The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: Why Capable People Suffer from the Impostor Syndrome and How to Thrive in Spite of It (7 page)

Once the curtain was finally pulled back, what they found stunned the overwhelmingly male scientific community. Women scientists had to produce 2.5 times more research and/or published work to receive the same competence scores as male applicants.
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Put another way, the men were able to go further by doing significantly less, confirmation that despite objections that affirmative action would “lower standards,” mediocrity has never been an impediment to male success.

Being female means that you’re held to a higher standard in professions where you might expect evaluation to be purely objective.

Not only is the bar set higher for women, but the burden of proof is on you to prove your competence in ways rarely required of men. For instance, even when fictitious male and female tenure candidates were deemed equally likely to be promoted on the basis of a superb curriculum vitae, reviewers were four times more likely to ask the female candidate for supporting evidence, such as proof that she had won her grants on her own or a demonstration of her teaching.
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I’ve heard similar “prove it” stories from countless female students and students of color accused of plagiarism by professors who thought their paper was “too good.”

Even so, if these kinds of double standards are ticking you off, you may want to curb your anger. That is,
if
you want to be seen as competent. Men such as Donald Trump and John McEnroe are famous for blowing off
steam and letting the chips fall where they may. Certainly one reason they get away with it is because they don’t care what people think about them. However, the fact that they’re male means they also
don’t have
to care. In experiments involving mock job interviews, observers concluded that the angry male candidates not only deserved more status and a higher salary but could be expected to do better at the job than angry women. In other words, irritability in men is regarded as a sign of status. But when women lose their temper they’re seen as
less competent
.
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Not everyone needs research to prove how costly negative assumptions about female competence can be. In a post titled “Why James Chartrand Wears Women’s Underpants,” the widely read founder of the Web design and copy business Men with Pens James Chartrand revealed that “he” is actually a “she” presenting herself as a man. The reason? Not only was it significantly easier to get freelance work as a man, but Chartrand reports that the implied credibility and respect meant less negotiating over fees and even having the same bid submitted as a man win out over the one submitted as herself. Writing under a male pseudonym, says the thirty-something Canadian, “opened up a new world. It helped me earn double and triple the income of my true name, with the same work and service. No hassles. Higher acceptance … Business opportunities fell into my lap. People asked for my advice, and they thanked me for it, too.”
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You already know you hold yourself to a higher standard, expecting of yourself perfection with ease. Do you think other people’s unrealistic expectations might compound the problem? When you already question your competence it’s bound to make it harder to determine whether, for example, the reason you didn’t get the promotion is that you really were
lacking in some way or because you’re being judged by a different standard.

That’s why you need to step back and explore what role gender or other bias based on race, age, or disability may play in your feeling less competent than you really are. For example:

If you answered yes to any of these questions, take time to reflect on how these experiences have affected how confident and competent you feel today. From now on, don’t automatically assume that the reason you were passed over or asked to provide additional proof of abilities or credentials is because you’re somehow lacking. At the same time, be aware that there really are reasons unrelated to gender or racial bias why decisions go a certain way or careers stall. We all have blind spots. So before you cry foul, ask yourself a few questions:

Being female means you and your work automatically stand a greater chance of being ignored, discounted, trivialized, devalued, or otherwise taken less seriously than a man’s. Take something as basic as art. Despite being equally creative and painstaking, ceramics, embroidery, weaving, and other mediums associated with women are relegated by historians and curators alike to the inferior status of “crafts.” Similarly, the scholarly, scientific, or literary work of women has generally not been considered as “important” or “brilliant” as that of men. Books and films produced by women or that appeal to them are frequently derided as “chick lit” or “chick flicks.” But you rarely hear a similarly rhyming term used to describe the often violent action films popular among male audiences.

It’s unlikely that the stray demeaning remark or indignity will undermine your self-confidence in any lasting way, especially if it comes from a stranger. It’s the cumulative effect of often subtle put-downs that can take a toll. For example, of the hundreds of highly successful male executives and entrepreneurs I’ve worked with, I’ve never heard a single one protest that his work was being trivialized. But it’s something women complain about a lot.

Little
is one of those words men don’t take kindly to—at least not when it’s used in reference to them. But it’s a word that’s freely tossed around to refer to your work. Like when a young professor I know announced excitedly that her grant had come through, only to feel totally deflated when the dean responded, “Oh, you mean the little one?” Even when made innocently, belittling comments like “Why don’t you share your little idea with the group?” “I hear you’re starting a little consulting business.” “When is your little show happening?” send the message that what you have to offer is not really serious.

If researchers looking at children are right, males may have simply
grown up learning to take females less seriously. In play pairs, even among children as young as two and a half, boys pay attention to protests from other boys. But when girls tell boys to stop doing something, the boys ignore them.
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Fast-forward a few years and even on what researchers had set up as a collaborative science project, the experience of being the only boy differed dramatically from that of the lone girl. When teams consisted of three girls and one boy, the girls deferred to the boy, who spoke twice as much as all the girls combined. But when the situation was reversed, the boys ignored and insulted the lone girl.
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Jump ahead to adulthood and this pattern continues. Midlevel women in high-tech describe their largely male work environment to be so “competitive and unfriendly” that it requires “a concerted effort to be assertive in order to be heard.”
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Naturally, everyone wants to feel heard. It’s likely, though, that for you feeling heard matters even more. If you’ve ever sat in a classroom or meeting and felt your contributions were ignored, you won’t be surprised to learn that when female students feel their questions are dismissed by professors, their self-confidence declines; conversely, feeling heard boosts women’s confidence.
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You don’t have to convince United States Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that feeling heard matters. Speaking of her experience as a female attorney in the sixties and seventies, Ginsburg told
USA Today
, “I don’t know how many meetings I attended … where I would say something, and I thought it was a pretty good idea … Then somebody else would say exactly what I said. Then people would become alert to it, respond to it.” Three decades later Ginsburg admits that there are times when the lack of diversity on the high court can still be wearying. “It can happen even in the conferences in the court. When I will say something … it isn’t until somebody else says it that everyone will focus on the point,” said Ginsburg.
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When you feel like an impostor, you’re prone to undervalue yourself.
Widen the lens a bit and the question becomes, how could you not? As more women enter a field, the pay scale drops and so does the job’s status. And when you live in a society where money and status are revered, having less of both only reinforces the perception that the work you do is not as highly valued—at least not when a woman does it.
Miami Herald
humor columnist Dave Barry raised this point when he suggested, “The obvious and fair solution to the housework problem is to let men do the housework for, say, the next six thousand years, to even things up.” Joking that “the trouble is that men, over the years, have developed an inflated notion of the importance of everything they do, so that before long they would turn housework into just as much of a charade as business is now. They would hire secretaries and buy computers and fly off to housework conferences in Bermuda, but they’d never clean anything.”
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It’s easy to smile at the truth in Barry’s joke. But it’s no laughing matter when your job is the one routinely made smaller. Just ask former Clinton White House staffer Dee Dee Myers. In her book
Why Women Should Rule the World
, Myers offers a revealing look at the subtle and not-so-subtle ways women are rendered less important. She tells of the intense pressure then president-elect Bill Clinton was under to make good on his promise to create a government that “looked like America.” Unfortunately, his initial appointments looked like more of the same. That’s when insiders hatched a plan to appoint Myers to be the first female White House press secretary—
kind of
. Myers got the news from transition-team members George Stephanopoulos and Ricki Seidman. I’ll let Myers take it from here:

“[They told me] I would have the title of White House press secretary. But the job would be a little different. George would be director of communications; he would handle the daily briefings, as he had during the transition, and I would be the backup briefer. He would take the press secretary’s office in the West Wing; I’d have a smaller office in the same suite.
He’d carry the highest rank of assistant to the president (as all previous press secretaries had); I’d be a deputy assistant—a lower rank that came with a smaller salary (natch).” Of the offer, Myers says, “Suddenly, I found myself staring down the barrel of a predicament that I knew was all too common among women: responsibility without corresponding authority.”

Once in the White House, Myers had the lesson reinforced. It turned out that despite having less responsibility, a deputy in another office was making ten thousand dollars more a year than she was. So Myers went to chief of staff Leon Panetta to straighten out what she presumed to be a simple and easily remedied oversight. Instead Panetta explained that the other guy had taken a pay cut to work for the president, there was no money in the budget for a raise (we’re talking eight hundred dollars a week here, folks), and besides, he had a family and she didn’t. When Myers tried to press her case, Panetta abruptly ended the meeting with “It’s not going to happen.”

You don’t have to be especially motivated by power or money to recognize the diminishing effect such experiences can have on a woman. Myers writes, “The president and the senior staff made the job less important than it had been. And that made
me
less important.”

If you’ve been selling yourself short, it may be because the world you live in does too. To begin to connect the dots, look for instances in your own life when you have felt ignored, trivialized, or otherwise taken less seriously. Instances when you had to work harder for your voice to be heard and/or ways you may have been devalued financially. Do you see possible connections between these external realities and your internal struggle to feel competent and deserving?

Even when you understand the larger social landscape, you can’t control
what other people think or do. There are, however, things you can do to mitigate certain situations or at least be mindful of. Take showing anger at work. You can still get riled if you want, but at least be aware that doing so puts you at risk of being seen as less competent. Know too that when women explain why they are angry, researchers found people more apt to cut them slack, whereas they are less forgiving of men who do the same because offering reasons for their emotions is considered a sign of weakness.