The limitations of “imposter syndrome”

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.