The limitations of “imposter syndrome”

[firecat]

Why Everyone Feels Like They’re Faking It
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/13/the-dubious-rise-of-impostor-syndrome

The article especially focuses on what some women of color say about how the concept of imposter syndrome doesn’t capture their experience. (Which means the title of thr article is a problem…)

I don’t particularly have imposter syndrome feelings either. I’ve often felt like i was only pretending to know what I was doing, but I don’t fear being found out as a fraud. Rather, because people generally seemed happy with what I was doing anyway, I concluded we all feel like we’re pretending to know what we’re doing.

Tulshyan started hearing the term a decade ago, when she left a job in journalism to work in the Seattle tech industry. She was attending women’s leadership conferences where it seemed that everyone was talking about impostor syndrome and “the confidence gap,” but no one was talking about gender bias and systemic racism. She got tired of hearing women, especially white women—her own heritage is Indian Singaporean—comparing notes on who had the most severe impostor syndrome. It seemed like another version of women sharing worries about their weight, a kind of communal self-deprecation that reiterated oppressive metrics rather than disrupting them.

Comments

[nocturnus33]

I run into the article a few days ago and like it a lot. I do doubt myself quite a lot; I d feel it's never enough, but I'm in a chauvinistic, type-A industry whose mock motto is "publish or perish"; so feeling an impostor in a setting of unrealistic demands it's to be expected. I like what they say:
“Imposter syndrome directs our view toward fixing women at work instead of fixing the places where women work.”

[firecat]

I doubt myself sometimes but without the “they’re going to discover I’m a fraud!” part.

I like it on the rare occasions people recognize that “fixing women” isn’t the only or best option for many issues.

[nocturnus33]

Yeah, that's the problem with psychologistic reductionism. Everything is explained from pathology or looked at from an individual perspective. The problems caused as a result of the social structure are reframed as psychic issues.

[firecat]

Well said.