Monthly Archives: November 2022

Tutorial 8/11

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Before my tutorial I had emailed David two questions :

  1. I’ve been asking in my interviews with male working class students about imposter syndrome and if they feel that they experience it. Mostly they have said no but then what they’ve said about the way they feel are symptoms of imposter syndrome. Research I’ve read says that this is something that women suffer from (I hate using the word suffer here but it fits for now) so I’ve found research that makes the case for keeping my question focused on female students but I’m confused. 
  2. Do you have any tips for keeping the report within the word limit?

The answer to the first one was simple when David explained it in a different way. I am a woman. Men are even less likely to open up to me than they are to other men. Working class men are stereotypically proud, and opening up about their feelings of being not good enough is very unlikely. David gave the example of men drinking in the pub – they don’t talk about their feelings until they are a few pints deep, and then it’s like a floodgate opens and they won’t stop talking about how they feel. He suggested a change of approach might be needed if I want honest answers from the men I’ve spoken to, eg. a Likert scale follow up survey. This would allow me to compare the answers I was given in person versus the answers given without my presence. I like this idea and I will be writing a Likert scale survey this afternoon.

The second question had a very nuanced answer. I have to admit that I have been rambling in the rewrite of my report and the introduction and methodology sections keep growing!! It wasn’t until David explained why it’s called an evaluative report that the penny finally dropped. Value is in the name of the report and that’s exactly what I need to demonstrate in my report – why does my research have value? Everything I write should be illustrating why my research has value and if it doesn’t show that, then it won’t be included.

Action Points

  • Start rewriting my report (again) with the aim of showing the value in my research ✔️
  • Write Likert scale survey and send to my male interviewees ✔️
  • Change my question to take ‘female’ out of it. The discussion about why male students are unlikely to open up to me has showed me just why they should be included in my research ✔️
  • Think of questions I have for David for our last tutorial. I don’t want to waste his time by not asking questions and regretting it later

Branching Out

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In my tutorial last week, David mentioned potentially including some male stakeholders. I had been conducting a few interviews with male working class students but it hadn’t really been my focus.

And then in class Zuleika gave us a refresher lesson on bias, and overcoming it. And I realised that although I had been conducting my research with the best of intentions, my bias had been showing. And it was holding me back, and potentially stunting my research. And whilst I doubt that many men will open up to me and admit to feeling any other way apart from confident, that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t include them in my research.
The majority of academic papers on imposter syndrome talk about women, however a study in Quartz says that actually men are experiencing imposter syndrome more than women.

“I first learned about this two years ago, when my editor at the time asked me to write on the subject. Instead of feeling understood or validated, I felt defensive. It had never occurred to me to look around my male dominated industry and worry that I didn’t belong; the notion that I should relate to imposter syndrome seemed to imply that I deserved to feel like a fraud. As I started to report the article, I worried that not suffering from imposter syndrome would be interpreted as a sign of arrogance. This concern, it turns out, is well-founded. Contrary to stereotypes, research suggests women are as confident as men—they are just penalized rather than rewarded for the same self-assured behavior.“

The article goes on to mention something called the Imposter Phenomenon Scale. I find it interesting that it is named after the original name for imposter syndrome and this supports the argument to stop pathologising it and calling it a ‘syndrome’.

“Overall, women self-reported more imposter syndrome according to the scale. But the researchers found that men experienced more stress both when getting negative feedback and when told their results would be shared with the professor. “Collectively, our findings suggest that male IPs [imposters] fair worse when confronted with performance cues than do female impostors,” the authors wrote. “Male IPs experienced greater anxiety after receiving negative feedback and under conditions of high accountability than did female IPs, and exhibited less effort and poorer performance on a task when held accountable to a higher authority.

Conversation around imposter syndrome has always been gendered. But its balance has been slowly shifting over the past few decades. The condition was first identified in 1978 by two clinical psychologists, whose study only focused on women. In the years since, gender-related data on the subject have been mixed. Some have found that women do experience more imposter syndrome, while others have found no correlation.“

I find this paragraph particularly interesting – in the course of my research I have searched for imposter syndrome numerous times, both on Google Scholar, in the library and just regular Google search. Every time, the top results mention women. Therefore I don’t think I agree with the statement about the discussion around imposter syndrome becoming less gendered. Hypothetically, if a male student was searching for information on imposter syndrome, and saw that the first 10 results were about women overcoming imposter syndrome, he might feel even more alienated or alone. However, that isn’t to say that men don’t feel like imposters in education or the workplace.

I also think there is a problem with women telling other women that they are suffering from imposter syndrome. But how do they actually know? In a room full of women, they are all going to have different feelings. And yes, there might be a big proportion of them who feel like imposters but you can’t assume. At a lot of conferences targeted at women, there generally is a class or a talk about overcoming imposter syndrome. I’ve not seen anything similar at conferences I’ve found that are aimed at men.

https://qz.com/1296783/it-turns-out-men-not-women-suffer-more-from-imposter-syndrome

Fourth Intervention

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I decided to accept David’s challenge to move into video and I made a video using quotes from interviews I had already conducted. I watched the video with some of my stakeholders. I wanted to see their reactions to seeing their own words back, and if they found it comfortable/uncomfortable.

https://youtube.com/shorts/85_OY_9ommQ?feature=share

I chose to watch it alongside them to pick up on their body language and facial expressions, as sometimes they are more telling than the words that people say. Whilst I think this intervention was successful I think that I can do better. Using stakeholders that I had already used was in hindsight, a mistake. I think that this would have had more impact if I had shown it to people who hadn’t been involved in my project up to this point. I think I could have also shared this video on social media from the outset, something which I have now done in the hopes of gaining more widespread feedback from people I’ve not yet spoken to.

Because this was my first video, it is very short. I used this video as an experiment into video editing and after this video I taught myself how to use Final Cut Pro so that videos I make moving forwards are longer, more professional and easier to watch.

*Feedback from participants*

“It would have been more powerful to hear our voices back. I think it would have had more impact.”

“I felt uncomfortable because the beads were such happy colours in the video, mixed with not happy statements. But I liked it.”

“A longer video would have been good, but I liked the length of this too. It was like watching a TikTok video.”

Summary

Looking back on this intervention, I don’t feel that it was overly successful. Whilst I shared the quotes from stakeholders, I’m not sure this was a good way to answer my research question, and empower working class students to overcome feelings of being an imposter.

“Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome”

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In the course of my research into imposter syndrome, I came across this article by the Harvard Business Review. The article by Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey aims to persuade its readers that what we now call imposter syndrome doesn’t actually exist.

They write about how when this idea was first written about in 1978, it was referred to as ‘imposter phenomenon’ by Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes, the psychologists who conducted a study of high powered professional women and discovered this issue. The authors of this article go on to point out that this study left out a lot of women such as women of colour, and people of various income levels, genders and professional backgrounds. Further in the article they point out that white men who feel some level of not belonging in their workplace soon find a role model and overcome these feelings, through their work being validated. However the same can’t be said for women, and at most professional development conferences aimed at women, there is 9/10 times a talk on overcoming imposter syndrome.

The word syndrome, in the opinion of the authors, takes us back to when women were diagnosed with hysteria in the 19th Century. It is pointed out that women are said to ‘suffer’ with imposter syndrome, rather than just experiencing it.

“Even if women demonstrate strength, ambition and resilience, our daily battles with microaggressions, especially expectations and assumptions formed by stereotypes and racism often push us down. Imposter syndrome as a concept fails to capture this dynamic and puts the onus on women to deal with the effects.” I think this quote is interesting because it goes back to what they were saying about workshops given to women about overcoming imposter syndrome, instead of talking to the institutions that are causing women to feel this way. However, I think this is a problematic stance to take – in my opinion it’s not an all or nothing situation. You can’t expect companies to change overnight and take away the things that are causing women to experience imposter syndrome, and you can’t expect women to just learn how to deal with these feelings. This is something I was struggling with in my own research project and reading this article has made me very happy that I changed my question and my viewpoint.

“In truth, we don’t belong because we were never supposed to belong. Our presence in most of these spaces is a result of decades of grassroots activism and begrudgingly developed legislation. Academic institutions and corporations are still mired in the cultural inertia of the good ol’ boys’ club and white supremacy. Biased practices across institutions routinely stymie the ability of individuals from underrepresented groups to truly thrive.” After reading this paragraph, I had to take a minute to think it over and form my opinion. This sounds dramatic, but I was honestly taken aback. I can’t speak for people of colour and I don’t want to. But this paragraph seems to imply, to me, that imposter syndrome is somewhat caused by white supremacy.

Overall I think this article was very interesting to read. But I disagree with a lot of what is written. A lot of the time it is women telling other women that they have imposter syndrome ; some women have made a career from doing this, talking at conferences and writing books. This article comes across as quite biased, in my opinion, and saying that imposter syndrome “is especially prevalent in biased, toxic cultures that value individualism and overwork” is unfair. I would say that this article is full of attribution bias and isn’t a particularly balanced article to read.