Are We All Impostors?

Is impostor syndrome a thing? Will I ever stop asking questions?

I worked in tech for fourteen and a half years, not that I was counting. The whole fourteen and a half years, I was sure that any day, my bosses would discover I wasn’t very technical and fire me.

Day after day passed, year after year, and they did not fire me. They wouldn’t so much as lay me off — and they had ample opportunities in the constant reorgs of the tech world. They wouldn’t do it even when I was ready to leave and asked if they would lay me off. Hey, it had been known to work for some people; don’t judge me for trying.

Somehow, I had fooled them all those years.

Everyone feels like an impostor

My experience is not exactly uncommon, though it’s often considered the domain of women.

Exhibit A: At a 2010 conference of women in computing, Harvey Mudd College president Maria Klawe collaborated with a former student to convene an “impostor panel.” They brought together a handful of prominent, successful women to discuss their persistent feelings of being impostors. The standing-room-only crowd was a testament to how eager the conference-goers were to hear these women bare their souls; if such successful women felt like impostors, it was okay that they did, too. After that initial event, impostor panels became a thing at conferences.

Yet “impostor syndrome” is not limited to women. It’s so ubiquitous among both women and men that the most elevated of humans has been known to experience it.

Exhibit B: Witness this fabulous story from Neil Gaiman, a highly accomplished writer (thanks to

Janelle Hanchett

for this one):

But is it us or the system?

While most of us experience some degree of self-doubt, some think the concept of impostor syndrome itself should be in doubt. Witness the term’s origins:

Exhibit C (1): The psychologists who identified impostor syndrome in 1978, Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes, called it “imposter phenomenon” — an important distinction, because their wording made it sound less pathological. As Leslie Jamison has explained, they weren’t thrilled when the phenomenon was labeled a syndrome.

Exhibit C (2): Clance and Imes focused on high-achieving women.

Exhibit C (3): Those high achievers were mostly white women of a certain socioeconomic status and education level, much like Clance and Imes themselves.

Exhibit C (4): For women of color, the “impostor syndrome” designation is problematic, say Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey. Impostor syndrome is linked to self-doubt and the feeling that you’re fooling everyone, but systemic racism makes women of color more likely to have their competence doubted by others; if they feel self-doubt, that’s often projected onto them from outside. The feelings they have of not belonging aren’t just feelings; they often find themselves in environments that reject them.

In other words, it’s not about an individual failing — it’s the system. You know I’m down with that assessment.

This applies to all women, though the hurdles are much more intense for women of color. In general, people expect men to be smarter and more competent than women. I’ll never forget a TV show I saw years ago about “intergender” people, or hermaphrodites, as we used to call them. The show profiled a person who mostly presented as a somewhat butch woman but had spent a year going through the world as a somewhat feminine-looking man. She said that during that year, everyone treated her with greater respect and assumed she was more intelligent than when she presented as a woman — men and women alike. We all internalize society’s biases.

Still, in many environments, white women are expected to excel. Women of color mostly are not, so when they hear that women need to boost their self-confidence to combat impostor syndrome, they see through that more quickly than we white women do. They see more clearly that it’s the system that needs to be fixed, not them.

Confidence or competence?

As we saw in Exhibit B above, impostor syndrome is not limited to women. Yet it’s usually associated with us — and our apparent lack of confidence. Men tend to be more practiced at projecting confidence.

Exhibit D: I’ve been close to my friend Bill since high school. He’s a lovely person, and he also happens to be highly intelligent and highly educated. But in high school and college, I felt intellectually inferior to him. He always spoke so authoritatively on all kinds of subjects.

Slowly, though, I started realizing he wasn’t always the authority he made himself out to be. Bill did know a lot, and he could discern a lot. But as I saw pronouncements he made being refuted over the years by people who were actual subject matter experts, I realized that he was simply speaking with confidence, which made him sound authoritative. Sometimes he was on target, sometimes he wasn’t — but he always sounded like he was.

Bill is a highly competent person. But confidence is not an indicator of competence, although it’s often mistaken for it. We live in a culture that both highly values confidence and trains men to project confidence.

So instead of making our workplaces, educational institutions, and halls of power more supportive of women, we keep telling women to bolster their self-confidence. Although many men feel like impostors (remember Exhibit B), impostor syndrome is associated with women, another item added to the long list of things about us that we need to fix.

To combat impostor syndrome, we’re told to “fake it till you make it,” strike a power pose, let go of perfectionism, or use the PETAL method — which I will dismiss categorically on account of its being one of those annoying business-speak acronyms I loathe with all my being.

We’re told to fix ourselves, not the system. How many times must I repeat this? It’s the system, man!

Everyone everywhere all the time

Impostor syndrome isn’t just about self-doubt and a lack of confidence. It also involves the conviction that you don’t deserve the success you have and you’re pulling one over on everyone. You’re getting away with something, fooling everyone around you into thinking you’re something that you’re not, that you belong somewhere you don’t.

Exhibit E: When Rafael started studying object process methodology (don’t ask me to explain!), he didn’t feel like an impostor even though he knew little about the field; he was a student, so it was okay not to know. Now that he’s made significant progress on a conceptual modeling tool he’s developing, he feels like an impostor trying to pass himself off as a software architect. Never mind that he’s really good at what he does.

It’s not surprising to have that feeling when you’re embarking on something new, and there’s nothing pathological about it. But let’s face it, it’s not so surprising to have that feeling anytime.

Maybe “impostor syndrome” isn’t about being a woman, and maybe it isn’t something we need to fix. It’s certainly common; sources say up to 82% of us feel like an impostor at least some of the time. I kind of wonder about that other 18%.

As you get older — you can thank me, an older person, for this incredible wisdom — you become more aware of the fact that most of us are winging it through life. Sure, a brain surgeon or engineer seriously needs to know what she’s doing. Plenty of people achieve a high level of mastery in specific fields, and they don’t all feel like frauds. But overall, the adults are barely adulting. As Neil Gaiman suggested, maybe there aren’t any grown-ups.

So, what do we do with that profound insight? Here’s my three-step plan:

1. Throw out all the advice on overcoming impostor syndrome.

2. Accept that everyone is winging it and that you are, too.

3. Stop telling women to get more confident, and work on fixing the system.

You’re welcome.