The Imposter Phenomenon: Not Just In Your Head

And an answer from feminism, cognitive psychology, and David Hume

Of all the challenges that come up when I’m supporting people who do work they care about, imposter symptoms—feeling like you’re a fraud and out of your depth—may be the most common. Even if that’s not you, it almost certainly blights the working lives of people you know—and you can help.

I’ve written about the imposter phenomenon before. It’s horrible. People with imposter symptoms can’t enjoy their work, and live in fear of being found out or, worse, of screwing up something important. Women are affected more than men, though it can burden anyone. I’ve experienced it myself—as a litigation lawyer and, later, as a doctor, returning to work in an emergency room after many years of clinic-based medicine, despite a lot of retraining and updating. It’s been defined as the subjective experience of perceived self-doubt in one’s abilities and accomplishments compared with others, despite evidence to suggest the contrary.

At least, that’s how psychologists understand the imposter phenomenon—or imposter syndrome, as it’s often called. But a Great Work reader recently shared with me this thoughtful article (now behind a paywall) by feminist writer

Caroline Criado Perez

. Her perspective is that we shouldn’t think of this as a syndrome because that implies that the problem’s with the person experiencing it. Imposter feelings, she writes, are a rational reaction¹ to a culture that treats women, especially women in positions of authority, as imposters. If society murmurs, “This isn’t a job for people like you (women, members of ethnic minorities, people from lower classes or castes)” then of course you’re going to start doubting yourself.

This is feeling an imposter because of the role, your identity, and the culture in which you’re working. Those may all be facts, not misconceptions.

Photo by Randy Fath on Unsplash

As the definition I quoted above shows (“perceived self-doubt in one’s abilities and accomplishments compared with others, despite evidence to suggest the contrary”), psychologists have approached the imposter phenomenon differently. By that definition, you feel like an imposter not because of your role and what society says about who should occupy it, but because of misconceptions about your abilities. And those misconceptions aren’t facts: they’re false beliefs that can and should be changed.

I’ve written previously about how, if you feel like an imposter and that’s making work hard for you, the solution lies in that most evidence-based of psychological therapies, cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT). Identify the underlying beliefs (usually, that you’re not up to the task, and that something awful’s likely to happen as a result) and then review, as objectively as you can, the evidence for and against those beliefs. Consider whether there are more accurate beliefs to which, if you care about the truth, you should commit. From my earlier article:

… seen clearheadedly, you almost certainly are up to it. You’re probably doing whatever you do because you’ve been trained to do it, because you have experience, because you’re smart enough to work out what to do, because someone’s measured you up and concluded you’re up to it. You’ve likely faced situations like this one before, more stretching ones, even, and things have worked out fine. Your selectively-remembered screw-ups are probably no worse than your colleagues’ own quietly filed-away mistakes. Whatever the challenge is, it probably isn’t as hard or as serious as it first seems. And if you’re not up to it? Blessedly, things usually work out ok anyway. Our anxious minds mushroom imagined bad outcomes, sometimes as trivial as someone briefly thinking badly of us, into calamities.

CBT’s effectiveness is driven by a wonderful feature of the human mind: fixing wonky beliefs fixes the unhelpful feelings that come with them.

But Caroline Criado Perez has convinced me that there’s something missing from psychology’s account of the imposter phenomenon. Underlying many people’s beliefs that they’re not up to the job is a sense that the role they’re in isn’t a role for people like them—because of personal characteristics such as being a woman that, in our unequal societies, are probably exactly why their voice is so important in their role. That’s one reason why the imposter phenomenon affects women more than it affects men.

I write about solutions. Caroline Criado Perez is surely right that the solution to women feeling fraudulent in positions of authority is to change the culture. And if you’re not doing your bit for that, you may be part of the problem. (It’s ironic that, as I write this, the Wikipedia article on imposter ‘syndrome’—not the term preferred by academic psychology, Caroline Criado Perez, or me—claims that it affects men and women equally. That’s demonstrably false. Women have it worse.)

But what can you do, right now, if you’re struggling in your job because you don’t think you’re good enough and, underlying that, is a sense that jobs like yours aren’t really for people like you?

Eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, whose 314th birthday I’m sure we’ll all be celebrating on Wednesday, can help us out here. Hume spotted that it’s logical nonsense to say anything about how things ought to be based solely on how they are.² You can’t get an ought from an is.

In other words, the fact that (say) there aren’t many doctors in North America who are Indigenous women doesn’t, on its own, say anything about whether Indigenous women should be doctors. You’d need an ‘ought’ to prime any conclusions about how things ought to be.

Here’s a good one: professions and people in positions of authority ought to reflect the societies they serve.

And that opens up role-based imposter symptoms to fixing through CBT. This isn’t a job for people like you? Bullshit. If there aren’t many people like you doing this job it’s all the more valuable that it’s you doing it. Think of someone else from an underrepresented group doing work that matters: you’d not just say but truly believe that about them, wouldn’t you? So commit to it for yourself, too. Fix the wonky belief and you fix the unhelpful feeling.

It’s never simple. You have to correct false beliefs over and over until they, and the feelings that go with them, go away. And it’s everyone’s job to help—supporting colleagues from underrepresented groups, signaling our respect for them at every opportunity, showing that this is a job for people like them, and doing our bit to change the culture. And that’s how the world gets better.

Two final points. First, big thanks to Great Work reader Mark Strathdene for sharing Caroline Criado Perez’s article with me. And: Great Work is necessarily about equality. This is an important part of the book, but I haven’t said enough about it in this newsletter yet. There’ll be more.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

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1. By ‘rational’ I understand Caroline Criado Perez to mean ‘natural’ or ‘to be expected’.

2. David Hume. A Treatise of Human Nature, Eds. David Fate Norton and Mary Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), Book 3, Part 1, Section 1, para. 27 (page 302). Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature was first published in 1739.