You Are Not an Imposter

So get rid of that syndrome

It has become a regular occurrence in my Seen-Unseen recordings with female guests that at some point they will wonder why I called them on the show. A common theme: I don’t know why anyone would want to listen to this. This is so frequent that the only variance now is when my guest will say this: at the time of my inviting them, or the start of the recording, or in the break, or at the end.

In what must seem to be a practised way by now, I inform them that every woman I’ve ever called to the show has displayed this Imposter Syndrome, and no man ever has. Every man is like Of course I deserve to be here, haha, let me give you some gyan. (This is not strictly true, as a selection effect kicks in: I only invite the kind of man who is likely to be humble. Humility is a necessary condition for excellence, though not for success. But particular cases aside, it is true that women are far more likely to feel like imposters than men are.)

To borrow Shrayana Bhattacharya’s words from Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh, the world is divided “between males with unwarranted self-confidence and females with unwarranted self-doubt.” This is not just a clever line — it is empirically true.

Check out this great piece by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman called ‘The Confidence Gap,’ in which they write that “evidence shows that women are less self-assured than men—and that to succeed, confidence matters as much as competence.” Kay and Shipman describe something that struck them while they researched for their 2009 book Womenomics:

To our surprise, as we talked with women, dozens of them, all accomplished and credentialed, we kept bumping up against a dark spot that we couldn’t quite identify, a force clearly holding them back. Why did the successful investment banker mention to us that she didn’t really deserve the big promotion she’d just got? What did it mean when the engineer who’d been a pioneer in her industry for decades told us offhandedly that she wasn’t sure she was really the best choice to run her firm’s new big project? In two decades of covering American politics as journalists, we realized, we have between us interviewed some of the most influential women in the nation. In our jobs and our lives, we walk among people you would assume brim with confidence. And yet our experience suggests that the power centers of this nation are zones of female self-doubt—that is, when they include women at all.

The confidence gap leads to a success gap because success, as Kay and Shipman write, “correlates just as closely with confidence as it does with competence. No wonder that women, despite all our progress, are still woefully underrepresented at the highest levels.” An illustration of how this plays out:

Linda Babcock, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University and the author of Women Don’t Ask, has found, in studies of business-school students, that men initiate salary negotiations four times as often as women do, and that when women do negotiate, they ask for 30 percent less money than men do. At Manchester Business School, in England, professor Marilyn Davidson has seen the same phenomenon, and believes that it comes from a lack of confidence. Each year she asks her students what they expect to earn, and what they deserve to earn, five years after graduation. “I’ve been doing this for about seven years,” she has written, “and every year there are massive differences between the male and female responses.” On average, she reports, the men think they deserve $80,000 a year and the women $64,000—or 20 percent less.

The male self-confidence is not the part of the puzzle that surpises me. Self-confidence is an evolved trait in men for reasons that include, but go beyond, confidence breeding success in a virtuous cycle. The big question here is, why are women so full of self doubt?

Tired/Exhausted/Sick/Dying/Dead

On the flight from Bengaluru to Mumbai two days ago, I read Peter Handke’s beautiful A Sorrow Beyond Dreams. Remembering his mother’s early years, he writes:

For a woman to be born into such surroundings was in itself deadly. But perhaps there was one comfort: no need to worry about the future. The fortune-tellers at our church fairs took a serious interest only in the palms of the young men; a girl’s future was a joke.

No possibilities, it was all settled in advance: a bit of flirtation, a few giggles, brief bewilderment, then the alien, resigned look of a woman starting to keep house again, the first children, a bit of togetherness after the kitchen work, from the start not listened to, and in turn listening less and less, inner monologues, trouble with her legs, varicose veins, mute except for mumbling in her sleep, cancer of the womb, and finally, with death, destiny fulfilled. The girls in our town used to play a game based on the stations in a woman’s life: Tired/Exhausted/Sick/Dying/Dead.

I share this passage only because I read it recently, so it’s fresh in my head, but if you read or observe the world around you, this is the life of women. Except for a few lucky elites of this century, and much of that could be also be chimera, women’s lives contain none of the possibilities that men take for granted. Most domains are closed to them. If not actually subhuman, they are treated as a lesser kind of human, illustrated by the fact that they are treated as the property of men, not just in culture, but also in the law. (Just look at this recent illustration.)

I suspect that this could be one factor leading to the Imposter Syndrome. Women feel they are not good enough to do something, because deep down inside, they may feel that they’re not supposed to do that thing. Underlying the sense that they’re imposters could be the unarticulated feeling that they’re intruders.

This is irrational — but we feel what we feel without knowing where those feelings come from. And even if we do know, we can’t help feeling that way.

A Possible Solution: Play to Play

My last post, which touched a chord with so many people, was about how it would be ideal to be able to do things for the love of it: and to not worry about specific goals, or about validation. I feel that this may also be a way of beating the imposter syndrome.

A big part of the imposter syndrome comes from the anxiety of what others will think of us. We feel their gaze; we stiffen up; we overthink. I’m sure this anxiety has been a big part of your own life, regardless of your sex. We are human, and this is hardwired.

But many of us learn to fight this. The sentiment that gives us the way out: I play to play. When I write to write, I don’t care if a masterpiece emerges, or how people react to it. Yes, it is nice if it is great and people love it, but those are secondary. The pleasure of the writing is primary. (Believe it or not, that’s why I’ve suddenly become regular with this newsletter, but it took me years to get here.)

If the gaze of others makes us feel like imposters, then disregarding that gaze could be the way out. If the world doesn’t matter, then the term ‘imposter’ has no meaning.

(I accept that this is easier said than done in corporate contexts, so many of which can be so toxic, where what others think of us can affect our career. But even here, there is the danger of overthinking it. If you follow your dharma of doing your job the best you can, then banish the fear, express your opinion, ask for the biggest raise. You will always have more to gain than lose.)

The irony of this post is that I have a legitimate reason to feel like an imposter while writing it: I’m not a woman. But hey, I had these thoughts, and I offer them in good faith. And remember, even if I am an imposter — you are not!

The Mountain That Remains

The thought that the term ‘imposter’ becomes meaningless in a world without the gaze of others reminded me of this great poem, so let me end with this:

IMAGINARY NUMBER
by Vijay Seshadri

The mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed
is not big and is not small.
Big and small are

comparative categories, and to what
could the mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed
be compared?

Consciousness observes and is appeased.
The soul scrambles across the screes.
The soul,

like the square root of minus 1,
is an impossibility that has its uses.

Illustrations by Simahina.