from being full and equal members of the workforce, or if you work in a job that is atypical for women, then you probably have more “war stories” than if you were the beneficiary of these forerunners or work in a more female-friendly environment.

  Even different women who work for the same organization can have dramatically varied experiences depending on the level or department they work in and whether they work in the home office or out in the field. The type of work you do matters too. If you’re in a female-dominated field such as social services or education, you may not face many obvious double standards. But if, for instance, you make your living in front of a camera, then you know full well that if you balloon up to a size 4, your career can tank, while leading men such as Denzel Washington, John Travolta, and Russell Crowe can go from hunk to chunk with no dip in box-office appeal or earnings.

  Some of what you learn in this chapter may be depressing or discouraging. However, knowing what’s going on will help you to contextualize your impostor feelings more and personalize them less. As you step away from your experience you’ll see that there’s a lot more to your impostor story than meets the eye. From there you can explore how external realities might have affected what’s going on inside you.

  Understanding that there are forces that can work against you can also help you learn how to deal with them. At the same time, this is not about casting yourself or women as a whole in the role of victim. True, there are ways society can have an enormous impact on how competent you feel. But you have a role as well, which is why you’ll be invited here
to take stock of ways you yourself might unwittingly collude in undermining your own success.

  Judging Women

  It’s often said that we are our own worst critic. However, what you may not realize is the extent to which your competence is being critiqued by other people—people who despite knowing nothing about you have nonetheless made determinations about you based solely on your gender. You already know, for instance, that you chalk up your accomplishments to chance. Well, as it turns out, you’re not alone. Research has found that people are more likely to attribute a man’s success to ability and yours to luck. In other words, when he achieves a positive outcome it’s because he has “the right stuff,” but when you pull it off it’s because you just got lucky.1

  Then there’s the old joke about how a woman has to work twice as hard as a man to be considered half as good. Somewhere along the line women added the punch line “Fortunately that’s not difficult.” Well, guess what? As it turns out, it really is. As Swedish immunologists Christine Wenneras and Agnes Wold discovered, for women scientists it can literally be two and a half times more difficult.

  Wenneras and Wold wanted to determine why, despite the increasing numbers of doctoral degrees for women in science worldwide, men still dominated the highest levels of academic research. So they investigated how research grants were awarded. They had their work cut out for them. The Swedish Medical Council’s unshakable belief in its system of meritocracy made gaining access to the private peer-review system so difficult that it took two years and even a court order for them to succeed.2

  Once the curtain was finally pulled back, what they found stunned the overwhelmingly male scientific community. Women scientists had to produce 2.5 times more research and/or published work to receive the same competence scores as male applicants.3 Put another way, the men were able to go further by doing significantly less, confirmation that despite objections that affirmative action would “lower standards,” mediocrity has never been an impediment to male success.

  I am working for the time when unqualified blacks, browns, and women join the unqualified men in running our government.

  —Sissy Farenthold, Texas state representative

  Being female means that you’re held to a higher standard in professions where you might expect evaluation to be purely objective.

  When orchestras use a screen to conceal the identity of the auditioning musician, female musicians are twice as likely to advance from the preliminary rounds and their chances of being selected in the final round increase severalfold.4

  Female high school science teachers received lower evaluations than male teachers from recently graduated students even though both proved equally effective at preparing their students for college.5

  Both male and female psychology professors evaluating the credentials of fictitious candidates for an assistant professorship showed a two-to-one preference for “Brian” over “Karen,” rating “his” credentials as superior, even though the credentials were identical.

  Not only is the bar set higher for women, but the burden of proof is on you to prove your competence in ways rarely required of men. For instance, even when fictitious male and female tenure candidates were deemed equally likely to be promoted on the basis of a superb curriculum vitae, reviewers were four times more likely to ask the female candidate for supporting evidence, such as proof that she had won her grants on her own or a demonstration of her teaching.6 I’ve heard similar “prove it” stories from countless female students and students of color accused of plagiarism by professors who thought their paper was “too good.”

  Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly promoted as a male schlemiel.

  —Bella Abzug

  Even so, if these kinds of double standards are ticking you off, you may want to curb your anger. That is, if you want to be seen as competent. Men such as Donald Trump and John McEnroe are famous for blowing off steam and letting the chips fall where they may. Certainly one reason they get away with it is because they don’t care what people think about them. However, the fact that they’re male means they also don’t have to care. In experiments involving mock job interviews, observers concluded that the angry male candidates not only deserved more status and a higher salary but could be expected to do better at the job than angry women. In other words, irritability in men is regarded as a sign of status. But when women lose their temper they’re seen as less competent.7

  Not everyone needs research to prove how costly negative assumptions about female competence can be. In a post titled “Why James Chartrand Wears Women’s Underpants,” the widely read founder of the Web design and copy business Men with Pens James Chartrand revealed that “he” is actually a “she” presenting herself as a man. The reason? Not only was it significantly easier to get freelance work as a man, but Chartrand reports that the implied credibility and respect meant less negotiating over fees and even having the same bid submitted as a man win out over the one submitted as herself. Writing under a male pseudonym, says the thirty-something Canadian, “opened up a new world. It helped me earn double and triple the income of my true name, with the same work and service. No hassles. Higher acceptance … Business opportunities fell into my lap. People asked for my advice, and they thanked me for it, too.”8

  Connecting the Dots to Your Life

  You already know you hold yourself to a higher standard, expecting of yourself perfection with ease. Do you think other people’s unrealistic expectations might compound the problem? When you already question your competence it’s bound to make it harder to determine whether, for example, the reason you didn’t get the promotion is that you really were lacking in some way or because you’re being judged by a different standard.

  That’s why you need to step back and explore what role gender or other bias based on race, age, or disability may play in your feeling less competent than you really are. For example:

  When you do well, do other people make comments about how “lucky” you were?

  Have you ever felt you had to overdeliver or otherwise been held to either a higher or a lower standard because you are a woman?

  Are there times when you feel like you have to prove your qualifications in ways men don’t?

  If you answered yes to any of these questions, take time to reflect on how these experiences have affected how confident and competent you feel today. From now on, don’t automatically assume that the reason you were passed over or asked to provide additional proof of abilities or credentials is because you’re somehow lacking. At the same time, be aware that there really are reasons unrelated to gender or racial bias why decisions go a certain way or careers stall. We all have blind spots. So before you cry foul, ask yourself a few questions:

  Do I need to gain more experience or a track record before I can reasonably expect to be moved ahead?

  Are there ways I can improve my skills at presenting ideas, negotiating, or interviewing?

  Who can I look to for objective feedback about things I could be doing better or differently to get where I want to go?

  The Importance of Being Lesser

  Being female means you and your work automatically stand a greater chance of being ignored, discounted, trivialized, devalued, or otherwise taken less seriously than a man’s. Take something as basic as art. Despite being equally creative and painstaking, ceramics, embroidery, weaving, and other mediums associated with women are relegated by historians and curators alike to the inferior status of “crafts.” Similarly, the scholarly, scientific, or literary work of women has generally not been considered as “important” or “brilliant” as that of men. Books and films produced by women or that appeal to them are frequently derided as “chick lit” or “chick flicks.” But you rarely hear a similarly rhyming term used to describe the often violent action fi
lms popular among male audiences.

  It’s unlikely that the stray demeaning remark or indignity will undermine your self-confidence in any lasting way, especially if it comes from a stranger. It’s the cumulative effect of often subtle put-downs that can take a toll. For example, of the hundreds of highly successful male executives and entrepreneurs I’ve worked with, I’ve never heard a single one protest that his work was being trivialized. But it’s something women complain about a lot.

  Little is one of those words men don’t take kindly to—at least not when it’s used in reference to them. But it’s a word that’s freely tossed around to refer to your work. Like when a young professor I know announced excitedly that her grant had come through, only to feel totally deflated when the dean responded, “Oh, you mean the little one?” Even when made innocently, belittling comments like “Why don’t you share your little idea with the group?” “I hear you’re starting a little consulting business.” “When is your little show happening?” send the message that what you have to offer is not really serious.