Pauline Rose Clance is ignoring me. It’s a bright Monday morning in Berkeley, California. I’m sipping a black coffee on my porch, and I feel like a fraud.
Clance, whom I’ve been trying to reach for two weeks, is the famed psychologist who first put a name to imposter syndrome. She is also the foremother of one of workplace psychology’s most ubiquitous afflictions, a malady that reached, last year, a cultural summit of sorts when Daniel Kwan, co-director of Everything Everywhere All at Once, accepted the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, bellowing, “Oh my God, guys! My imposter syndrome is at an all-time high!”
Mine too. Since I approached Clance, she and I have exchanged 10 emails: eight from me (“honoured”, “grateful”, “immense pleasure”); two from her (telegraphic three-word sentences). She has also ignored my voicemail. As I recheck the phone number, there’s finally a click at the end of the line.
“Hello?”
The imposter phenomenon is an expression Clance coined in her 1978 paper, co-authored with Suzanne Imes, “The Impostor Phenomenon in High Achieving Women”, which was later popularised as “imposter syndrome”. It describes “an internal experience of intellectual phoniness”. Imposters are ambitious, hard-working people who believe they must have fooled anyone who thinks that they are capable or talented. Even when faced with objective evidence of their skills, they remain unwavering in their conviction that they succeeded thanks to luck or error. The more plentiful their accolades, the more anxious they are that they’ll be found out. If they do fail, they see it as ultimate proof that their success was somehow undeserved. Even Einstein was not exempt, writing that, “The exaggerated esteem in which my lifework is held makes me very ill at ease. I feel compelled to think of myself as an involuntary swindler.”
When I introduce myself, Clance, speaking down the phone from her TV room at home in Atlanta, Georgia, clearly has no clue who I am or which interview request I’m referring to (“You know,” she explains, “I’ve just turned 85.”) She’s fully retired now, she tells me slowly, but she’s happy to talk.
Clance grew up in the Baptist Valley hills of Appalachian Virginia in the 1940s, the daughter of a sawmill operator and the youngest of six children. Everyone in her family called her Tiny. After high school, she attended Lynchburg College, Virginia — the first in her family to go on to higher education — where she studied psychology as part of her degree. She was fascinated by what she learnt and went on to do an MSc, then a PhD, in psychology at the University of Kentucky. As we talk, I am struck by her warm Southern drawl and perceptive manner.
As a PhD student, she continues, Clance remembers confessing to her friends that she couldn’t sleep thinking about the exams she knew she’d failed. But she always got top grades and eventually they stopped believing her. “Forget it,” one said. “Don’t pull that ‘woe is me’ crap again!” Clance decided to stop talking about her insecurities. But the feelings remained.
After her PhD, she got a job at Oberlin College as an assistant professor and counsellor. It was there that she first recognised her own sense of self-doubt in others, although at Oberlin the sufferers weren’t the children of manual workers from rural Virginia. She was surprised, in sessions, to hear students “with top SAT scores, selected from some of the best schools in the country” identify the same fears she had long struggled to harness. Those fears, she realised, transcended age, education and factual proof of the opposite.
“I feel like an imposter here among all these bright students,” a female student confessed to her. The young woman’s choice of word planted a seed in Clance’s mind. “Of course,” she adds, “she was one of the bright students herself.”
I hear the muffled voice of a morning news anchor in the background. Clance apologises. She has inadvertently turned on her TV. While I wait for her to turn it off, I realise I’ve been using “phenomenon” and “syndrome” interchangeably. When I point this out she sounds unfazed. Imposter syndrome is not, technically, a “syndrome” since it does not feature the requisite three of the “four Ds” of mental illness (deviance, distress, dysfunction and danger). But “‘Syndrome’ has become so popular that I just said: ‘I give up!’” Clance laughs. Perhaps the trend of self-diagnosing illness online has led us to label our experiences as “syndromes”. Or perhaps, as she puts it simply, “phenomenon is hard to spell”.
For almost half a century, the imposter phenomenon has been associated in particular with professional women. Women who, when Clance coined the phrase, worked in male-dominated industries. Early academic studies focused on “high-achieving women”, and it is their contemporary equivalents who readily spring to mind today. Former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg dedicated a chapter of her bestselling 2013 book Lean In to her experience of imposter syndrome (“At every stage of my career, I have attributed my success to luck,” she wrote). Award-winning writer Maya Angelou admitted, “I have written 11 books, but each time I think, ‘Uh oh, they’re going to find out now.’” Jacinda Ardern, Sonia Sotomayor and Michelle Obama have all spoken candidly about it.
In recent years, however, a new generation of feminists has challenged the idea of imposter syndrome. Its underlying assumption — at least, in the way the term is often used — is that if women could only shrug off their self-doubt, they’d be free to fulfil their potential. But this does not take into account the real barriers they face — an argument made by Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey in their 2021 paper “Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome”.
Statistically, female employees are underpaid and under-represented, and, for women of colour, this is exacerbated by systemic racism. Imposter syndrome risks diagnosing external barriers to achievement as simply internal ones, instead of acknowledging the ways in which the two can apply simultaneously. Clance resists being drawn into a debate over the limitations of “imposter syndrome”, which, after all, is never the term she used. She only offers that “you can be a feminist and experience imposter feelings”.
As her own fears of imposterism have faded, Clance has embraced her work’s success without arrogance, and without the undue display of humility so pervasive among high achievers (watching the Oscars “felt really good!” she says, happily). What would she tell those who experience imposter feelings today?
“Remember a success you’ve had. Then invite your boss in the room. What would they say? Then let someone else in, maybe your professor. Then the head of the project. Then your father, your sister. What would they say? Observe their conversation. Once the room is full, I ask you . . . ”
She pauses. I can almost feel her looking searchingly into my eyes. “Don’t you think it’s interesting that you can fool so many bright people?”
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