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You're Not an Imposter, The System Is Broken

Do you often worry that someday, everyone will discover you aren't as competent as you seem?

Good news—you’re not alone.

Most likely, you’re a high-achieving human.

You probably know this experience of perpetual doubt and fear of exposure as Imposter Syndrome (IP), but that’s a misnomer because IP is not a medical syndrome or a clinical condition; it’s a universal phenomenon. 

To prove just how universal this phenomenon is, studies in 2011 revealed that 70% of the general public felt like imposters. By 2020, that figure had risen to 82%, indicating that nearly the entire population had felt unshakable inadequacy. 

Imposter Phenomenon emerged from the research of two psychologists, Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes. In the fall of 1978, their article, The Imposter Phenomenon in High Achieving Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention, was published in Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, and Practice.

They recognized IP as a destructive pattern of discounting hard-earned achievements and attributing them to luck or charm rather than ability. The IP mindset breeds anxiety about being "exposed" as incompetent, spurring unrealistic standards and intense work ethic, almost as if trying to stave off inevitable failure.

At the end of his life, Albert Einstein confided in a letter to his friend, the philosopher and mathematician, Maurice Solovine that he felt like a fraud: "The exaggerated esteem in which my lifework is held makes me very ill at ease. I feel compelled to think of myself as an involuntary swindler." 

Yes, fellow involuntary swindlers, Albert Einstein also experienced IP.

Imposter Phenomenon often befalls high achievers who, unable to adequality internalize success, underestimate their accomplishments.

Innes and Clance found that repeated success over time does not break the cycle or deliver peace.

Success is not the cure.

This repetitive and long-lasting cycle leads to diminished self-esteem, heightened fear of failure, and the constant thrum of terror of imminent exposure.

The Study

The two psychologists, who bonded over their shared feelings of fraudulence, spent five years talking to over 150 white, upper-middle-class women aged 20-45, who were, by most metrics, successful.

Within this contained sample, they traced the imposter phenomenon's roots to two specific childhood scenarios arranged around the dynamics in their families of origin. 

Scenario One

In the first scenario, their “imposter” grew up with a sibling deemed as the “smart” one.

Relegated as the socially adept sibling who was charming and personable, they absorbed the message that, despite being equal academically to their “smart” sibling, they couldn’t get rewarded for being anything other than charming. 

They would find themselves going to great lengths to disprove the family myth, to no avail. Despite the evidence of equal brightness, their parents perpetually discounted them, leading them to question their intelligence. They began to ascribe their success to their charm. They excelled, not because they were intelligent, but because they charmed their teachers into giving them good grades. So begins the imposter phenomenon.

Scenario Two

In the second scenario, the imposter grew up being the “smart” one in the family. This child, a girl in this case, is rewarded for her superiority. She’s prettier, more intelligent, more talented than others, the family myth goes. 

Her parent’s praise is predicated on the idea that everything comes easily to her. She internalizes her parent’s definition of success, equating brilliance with ease.

Yet, the child begins to recognize that not everything comes easily to her; she begins questioning her parent’s perception of her, and she begins to feel like an intellectual imposter.

Despite their awareness that they can't pretend perfection forever, they still feel pressure to fulfill others' extremely high expectations.

Imposter Phenomenon is challenging to overcome because, alongside the feelings of imposterism, Clance and Imes identified four maintenance behaviors that perpetuated their fraudulent mindset. 

1. A cycle of diligent overpreparation fueled by a persistent fear of being exposed as unintelligent, leading to exhaustive studying and hard work to maintain excellent performance.

2. Intellectual phoniness to obscure perceived ability gaps, hiding actual ideas and opinions and presenting an inauthentic competence.

3. Leveraging charm while seeking external validation, believing brilliance within awaits recognition, craving mentor approval that might finally confer the ability they secretly hope they have.

4. Anticipating adverse outcomes for openly displaying competence due to societal views that successful, independent women are "hostile and destructive."

Like most studies of its time, and even now, the study perpetuated the targeted experience it sought to examine.

Denying historically excluded women from the study sample reinforced the systemic bias underlying the condition of impostorism.

By overlooking the impact of systemic racism and other biases on compounded identities, the original Imposter Phenomenon study can only apply to white women.

The fact is that historically excluded populations experience ostracization at higher rates than white women. The vital difference is that it’s not fraudulence that discounted populations experience.

Fraudulence can only occur when one is already inside the system that perpetually excludes.

White women feel fraudulent among others who, like them, have access to the power they hope to gain. Without this same access, one doesn’t feel fraudulent; they feel discounted.

For excluded populations, the fraudulence experienced by white people arises from the privilege of access, which isn’t afforded to all people.

White women can only feel like imposters among other white women and only within a system to which they already belong. It’s not hard to feel like a fraud when you’re one of the only Black people in a predominantly white space.

In contrast, marginalized identities have multiple experiences of alienation to deal with before having the privilege of feeling like a fraud among others who look and behave like them.

Ruchika Tylshyan and Jodi-Ann Bury unpack this so beautifully in their popular piece Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome in the Harvard Business Review.

They argue that in Imposter Syndrome we’ve pathologized discomfort instead of recognizing it as the necessary condition of being alive, but more vitally, the concept itself “reframes systemic inequality as an individual pathology.”

Tylshyan and Bury ask the question missing from all conversations about the topic: Why does imposter syndrome exist in the first place? And what role do our systems play in perpetuating and magnifying this experience in women?

The problem, they demand, isn’t women at all; it’s society.

Systems create inequality and, therefore, they can create equity. The burden should not fall on the individual but the system itself and the leaders who shape culture within systems.

This is why success is not the cure for Imposter Phenomenon.

Fix the bias, not women.

While many successful people have felt fraudulent in the face of their achievements, it is not because they don’t belong; it’s because systemic inequality conditions all of us to believe that only some people belong, that only some of us are valuable and worthy.

We must learn to embrace every part of ourselves, including our doubts and discomfort, accepting that these are feelings born from the condition of existing.

Whenever we feel the stabbing fear of fraudulence, let’s redirect that energy where it belongs to changing the systems built to keep so many of us out.

The solution to overcoming Imposter Syndrome lies not in solely addressing individuals but in fostering an environment that celebrates diverse leadership styles and values racial, ethnic, and gender identities as equally professional as the current standard.

Thoughts on this? I’d love to hear from you in the comments!

Until next week, I will remain…

COVER IMAGE BY Sheila Nicolin