The impostor syndrome: an obstacle to women’s pursuit of power

Women are still paid less than men for identical work (England, 2006) and occupy significantly fewer leadership positions (e.g., Catalyst, 2013). Why do men continue to be over-represented at the top, occupying positions of power in the workplace? One reason may be that women need to solve the challenge of experiencing the impostor syndrome. The impostor syndrome refers to high-achieving people who have difficulty internalizing their accomplishments and who fear that they will be exposed as a fraud (Clance & Imes, 1978). Women report higher impostorism than men (Kumar & Jagacinski, 2006); therefore, the current study tested whether impostorism hinders women’s ability to advance in their careers. Specifically, the present research addressed whether impostorism increases women’s sensitivity to negative feedback because impostor feelings are associated with decreased self-efficacy, self-confidence, and an attributional style that emphasizes internal sources of failure (for a review, see Kumar & Jagacinski, 2006). Whether the gender difference in attrition for students in STEM and employees in other domains is due to higher levels of impostorism for women than men is unknown, despite evidence that women in medical school score higher than men on impostorism (Jöstl et al., 2015). The present thesis tested whether negative feedback resulted in less interest in pursuing a graduate degree and less persistence for people high on impostorism, and whether that was particularly true for women. In addition, I examined whether impostorism had incremental validity as a predictor variable after adjusting for (1) self-esteem, which was negatively related to impostorism (Chrisman et al., 1995), and (2) beliefs about intelligence (Blackwell, Trzesniewski, & Dweck, 2007), because impostorism may be positively related to believing that intelligence is fixed rather than malleable. Results made the following novel contributions to the gender and impostorism literatures: (1) impostorism was especially detrimental to women’s pursuit of a graduate degree, but only when they faced negative feedback about their potential; (2) the stronger people’s impostorism, the more strongly they believed negative feedback about their potential; (3) impostorism was related to beliefs essential to career and academic advancement (e.g., fixed mindset beliefs). Finally, impostorism was not related to persistence rates on a graduate school aptitude task, but the task suffered from poor psychometric properties. Findings suggest that impostorism may hinder women’s career advancement by amplifying their responses to negative feedback. Additionally, the results illuminate other beliefs that people with strong impostor feelings may hold that are detrimental to career and academic pursuits. Future research should further address whether impostorism can affect persistence (i.e., attrition).Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Meghan Christina McLea