Six Things You Need to Know About the Imposter Phenomenon
It is 45 years since Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes published their work on the imposter phenomenon. They had no idea that their relatively small study of white high achieving women in the US would speak to so many other women across the world. Indeed, the concept itself has become so ubiquitous that a google search can produce around 7,570,000 results in milliseconds.
In the years since this publication, what do we now know?
1. The terminology has changed. In their original paper Clance and Imes used the term imposter ‘phenomenon’ to simply mean a fact or event that can be observed. The shift from phenomenon to the more contemporary phrase imposter ‘syndrome’ puts the issue into more medicalised domains. Syndrome is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as ‘a combination of medical problems that shows the existence of a particular disease or mental condition’. Research articles with the title Prevalence, Predictors and Treatment of Imposter Syndrome reinforce this perspective. It is no wonder, therefore, that this term has come under critique for being pathologizing and victim blaming.
2. Confidence is weaponised against women. We can see this victim blaming at work when we consider the issue of confidence. A felt lack of confidence when faced, for example, with a new role that you feel you have obtained by luck or through tokenism is a key element of imposterism. However, the issue of women’s confidence has become seen as a key reason why women do not progress at work. Indeed, we could say that women are viewed in quite pathological ways as lacking in confidence. Shanie Orgad and Rosalind Gill discuss the culture that has grown up around the idea of confidence and say that central to this ‘is the idea that women’s problems are solely the consequence of their own shortcomings’.
Darren Baker and Juliet Bourke also highlight how confidence is weaponized as women walk a tightrope of demonstrating the ‘right’ level of confidence. This can be seen in this respondent’s quote from Baker and Bourke’s research: “I find our women … lack self-confidence because they undersell themselves and point out their own weaknesses rather than promoting their strengths [but also] sometimes our women partners can be a little aggressive in an interview. I’m not sure if they lack confidence or are overcompensating for something.”
Yes, that’s the confidence tightrope so many of us have to tread. But it’s not all bad news … or is it?
3. There could be an upside to imposterism. Recent research suggests that feeling like an imposter can actually have some positive outcomes. Because you feel you don’t know enough of, say, university finances to do the best in your job, you compensate by developing stronger interpersonal skills. This can mean that you are more effective in the workplace as you are able to build strong teams or bring people with you through change. I am taking this finding with a pinch of salt. Since when does working harder in already time-poor economies have an upside? Which brings me to Point Four.
4. The magic ritual of diligence and hard work. My ambivalence about the research in Point Three is that - because there is an ever-present fear that our felt stupidity and lack of knowing will be discovered - we generally work exceptionally hard at everything. This creates a cycle of behaviours that Clance and Imes describe as having the quality of a magic ritual which is virtually impossible to break. This is because our hard work brings success – we pass the exam or have exceptional work performance; we consequently gain approval and feel good. And so, with the next challenge the cycle starts again. We believe that without this hard work we could not possibly be successful.
I recognise this in my own life. In truth I over-prepare but my anxiety that I will be found out for not knowing or understanding is so profound that I can’t help myself. One way this shows itself is that I always need to read one more article or one more book before I think I can say anything that might be worthwhile.
For Clance and Imes this is an empty success because the underlying feeling of being an imposter remains untouched. One way that Clance and Imes suggest that women could break this habit is to commit to halving their preparation time for an upcoming task and see if the outcomes are any different. Is this worth a try? It would certainly give you a bit of your own time back and that in itself may reduce some of the stressors in your life. I know for myself that there are certain tasks I do not spend much time on simply because they have less priority for me and there are only so many hours in the day. However ….
5. Don’t fix the woman, fix the institution. There is, as we might expect, a strong debate as to whether fraudulent feelings can be overcome through solely focussing on helping women fit in to existing structures. This is certainly the main response of many training programmes and managers as we can see from the comments in Point Two.
In their research Ruckika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey note how most discussions of imposter syndrome ignore the importance of fixing the workplace. If you are experiencing systematic racism or ableism or ageism or sexism or the micro-aggressions that go along with that then you are going to be undermined. Self-esteem and self-confidence hit rock bottom in such circumstances. It really is no surprise that so many women experience feelings of being an imposter. We are being asked to become something we can never be - a rather standard model of the ideal worker or leader.
The solution? For Tulshyan and Burey: ‘The answer to overcoming imposter syndrome is not to fix individuals but to create an environment that fosters a number of different leadership styles and where diversity of racial, ethnic, and gender identities is viewed as just as professional as the current model.’
Yay to that. But before we think nothing can be done at a personal level …
6. Feeling like an imposter is not an illusion. Because the weight of attention through training, advice columns and literature focus on ‘fixing women’ rather than ‘fixing the environment’ there are many who argue that we should cease discussion of imposterism altogether. But those feelings of imposterism are real. And yes, they are produced in particular circumstances that do not serve the majority of us well as Point Two and Point Five make clear. However, ceasing discussion of imposterism in and of itself will not stop us feeling the fear of being found out as a fraud.
Leslie Jameson argues that ‘Identifying impostor feelings does not necessitate denying the forces that produced them. It can, in fact, demand the opposite: understanding that the damage from these external forces often becomes part of the internal weave of the self. Understood like this, it becomes an experience not diluted but defined by its ubiquity’. As Jameson goes on to say this suggests that imposterism does its best work when depicting ‘a particular texture of interior experience: the fear of being exposed as inadequate.’
This means that imposterism becomes a rich ground for understanding how the discriminations we experience as women, inflected through intersectional experiences, comprise a core part of how we experience the world and what we need to challenge to enable us all to flourish within it. It means that the term imposterism – albeit a shorthand for a complexity and range of feelings, situations and power dynamics - gives us a linguistic starting point through which we can understand both ourselves and others more deeply.
This is the conversation we need to be having in all of our workplaces if we are to see the structural and system changes that are so needed.
with the best of all wishes,
Professor Christina Hughes
Founder and CEO Women-Space
April 2023