Americans psychologists in the 1970s could hardly foresee what would follow from their research.
Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes found that talented and successful women thought their success was because they had tricked everyone into believing they were competent.
Women saw themselves as failures. It was about the “impostor phenomenon”.
Clance and Imes came to that conclusion in their study published in 1978.
Later, the phenomenon was referred to as impostor syndrome. Countless magazine stories and self-help books have been written about it.
Impostor syndrome has become a term that means everything and nothing at the same time.
Is it in this world there is not a single highly educated woman in her twenties or thirties who does not suffer from impostor syndrome?
When you exchange information with young professionals, it seems that not. Is not.
How is the degree progressing? Terrible impostor syndrome. How is it going at the new job? Terrible impostor syndrome. How does the promotion feel? Terrible impostor syndrome.
For many, the impostor syndrome has become like a warm blanket that you can wrap yourself under when things are uncomfortable in working life.
I’m not a psychologist, but I’m happy to take a look: worrying about impostor syndrome is lazy thinking that prevents development and advancement in working life.
New learning is painful. Feelings of discomfort and uncertainty are part of working life.
It is very possible that the new job will be bad at first. It may also be that you are completely incompetent for the task.
In a way, the pattern is paradoxical. Those with impostor syndrome fear more than anything that they are incompetent, but at the same time, hiding behind the syndrome can prevent genuine reflection on whether they are really incompetent.
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Worrying about impostor syndrome is lazy thinking that prevents development and advancement in working life.
I claim that some of those with impostor syndrome are in the wrong job. Sometimes that can happen, and there’s nothing surprising about it.
However, recognizing it could help more than complaining about imposter syndrome.
Nearly fifty years after the publication of the article by Clance and Imes, an article on impostor syndrome was published that received enormous attention.
In an article published in the prestigious Harvard Business Review in February 2021, researchers Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey argued that “impostor syndrome drives us to fix women instead of fixing the places where women work”.
According to Tulshyan and Burey, impostor syndrome is especially prevalent in cultures that value individualism and overtime.
They argue that the discussion about women suffering from impostor syndrome leads to think that women are suffering from a crisis of self-confidence, and not from real problems in working life.
Ruchika Tulshyan was told in 2023 by an American magazine of The New Yorker in the interview that he hoped that the whole term could already be abandoned.
Suzanne Imes, who wrote about the impostor phenomenon in 1978, said in the same interview that just hearing the word impostor syndrome “hits her guts.”
For him, the term is wrong and misleading. Also according to Pauline Rose Clance, the phenomenon is “rather an experience than a pathology”.
Their purpose was to normalize the feeling, not make it a label like a diagnosis.
By Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey’s article is called Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome.
Stop telling women they have imposter syndrome.
Maybe women could stop telling themselves that too.
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