Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Life

Is ‘Imposter Syndrome’ Really a Women’s Issue?

Have you ever acted confident when deep down you felt unqualified or incompetent — in short, like an imposter? Have you ever felt that someday you would be discovered as a fraud? A blogger for Psychology Today linked this “imposter syndrome” to women, asking “why do so many successful women feel they are frauds?” It’s an interesting question to be sure, but I can’t help wondering if the “imposter syndrome” is really specific to women, and if there might be a danger in framing it as a women’s issue.

A post about this article sparked an interesting discussion at Feministing. Many commenters agreed that the “imposter syndrome” was related to gender, and gave examples of situations that support this connection. One commenter brought up the issue of women in the sciences, arguing that women who are accepted into science and engineering schools like MIT are told they only got in because of their gender. This type of affirmative action could be said to contribute to insecurity among women in the sciences who must repeatedly confront the assumption that they do not really deserve to be where they are.

The sciences are not the only field in which women are regarded with suspicion. As recently discussed in the Forward, women face barriers in Jewish communal organizations as they confront assumptions about their abilities as leaders and fundraisers. The same assumptions can be found in business, sports, and other traditionally “male” arenas. I have no doubt that women in these fields, and all fields, experience the “imposter syndrome.”

Read more

Leah Berkenwald is the online communications specialist at the Jewish Women’s Archive, and a contributor to its Jewesses With Attitude blog, which cross-posts weekly with the Sisterhood.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.