The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: Why Capable People Suffer from the Impostor Syndrome and How to Thrive in Spite of It (6 page)

If you fall into any of these categories, the first thing you need to do is give yourself a break. When you are outside your cultural comfort zone, for example, you’re bound to have more insecurity about your competence than a native does. If you are a first-generation professional, the fact that you got where you are without the benefits that accompany social class makes you both commendable
and
exceptional. When impostor feelings hit, give yourself extra points for performing as well as you do.

Next, look for ways to address the isolation that goes along with feeling like a stranger in a strange land. If you’re a student, tap into campus programs that serve international students. If you are a professional working abroad and there are no resources that offer contact with others from your culture, look for online venues that can connect you with others either elsewhere in the country where you currently reside or back home. Once you do, look for opportunities to raise the impostor syndrome not as
a confession, but as an interesting topic of discussion. Given the universal nature of these feelings, I guarantee that once you name the feelings, you’ll find people who will identify.

Remember too that regardless of the reason, whenever you feel like a stranger, a certain amount of fakery is required just to fit in. The important thing is not to take the discomfort of feeling out of your element to mean you are somehow less intelligent, capable, or worthy than others. You are where you are because you deserve to be. Period.

Clare Boothe Luce once remarked, “Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say, ‘She doesn’t have what it takes.’ They will say, ‘Women don’t have what it takes.’ ” The playwright, magazine editor, ambassador, and congresswoman launched her career in 1935. And yet some eight decades later the pressure to carry the competence torch for one’s entire gender, race, sexual orientation, and so on is still on.

Some years ago a young woman who was blind attended one of my workshops. The recent college grad struggled with the same impostor feelings as everyone else in the room. But she also expressed tremendous anxiety about being the first sight-impaired person at her new workplace. “If I’m not ‘Super Disabled Person,’ ” she explained, “I worry the next time someone with a disability applies for a job, they’ll think, ‘Uh-oh, we tried one of
those people
, and it didn’t work out.” It’s a situation highly familiar to people of color as well.

You don’t have to be blind to see the pressure that comes from feeling like you have to represent not just yourself but your entire social group, pressure that makes you more vulnerable to the impostor syndrome. Upon her retirement, Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor reflected on
her pioneer status. “My concern was whether I could do the job of a justice well enough to convince the nation that my appointment was the right move. If I stumbled badly in doing the job, I think it would have made life more difficult for women.”
¹⁴

Merely
thinking
about being in the minority relative to men has been shown to lead to palpable anxiety in women (something we’ll explore in more detail in a future chapter). At best, you feel self-conscious; at worst, intimidated. Add to that any assumptions that you got where you are solely as a result of affirmative action (which in the minds of some translates into the belief that you are automatically less capable) or that you cruised on the basis of good looks. Either scenario can undermine your confidence and up the pressure to prove yourself.

If you don’t think numbers impact performance, think again. As researchers at Massachusetts Institute for Technology discovered, once the percentage of female students in a department rose above about 15, women’s academic performance improved. Girls who attend single-sex schools have higher career aspirations than both boys and girls at coed schools.
¹⁵
Studies repeatedly show that if you attended a women’s college, you are likely to have higher self-esteem and more intellectual self-confidence than your counterparts at coed institutions. The same is true for African Americans who attend historically black colleges.

So what can you do? First, know that it’s not you. There really are well-documented and important differences between how men and women in the workplace tend to communicate, assert authority, negotiate, use humor, and navigate organization politics. Understanding these differences can help you recognize when a perceived slight may be more a matter of style than of sexism. In these situations a sense of humor can go a long way.

If you are a person of color working in a predominantly white environment, you may have had to figure out how to navigate within the
dominant culture. At the same time, embracing your own culture can actually serve as a powerful buffer against self-doubt, with one study finding that high-achieving women of color who drew collective self-esteem from being a member of their racial or ethnic group felt less like impostors.
¹⁶

Other things you can do are actively build relationships with people of any ilk who support your academic or professional goals. Join or form a professional network within your workplace or community. If you do not live or work in a racially or ethnically diverse setting, make the effort to attend conferences and other networking events outside your area.

Last, don’t confuse the discomfort caused by feeling outnumbered with the idea that you’re not smart enough or are in some way not worthy of being there. You are where you are because you deserve to be. Being one of a token few can be stressful. Which makes it all the more important that when impostor feelings do strike, you give yourself extra points for performing as well as you do. You may be expected to represent your entire social group, but you need not accept that responsibility. You have as much right to fall as flat on your face as the next person; assert it.

A
n executive at an international investment bank invited me to deliver a talk on the impostor syndrome at her company. Sandra had talked with a number of female managers who she knew would benefit, but her motive was not completely unselfish. Despite her impressive title and even more impressive salary, with every new promotion she thought,
Don’t these people realize I’m just winging it here?
It had to be reassuring, then, when
within twenty-four hours more than two hundred people signed up to attend.

Among the responses Sandra received was an email from another executive. His reply read simply: “I don’t need this. I really am smarter than people think I am.” My client marveled at the mirror-opposite responses between her and her colleague. “Where does he get that kind of confidence?” she asked. Not long afterward I received an email containing a strikingly similar story from a highly regarded research scientist who’d attended an impostor workshop the previous day.

You know, it really is
funny
how so many presumably intelligent, capable men exude this level of confidence while as many equally bright, competent women struggle to do the same. How women find it so hard to recognize their own competence while men feel unacknowledged for their brilliance by others. How research consistently finds that in fields ranging from finance to teaching to athletics, males regard themselves to be more knowledgeable, secure, or capable than women rate themselves. The question, of course, is why.

In the last chapter you learned seven perfectly good reasons why you—or anyone—might come to feel like a fraud. Some, like being a student, working in a creative field, being one of the few people who look like
you in your workplace, working alone, or studying or working in a different country, are highly situational, which means that it’s conceivable that you could avoid the impostor syndrome altogether if you steered clear of these triggering scenarios. Others—how you were raised or being a first-generation professional—you really can’t get around.

There is one more all-permeating situation that you can’t avoid: your gender. That’s why we’re going to shift our view from situational factors to how society can make you feel less competent than you really are. Factors that also help explain why impostor feelings are more commonly expressed by women. As we explore the ways in which certain social realities compound female self-doubt, keep in mind that not all women have the same experience. If you happen to have been on the early front lines breaking down barriers that kept women from being full and equal members of the workforce, or if you work in a job that is atypical for women, then you probably have more “war stories” than if you were the beneficiary of these forerunners or work in a more female-friendly environment.

Even different women who work for the same organization can have dramatically varied experiences depending on the level or department they work in and whether they work in the home office or out in the field. The type of work you do matters too. If you’re in a female-dominated field such as social services or education, you may not face many obvious double standards. But if, for instance, you make your living in front of a camera, then you know full well that if you balloon up to a size 4, your career can tank, while leading men such as Denzel Washington, John Travolta, and Russell Crowe can go from hunk to chunk with no dip in box-office appeal or earnings.

Some of what you learn in this chapter may be depressing or discouraging. However, knowing what’s going on will help you to contextualize your impostor feelings more and personalize them less. As you step away
from your experience you’ll see that there’s a lot more to your impostor story than meets the eye. From there you can explore how external realities might have affected what’s going on inside you.

Understanding that there are forces that can work against you can also help you learn how to deal with them. At the same time, this is not about casting yourself or women as a whole in the role of victim. True, there are ways society can have an enormous impact on how competent you feel. But you have a role as well, which is why you’ll be invited here to take stock of ways you yourself might unwittingly collude in undermining your own success.

It’s often said that we are our own worst critic. However, what you may not realize is the extent to which your competence is being critiqued by other people—people who despite knowing nothing about you have nonetheless made determinations about you based solely on your gender. You already know, for instance, that you chalk up your accomplishments to chance. Well, as it turns out, you’re not alone. Research has found that people are more likely to attribute a man’s success to ability and yours to luck. In other words, when he achieves a positive outcome it’s because he has “the right stuff,” but when you pull it off it’s because you just got lucky.
¹

Then there’s the old joke about how a woman has to work twice as hard as a man to be considered half as good. Somewhere along the line women added the punch line “Fortunately that’s not difficult.” Well, guess what? As it turns out, it really
is
. As Swedish immunologists Christine Wenneras and Agnes Wold discovered, for women scientists it can literally be
two and a half
times more difficult.

Wenneras and Wold wanted to determine why, despite the increasing
numbers of doctoral degrees for women in science worldwide, men still dominated the highest levels of academic research. So they investigated how research grants were awarded. They had their work cut out for them. The Swedish Medical Council’s unshakable belief in its system of meritocracy made gaining access to the private peer-review system so difficult that it took two years and even a court order for them to succeed.
²