The term "impostor syndrome" has a really complicated and problematic history. It tumbled into pop psych but it's harmful because it puts the onus on an individual to fix something & obscures any environmental issues that are likely at play, especially for marginalized folks.

I started hearing the term during my first internship in tech, and I became interested in it so I did a research project around it during my last semester in school. If you're interested, let's take a walk down psych memory lane...

The tl;dr is that the term "impostor syndrome" morphed from the term "impostor phenomenon", which was coined in 1978 by clinical psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, who were studying primarily white, middle and upper-middle-class high-achieving women. So there's that.

They'd found that highly successful women from a range of professions were experiencing internal feelings of phoniness, regardless of professional recognition or scores on standardized tests. Additionally, they tended to constantly be in fear of being “found out” as frauds.

Their research was building off of work that had been done earlier in the 70’s by a psychology professor at Harvard, Matina Horner. Her construct of "fear of success" was a theoretical framework that sought to explain disparities between men’s and women’s drive for success.

This drive for success/need for achievement research was done primarily in the 1950’s and 1960’s by Horner’s mentor’s mentor, David McClelland, but most was based solely on men, partially because McClelland worked at the then-primarily male Harvard.

Horner’s work picked up where McClelland’s left off, and her fear of success construct was frequently referenced in popular literature, similarly to the “impostor syndrome” today. Her research catalyzed much appreciation and further scholarship, but later was harshly criticized.

It's been criticized as being a classic example of a deficit model, where the research was designed in such a way that it seeks to answer “the problem” through the lens of the target group’s assumed weaknesses/deficits.

For example, Horner’s research as to why women were not in math and science and why students of colour were less successful (ugh) was measuring indicators such as SAT scores, hormones, brain function, family values toward education, etc. Good start, right?

Rather than accounting for environmental factors and acknowledging race and gender as social constructs that may impact the results, the research’s focus was on indicators that were largely proxies for race and gender.

McClelland’s and Horner’s work created the foundation upon which Clance and Imes’ work on the impostor phenomenon was built, so it's important to examine the ways in which historically biased perspectives in the original research trickled through.

And like the old research, subsequent studies on the impostor phenomenon have been criticized as offering conflicting data on the gender differences, lacking an intersectional perspective, and consequently, failing to include environmental variables into the equation.

In interviews, one of the researchers even said that she doesn't know how it morphed from "phenomenon" to "syndrome" in popular discourse, but hypothesizes that it's because a syndrome is an easier concept to grasp than a phenomenon.

The problem with that, though, is that using “syndrome” as terminology reinforces the notion that these feelings need to be diagnosed and should be treated as an internal condition that mandates a cure. It doesn't even fit the clinical criteria for a psychological syndrome.

But the term has been used in hundreds of think pieces and TED talks, and by lots of public figures, so it's become a bandaid diagnosis for feelings of alienation or discomfort. Ever damn article on Google is "how to overcome impostor syndrome in 5 easy steps".

Rather than probing people to further assess all the factors that may be contributing to feelings of fraudulence, impostor syndrome is so often deemed to be the culprit and methods of overcoming the syndrome are accordingly limited in scope to personal responsibility.

This happens a lot in language, where a word gains popularity and becomes the "catch all", which in turn makes it a lot harder to find the real source of the problem.

A lot of people say "I have impostor syndrome" but are really referring to the very normal feeling of being new in a field, or being surrounded by a lot of talented people. But what if it's more than that?

What if someone says they have impostor syndrome but they really mean "I'm the only trans person at my workplace". Or that they're experiencing racial microaggressions all day long. Those are harder, yet more important conversations to have.

So that's why, whenever someone says they have impostor syndrome, I try to ask "what do you mean by that?". Maybe they've got a lot of humility, maybe they're junior, but maybe it's a white supremacist patriarchal capitalist society that's grinding them down.

Also, maybe, just maybe, we'd BENEFIT from valuing humility over hubris and teaching the privileged & overconfident to second guess themselves sometimes. There's a really great article on this and more by Cate Huston: https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-trouble-with-imposters

It leads to much more honest and productive conversations when we take out the term entirely. And there's lots more where this came from if folks want to chat more