Impostor Syndrome

Leslie Jamison expounds at seemingly interminable length in The New Yorker on the great discovery of impostor syndrome. Apparently, American women, mostly professional white women, are beset with the notion that they are not as good as the world says they are, that they do not really belong in the exalted positions they have attained.

Jamison explains how an assistant professor discovered the idea:

In the early seventies, as an assistant professor at Oberlin College, [Pauline] Clance kept hearing female students confessing experiences that reminded her of her own: they were sure they’d failed exams, even if they always did well; they were convinced that they’d been admitted because there had been an error on their test scores or that they’d fooled authority figures into thinking they were smarter than they actually were.

And also:

They wrote that women in their sample were particularly prone to “an internal experience of intellectual phoniness,” living in perpetual fear that “some significant person will discover that they are indeed intellectual impostors.” But it was precisely this process of discovery that helped Clance and Imes formulate the concept—as they recognized feelings in each other, and in their students, that they’d been experiencing all their lives.

And,

By then, impostor syndrome was already something that people routinely confessed about their experiences in high-achieving environments. But it did feel like a genuine exposure of various low-key humiliations: the blooming circles of dark sweat under my armpits as I larded my sentences with jargon, the scrambled, panicked posturing of theoretical preferences.

Later researchers declared that the problem lay in systematic bias about hiring and promoting women. In a strange way, they are closer to the truth:

Like Clance and Imes, Tulshyan and Burey recognized in each other versions of the feelings that they themselves had been harboring—only these were feelings about the world, rather than about their psyches. They were sick of people talking about women having impostor syndrome rather than talking about biases in hiring, promotion, leadership, and compensation. They came to believe that a concept designed to liberate women from their shame—to help them confront the delusion of their own insufficiency—had become yet another way to keep them disempowered.

In truth, the problem is diversity quotas. Women believe that they have been hired to fill quotas, not on their merits. In many cases this is true. Thus, it is not crazy and not a psychological deformity for them to think that they did not earn what they have achieved.

In principle, blacks should also have the same feelings, but, if Jamison is right, they more often believe that they deserve to have whatever they have-- diversity quotas, be damned.

So, we have reengineered the workplace to make it more diverse. The result is that we have deprived people, especially, but not only women, of the chance to earn their way.

So, if you believe that women are most often prey to imposter syndrome, the reason must be feminism. Dare we say, Jamison does not even consider this hypothesis.