Do You Feel Like a Fraud?

When Women Feel Like Frauds They Fuel Their Own Failures--Jenna Goudreau

Tina Fey once confessed that she sometimes screams inside her head, “I’m a fraud! They’re on to me!” Sheryl Sandberg attended a Harvard University speech called “Feeling Like a Fraud” and decided they were speaking directly to her—she’d fooled them all. Sonia Sotomayor was “too embarrassed” to ask questions while at Princeton University, and said, “I am always looking over my shoulder wondering if I measure up.” Meryl Streep gets “cold feet” before every new project and told a reporter in 2002, “I don’t know how to act anyway, so why am I doing this?”

Despite being plagued by self-doubt, these women barreled through it to the highest peaks of success. Many more, however, are crippled.

The “impostor syndrome” was discovered by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in 1978, and according to a longtime lecturer on the phenomenon, Valerie Young, Ed.D., little has changed in the last three decades—except that more women than ever are susceptible.


Young, the author of new book The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women, describes it as “always waiting for the other shoe to drop. You feel as if you’ve flown under the radar, been lucky or that they just like you. If you dismiss your accomplishments and abilities, you’re left with one conclusion: That you’ve fooled them.”

While both men and women experience the impostor syndrome, studies show that women are more often affected and more likely to suffer the consequences. According to Young, boys are raised to bluff and exaggerate. Girls, on the other hand, learn early to distrust their opinions and stifle their voices. They discover they are judged by the highest physical, behavioral and intellectual standards. Perfection becomes the goal, and every flaw, mistake or criticism is internalized—slowly hollowing out self-confidence.

Even those women who escaped childhood with a relatively strong sense of themselves will face more than just a psychological barrier. “A real bias against female competence persists,” says Young. “Being female means you and your work automatically stand a greater chance of being ignored, discounted, trivialized, devalued or otherwise taken less seriously than a man’s.” That means even a slight fear of inferiority may be further compounded by stereotypes and subtle digs at women’s perceived abilities. So is it any great surprise that women would question their competence? Everyone else does.

Moreover, Young says women in male-dominated fields are especially vulnerable to feeling like frauds. Being an “other” breeds isolation and additional pressure to perform. In one study of engineering students, when women watched a video featuring a large gender imbalance, their heart rates shot up. “It’s stressful for women to walk into a room full of men,” says Young.

A 25-year-old computer software engineer in New York earned a degree from an elite university, worked hard in several college internships and was recruited immediately to a good-paying job, where she was promoted, awarded and praised. How did she do it? “I fooled them,” she says, as if she had scammed every hiring manager, colleague and boss she’d ever had. “Someone will realize it eventually.” When superiors compliment her work, deep down she doesn’t believe them. The insecurity, she admits, may stem from the fact that she didn’t begin coding at age 12 like some of her coworkers and doesn’t code after hours just for fun, all of which may be amplified by the fact that she is the only woman on her team.

The inherent danger of believing you’re not good enough is that it will become self-fulfilling. Christine Jahnke, speech coach and author of The Well-Spoken Woman, says women approach every meeting and project as if they are being tested rather than trusting that if they are in the room, they belong there. The fear leads them to sit in the back, hide behind furniture, qualify ideas with “I think,” “maybe” and “but,” or take criticism too personally.

Over a career, the cumulative effect of constant anxiety is usually failure. According to Young, feeling like a fraud manifests as overworking, holding back, hiding out, giving up, procrastinating or stress-induced self-sabotage, like substance abuse and sleep deprivation.

In the former, the “impostor” women may feel they need to work two or three times as hard, so over-prepare, tinker and obsess over details, says Young. This can lead to burn-out, missing the big picture or being typecast as an operator rather than a leader. On the other side of the spectrum, the women may procrastinate or not put in enough effort on an assignment. “If people don’t like it, you know you whipped it together and have a built-in excuse. But if it succeeds, you feel even more like an impostor,” she says.

Recognition is the first step in breaking the cycle. “I’ve realized that almost everyone is a fraud, so I try not to feel too bad about it,” said Tina Fey. At the same time, Young suggests allowing yourself the lenience to make mistakes and learn from them, defining competence as the ability to figure something out rather than having all the answers, and accepting that you really do belong.

“Women keep waiting for permission to take a seat at the table,” Young says. “Let’s stop waiting for permission.”