The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: Why Capable People Suffer from the Impostor Syndrome and How to Thrive in Spite of It (20 page)

Women will often attempt to minimize the discomfort by trying to still be one of the gang. The problem with this strategy is that organizations are based on the more hierarchical relationships men prefer. So even if your former peers embrace you as one of them, your behavior has violated an unwritten rule that managers are supposed to mainly socialize with people at their level. It’s okay to occasionally lunch with your former work pals, but it’s considered a bad career move not to shift primary allegiance to the new management level.

If you identify with either example, use these questions to parse what you’re really dealing with:

Feeling isolated is not just a function of job level. It can happen any time you work in an overwhelmingly male-dominated environment—something that you learned in
chapter 2
—and can easily contribute to self-doubt in women. Think about how you feel when you walk into a networking event where you’re the only woman: Do you feel confident and in control? Or do you feel self-conscious, perhaps even a little intimidated? If you chose the later, you’re not alone.

Psychologists wanted to understand the possible effects of gender-imbalanced settings on advanced math, science, and engineering students. So they had them watch videos portraying a summer leadership conference. One video showed a conference where men outnumbered women three to one, and another portrayed a conference with equal numbers of men and women. Not surprisingly, women who watched the first video reported a lower sense of belonging and less desire to participate.

What is significant was the finding that just
watching
the gender-imbalanced video caused these elite female students to experience faster heart rates, perspire more, and be more easily distracted—all indicators of stress.
¹⁰
Knowing this can help in those real-life situations where you might judge yourself for letting your minority status get to you in the first place. Now instead of thinking,
If I were really competent, I wouldn’t be so unnerved
, you understand that you can be perfectly competent and still experience stress in these situations.

If you identify with this success scenario, ask yourself:

Gender is not the only factor that can lead you to worry about the alienating effects of success. If you are a person of color, you may experience cultural pressure to downplay your academic or professional success in order to avoid being accused of “acting white.” Similarly, if you are a first-generation professional, your success may alienate you from the people you grew up with—sometimes to a painful extent. Even if you want to talk about your work with family or friends, it’s not always easy. If they don’t ask you about your work, you feel hurt. If they do ask, it’s obvious they don’t really get what it is you do. Rather than trying to bridge this new divide, you may attempt to circumvent it altogether. You avoid mentioning that prestigious college or job around hometown friends lest they assume you think you’re “better” than them.

The loss of connection may be so intolerable that some people deliberately choose a job below their training or abilities. I once met a Ph.D. in business who had taken a job as a bookkeeper. The impostor syndrome had something to do with her lowering the occupational bar, but it was also a way to close the connection gap. “When people find out I have a Ph.D.,” she said, “I can immediately feel this gulf widening between us.”

Sometimes the distance caused by a career decision is more physical than emotional. It’s scary enough to move far from home; feeling like an impostor only adds to the anxiety. If you also happen to belong to a religious, racial, or sexual minority, then this can further complicate your
decision. Not only are you leaving friends and family behind, but depending on the demographics of the new locale, you may cut yourself off from your larger social network as well. When you are forced to decide between advancing in your career and experiencing social isolation or in some cases even the risk of physical violence, it’s that much harder to separate legitimate misgivings from impostor fears.

Any kind of major change or transition will trigger impostor feelings. If you identify with this success scenario, ask yourself:

You might think accomplished women worrying about not finding love is a thing of the past. In reality the women in my workshops speak often about the challenges they face on the relationship front. There is a reason MIT professor Sheila Widnall includes on her list of
10 Reasons Why Women Don’t Go into Engineering
the concern that a female with the highest math score won’t get a date to the prom. The dating scene has never been easy for “nerdy” guys, but it’s probably not because women are threatened by a smart man. At least not in the way some men feel about being “outsmarted” by a female—especially on their own turf.

Even if you personally brush off such nonsense, every heterosexual
woman who’s ever studied in a male-dominated field such as math or science knows that the response to the question “What’s your major?” is not exactly a dude magnet. One female physics major was actually coached by a male friend to lie and tell prospective dates that she was majoring in early-childhood education. Apparently he thought other males would be less intimidated by a woman preparing to command a classroom of five-year-olds than by one who might someday run a laboratory of fifty-year-old men.

There aren’t a lot of men who worry that being “too successful” will hurt their love life. But depending on your age, I bet you remember the famous 1986
Newsweek
cover-story prediction that “a single, 40-year-old woman had a better chance of being killed by a terrorist than getting married.”
People
magazine fanned the fear when it featured photos of Diane Sawyer, Linda Ronstadt, Donna Mills, and Sharon Gless with the headline “Are These Women Old Maids?” and warned: “Most single women over 35 can forget about marriage.” Years later the terrorist line was introduced to a whole new audience when it showed up in the 1993 movie
Sleepless in Seattle
.

As it turned out, there were no such dire consequences for women who put off marriage to focus on their career. In fact, twenty years later
Newsweek
admitted it had misrepresented an obscure demographic finding, tossed in a terrorist reference that was intended to be a joke, and generally created a scenario that had little basis in reality. But a powerful seed had been planted in the minds of many single women: You can be highly successful or you can have love, but you can’t have both.

Even women who have found love admit to worrying about the consequence on their relationship of advancing
too
far in their career. Of course, most couples realize that a middle-class lifestyle requires two paychecks. However, if you happen to be one of the estimated 40 percent of women
in the United States who outearns her spouse, unconsciously you may be concerned with the effect of your success on the male ego—something that’s even more of an issue for couples who work in the same organization or industry.

If you identify with this success scenario, ask yourself:

The value you place on being liked can also impact how you behave—or, in some cases, don’t behave. According to New York University professor Clay Shirky, even when the situation calls for it, his female students “aren’t just bad at behaving like arrogant, self-aggrandizing jerks. They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, antisocial obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so.” He adds, “Whatever bad things you can say about those behaviors, you can’t say they are underrepresented among people who have changed the world.”
¹¹

His comments were made in a blog post titled “A Rant About Women.” As you can imagine, they caused quite a buzz, even catching the attention of National Public Radio and the BBC. Shirky’s rant was prompted by a male student who asked him to write a job recommendation. When he asked the student to elaborate on what the letter should
say, the professor received a draft full of superlatives. It was only after sending off a toned-down version of the letter that Shirky realized that because of that over-the-top draft, the student got a much better recommendation out of him than he would have otherwise.

It also caused him to worry that most of his female students couldn’t write a letter like that, explaining, “I’m not concerned that women don’t engage in enough building of self-confidence or self-esteem. I’m worried about something much simpler: not enough women have what it takes to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks.” And what it takes, he argues, is
not caring what people think about you
. That’s a problem. Because women
do
care what people think about them—and as it turns out, with good reason.

Shirky went on to predict that more of his male students will go on to become famous for no other reason than that “men are just better at being arrogant, and less concerned about people thinking they’re stupid (often correctly, it should be noted) for trying things we’re not qualified for.” Here we agree.

However, the really big boat that Shirky missed was his initial failure to recognize the backlash for women who
are
self-aggrandizing. What we’re really seeing here is not so much female modesty or insecurity as women’s internal responses bumping up against certain social realities. Namely, even if a woman
wanted
to behave like an arrogant self-aggrandizing jerk, and even if she didn’t give a hoot about being judged or ostracized or isolated, if she does care about being considered
competent
, she can ill afford not to care.

This is important to understand because it would be easy to assume that the reason you’re hesitant to do things like negotiate for more money or take on a leadership role is that you lack confidence. And that may well be true. However, as you are about to learn, for females, being
too
smart, or
too
bossy, or
too
self-serving, has consequences.

IF I ACT TOO SMART, PEOPLE MAY NOT LIKE ME

If you grew up near the top of your class you may have experienced at a young age the conflict between being smart and being liked. This is true of course for boys too. People who specialize in working with academically gifted students, however, will tell you that gifted girls often presume that boys do not like intelligent girls. Sadly, with good reason: Of the four categories of gifted and nongifted males and females, gifted girls were deemed least popular.
¹²
When you consider the strong social pressure to fit in, it’s easy to see why a lot of gifted girls learn to downplay or devalue their abilities in order to avoid ostracism by their peers. It’s a lesson that may well be carried into adulthood.

Being self-effacing or dismissing your abilities or accomplishments as “no big deal” in front of others sure sounds like the impostor syndrome. However, if you sense in certain settings that your superior intelligence is costing more points than it’s winning you, then you may unconsciously hold back.

There is a difference between minimizing an achievement to guard against “bragging backlash” and believing you’re not actually responsible for it. In other words, you may be perfectly comfortable, even proud of your smarts. But if you believe you’ll be thought less of if you
talk
about your accomplishments, you may either (a) stay mum, or (b) downplay your success with statements like “It was nothing” or “I was just lucky.” After all, you don’t want people to think you’re “full of yourself.” Such behaviors look and sound like impostorism when, at least in part, they may represent a social strategy designed to maintain relationships.

After all, if you care about what people think of you, then you’re also going to go out of your way to protect the other person’s feelings. And being modest helps you do that—that is, if you’re a woman. In one study, college students who scored higher on an intelligence test were asked to disclose their scores to students who did not perform as well. When
women shared their scores with another woman in a modest (i.e., non-bragging) way, they assumed that the other person liked them more. They also thought that by being modest, they allowed the other person to feel more intelligent and confident. For men the opposite occurred: Men who bragged about doing well assumed that women liked them
more
and that the other people felt
better
about themselves.
¹³