Tag Archives: imposter syndrome

Imposter Syndrome – Robbin Chapman PhD

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Robbin Chapman, PhD who is the Associate Dean for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging in the Office of Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at the Harvard Kennedy school, published a presentation about imposter syndrome. Whilst I would love to share every page of it here, I’ve screenshotted the slides that resonated the most with me and that I think are the most relevant to my research.

(Complete side note, I really like the name of Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging. It somehow sounds more friendly and welcoming than Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.)

Almost all of these describe the environment at arts based education institutions. And other places too, of course. From conversations I’ve had, art schools are some of the most competitive and exclusive places that people can choose to study. I have also heard that whilst there might not be ‘systems of oppression’, the environment itself can feel oppressive.

These might all be amazing and helpful tips, but I think they are easier said than done. I also think that normalising self doubt is a scale – there is a certain level of self doubt that isn’t normal, and can prevent people from functioning to the best of their abilities in an education environment and in the workplace.

I would add ‘create’ to this list for the group of students I am focusing on for my project. They are all creative students and making art is a valid way of expressing how you feel, or just a way to release any pent up frustration, anger or disappointment.

This self assessment tool was thought up by one of the women who first coined the term ‘imposter phenomenon’. I like the idea of self assessment but I do think it would be easy to cheat, and downplay how you are feeling. Sometimes when people fill in things like this, they still give the answers that they are expected to give, even if they are not showing the results to anyone. However, if this chart was filled in with 100% honesty, I can see it being a very helpful tool in the realisation of how much or how little you are experiencing imposter phenomenon.

Something about this that I find quite odd however, is that the self assessment tool at the end of the presentation has had its name changed. Originally it was called the Imposter Test or the IP (meaning imposter phenomenon) by Pauline Rose Clance when she wrote it – as seen here on her website. https://paulineroseclance.com/pdf/IPTestandscoring.pdf
I think this is a great presentation and very helpful for students in higher education, but I do have to question why it was necessary to change the name of this self assessment tool. Was it just to create a more cohesive presentation? Or was it because imposter syndrome is the more commonly accepted name for this feeling?
When I first saw this presentation about imposter phenomenon, I thought that maybe it is something that arts based universities should display on their websites, or around campus. But I am unconvinced about how many people would pay attention. I know that personally I ignore most posters that I see on the walls at CSM, simply because I don’t have the time to stand and read a long poster. (I’d also probably be in the way, based on where they are usually hung)

https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/hks-communications-program/files/pp_robbin_chapman_041119_impostor_syndrome.pdf

Social Interactions

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I was reading this article on Refinery 29 about imposter syndrome in the workplace, aptly titled Do I have imposter syndrome or am I just a working class woman? and it had a link to what I believe is a chapter from a book. The chapter is focused on social class differences in social interactions at university.

I picked out some quotes that I found especially interesting.

.. working-class students’ minority group status is more evident at university than in their prior educational settings, and this may lead them to feel out of place at university (Croizet, Austin, Goudeau, Marot, & Millet, 2019; Easterbrook, Hadden & Nieuwenhuis, 2019)

Additionally, universities are distinctly middle-class environments that include their own norms and cultural values that can clash with working class values (Rubin, Denson, Kilpatrick, Matthews, Stehlik, & Zyngier, 2014; see also Batruch, Autin & Batura, 2019). More specifically, universities embody a middle-class independent approach to learning and achievement, which is discordant with interdependent working-class values, making university more alien and difficult for working-class students (Stephens, Fryberg, Markus, Johnson, & Covarrubias, 2012)

I find this quote both interesting and confusing. Interesting because I think working class students being a minority in higher education isn’t necessarily more obvious than a student’s previous school. It all depends on where they went to school – did they get a scholarship to a private school where they were a minority? Or did they grow up in a LPN, where the majority of students were working class?
And confusing because nowhere did they define what these ‘working class values’ are. I couldn’t work out if they meant traditional, slightly old fashioned working class values or if there is a 21st century context to this phrase.

Finally, working-class students are often the first in their families to attend university. Consequently, working-class families have less experience with universities and are often unable to provide the same level of financial, informational, mentoring, and/or identity support as middle- class families do to their sons and daughters (Rubin, 2012b).

This particular quote reminds me of a conversation I had before I even started this research project. One of my friends who doesn’t study a creative subject was complaining that her family seem to think she’s too good for them now, and she was feeling out of her depth at home and at university. I think that this is a problem that a lot of working class students could experience – since starting at university now they don’t fit in with their family, or their peers at university. This could feel very isolating and a constant feeling of being an imposter.

Rubin and Wright (2015, 2017) found that (a) working- class students tended to be older than higher-class students, (b) older students tended to have more paid work and childcare commitments than younger students, (c) students with more of these commitments tended to spend less time on their university campus, and (d) students who spent less time on campus tended to be less socially integrated at university. Rubin and Wright also found that working-class students tended to be less satisfied with their finances, and that this social class difference in financial satisfaction helped to explain their lack of social integration.”

This mention of working class students tending to be older than higher-class students is very interesting to me. When I was looking at demographics of students at various arts universities, it was very hard to find out the ages, due to data not being disaggregated or being split into broad age groups eg 18-25, which personally I didn’t find very useful. The age difference between working class students and the rest of the student body could be a reason that a lot of working class students feel alone, simply because they don’t feel that they have anything in common or they feel at different stages in their lives.

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Going back to the Refinery 29 article, once again imposter syndrome is being gendered. I acknowledge that the author of the article is female so she is talking about her experience. However the other people she spoke to in her article are all female too. And yes, there is research that shows that women are more likely to have imposter syndrome in the workplace. But that isn’t to say that men don’t experience it too. And talking to some men or non-binary people would have created a more balanced article, in my opinion.

Rubin, M., Evans, O. and McGuffog, R. (2019). Social Class Differences in Social Integration at University: Implications for Academic Outcomes and Mental Health. The Social Psychology of Inequality, pp.87–102. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-28856-3_6.

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Do We Grow Out of Imposter Syndrome?

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The age group I’ve chosen for my stakeholders is 18-27, and I realised that I’ve never explained my reasoning behind this. At 18, you’re potentially away from home for the first time, studying in an unfamiliar environment. At 27, you’re considered a mature student. You’ve probably done your BA, left education to work and then come back to university to continue studying or you’re in higher education for the first time after working for a few years. There are different factors that could make students feel like an imposter at each age.

But is imposter syndrome something that can be grown out of?

Author Valerie Young, who is an expert on imposter syndrome says, “people can still have an imposter moment, but not an imposter life.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8028514/

I like this quote that I came across whilst reading an article by Sumina Mainali because to me it implies that imposter syndrome doesn’t have to take over your whole life and it doesn’t have to be a permanent condition.

“In the long run, many of us have grown out of the imposter syndrome and into our own
knowledge and skills—and humility. We embrace what we know and all that we do not know.” I saw this quote in the blurb for an article in Nurse Leader, 2011. Sadly the full article was hidden behind a paywall and I couldn’t access it. However I find this small tidbit very helpful, and connects with conversations I’ve had about imposter syndrome, where I’ve been told that people think imposter syndrome is something we grow out of because that’s what their parents have told them. This quote almost implies that once people embrace the things that they do know and make the most of their knowledge and skills, the feelings of being an imposter will become less significant.

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

“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.