"The researchers concluded that the women who participated in this study experienced impostor phenomenon more so than the men who participated."
am I misparsing this sentence? how can both be true?
Men and women could be equally likely to develop some form of imposter syndrome (thus, equal prevalence), but the women could be more severely affected (scores of, say, 5 vs. 3 on some kind of test or questionnaire).
but it's the other way around. Men and women are affected with the same severity but women are more likely to develop it. ( or at least that's what I understood from bradjohnson's comment).
I can only see two ways to make both statements consistent:
- Men and women are both likely to have an general 'diagnosis' of imposter syndrome, but women experience more 'acute attacks' of it per unit time. Half of of men and women feel like imposters during a year, but the affected women feel that way twice a week, while the affected men feel it once/week.
- Women experience it more severely than men: a male colonel feels like a lt. colonel, but a female colonel feels like a major)
Could be some combination of the two...or the writing is just a mess!
Severity is the same for both genders (those that have it, feel it with similar enough degree and frequency), but in equal sized groups of men and women, there are more women who exhibit it.
From Wikipedia's ref #1 (Langford and Clance, 1993)
"Studies of college students (Harvey, 1981; Bussotti, 1990; Langford, 1990), college professors (Topping, 1983), and successful professionals (Dingman, 1987) have all failed, however, to reveal any sex differences in impostor feelings, suggesting that males in these populations are just as likely as females to have low expectations of success and to make attributions to non-ability related factors."
And Ref #9 (Kumar and Jagacinski, 2006)
"Women expressed greater imposter fears than men and were also higher on ability-avoid goals."
The writing in the Wikipedia article is not great though, so it could have gone either way...
I understood the first sentence to be saying that the proportion of men experiencing "imposter's syndrome" is the equal to the proportion of woman experiencing it.
I understood The second sentence to say that a higher proportion of women experience it.
To my understanding, it's not possible for these two statements to be true at the same time. So one must be wrong.
"This foo is bar."
Both statements can be true simultaneously.
I understood it to be:
P(W) == P(M)
and P(W) > P(M)
either the sample was too small, they got unlucky or the result is stated too generally.
Not necessarily. Maybe the replications were flawed. Characteristics of a population can change over time. Blah, blah, blah. It's incredibly hard to say something is flat wrong or absolutely correct. A good scientist uses what others might call "weasel" words (I hate that term), like, "The data is (in)consistent with the hypothesis."
The more evidence that mounts for or against a hypothesis, well, it's up to you to decide how to act.