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Comment by marquis | Hacker News Reader

Imposter syndrome is totally expected when you have no public role models doing what you do, and all of your teachers are "not like you" as are all the books and education materials. Speaking for myself, it gets easier as I grow older and in fact I find myself ticking the "I want my own company" box. But that took years, while my male colleagues founded companies of their own in their 20s.

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Maybe I'm too anti-social but my role model were letters on the screen all along. Books and education materials belong to a "bit-gender", it's a piece of info and gender doesn't go in the play. I. e. in book written by Evi Nemeth and others I could not tell whether the respective part is written by she or he.

Maybe I'm too geeky and other people actually need physical humans like themself to cling to? :) That's a weird idea.

It was the same for me while I was "just a programmer" but I've moved into executive positions and have to deal with people on a human level. I am really enjoying the change in challenges and often miss that I could spend days on end with the "bits". I consider myself extremely lucky to have a role model who is an incredible person. Without her I would feel lost, and hope I can repay the favour some day to some young women.

Surprisingly enough, executive positions usually have much more level gender ratio around me. It should be easier to find a role model there.

>Maybe I'm too geeky and other people actually need physical humans like themself to cling to? :) That's a weird idea.

A huge issue is that many, many people don't recognize that not everyone has the same needs as them. It's actually very refreshing to see someone point this out, even if it's in a sarcastic way.

Too often conversation take a turn into "Well I did X without help, why should anyone else need help to accomplish the same thing". It's counterproductive to learning in general.

Imposter syndrome was felt by 50% of my colleagues when I left an awesome startup who insisted on the programmer-hero culture. Not gender-related.

>Imposter syndrome is totally expected when you have no public role models doing what you do, and all of your teachers are "not like you" as are all the books and education materials

Except that imposter syndrome is just as common in men.

Have you seen studies on it? I know some men feel it (anecdotally, I have), but saying "just as common" implies having some actual data on it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome#cite_note-Lan... cites a few studies showing no difference between the sexes.

The paper you linked to does not say that men and women experience the thing we are haphazardly referring to as "impostor syndrome" in the same way. In fact, it reinforces the claims made on this thread by suggesting that males respond to the phenomenon by developing a higher tolerance for risk.

How do you know though? Obviously imposter syndrome is common in men, but how do you know if it's more or less common in men than women in tech jobs? Do you have something to back that up?

Wikipedia articles often have sources, which makes them a good first place to check for stuff like this.

"Clance & Imes (1978) postulated that the experience would be more prevalent among females because of societal stereotyping of women as less capable than men ... 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"

Thanks, but it would probably have been better to link the article or the source beforehand. People make unfounded claims all the time on reddit and HN, so without a source it's often safe to assume they're basing it on anecdote or belief. I don't always have the time or willpower to research claims that are made.

I don't keep millions of links to every random thing I've ever read handy.

Pinboard.in is handy for that.

Interesting. Those studies are quite dated, however, and I'm not sure how valid the conclusions are anymore. Gender mores have changed quite significantly from the 80s, as have societal norms including societal expectations of a particular gender. One could easily argue that imposter syndrome is more prevalent in women today, because they are in industries which they were not in previously.

Yes, one could assume all sorts of things based on misconceptions (women were more prevalent in CS back then, not less). But assuming evidence is wrong because we don't like it isn't particularly convincing.

Columbus sailing westward hit land, thinking he had reached India. The evidence supported his assumption at the time, in fact drawing any other conclusion would have been erroneous.

My point is that a handful of studies decades ago may have been correct: then. However, I think any sane person would agree that the conclusions drawn from that era have very little bearing on how the world operates today. Information asymmetry was extremely high in academia back then, because academics were not really scrutinized as they are today.

No, most sane people will agree that evidence is valuable, and a lack of evidence is not more valuable simply because you wish the evidence didn't exist. As I said, go look at the most recent studies that show the same thing then. Put in some effort yourself instead of just dismissing reality because it doesn't fit your preconceived notions of how things should be.

The article goes on to discuss how despite similar impostor feelings, the responses of men and women to those feelings differ.

More recent studies affirm a gender gap in "impostor syndrome"; it was easy to find one from 2008 on Google Scholar, and I quickly stopped looking.

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