Category: Human Behavior

On imposter syndrome, the roots of self-doubt, and what the research actually tells us.

by Luisa Tabatabai & Mariella Staby,
Community Research Team, Nova Women in Business

She has the degrees, the title, the track record. Her colleagues respect her. Her results speak for themselves. And yet, somewhere between the meeting room and the mirror, she wonders: Does anyone know I don’t really belong here?

This is imposter syndrome. For high-achieving women, it is not a character flaw or a passing phase. It is a documented, pervasive pattern with measurable consequences for careers, organisations, and ambition itself.

Where It Begins

The term “imposter phenomenon” was coined in 1978 by psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes, who studied 150 high-achieving women in the United States. Each had been formally recognised for her professional and academic success. And yet, despite the external validation, nearly all struggled to internalise their accomplishments, attributing their achievements to luck, timing, or the inability of others to see through them. What Clance and Imes identified was not simply low self-esteem. It was something more specific: a persistent disconnect between objective achievement and subjective self-perception. Success, no matter how documented, failed to silence the internal voice insisting it was undeserved.

Decades later, this phenomenon remains stubbornly persistent, and its roots, research suggests, run earlier and deeper than the workplace.

The Confidence Gap Begins in Education

One underappreciated strand of the research traces the confidence gap to the classroom itself, long before professional life begins. A landmark study by Colbeck, Cabrera, and Terenzini (2001), published in The Review of Higher Education, examined how teaching practices shape students’ professional self-perceptions and found that the effect is not gender-neutral. Even when controlling for academic performance, women consistently emerged from higher education with lower professional confidence than their male peers. The implications are significant: the gap is not simply about what students learn, but about how educational environments communicate to students, particularly women, whether they belong.

This early erosion of professional confidence creates compounding disadvantages that follow women into their careers. Carlin, Gelb, Belinne, and Ramchand (2018), writing in Business Horizons, document one of its most consequential effects: women are significantly more likely than men to withdraw from a job application if they believe they lack even one listed qualification — whereas men routinely apply despite perceived skill gaps. The result is a self-imposed filter on ambition that costs both women and the organisations that might have hired them.

The Research: More Than Anecdote

For a long time, imposter syndrome was treated primarily as an individual problem, something to be managed through therapy or mindset coaching. More recently, large-scale data has told a more structural story.

A 2024 meta-analysis published in Current Research in Behavioral Sciences, drawing on 115 effect sizes and over 40,000 participants, confirmed what Clance and Imes originally proposed: women experience imposter syndrome more frequently and more intensely than men. The findings were consistent across academic, professional, and healthcare settings and spanned participants in North America, Europe, and Asia.

Research from Cornell University adds another dimension. Studies there found that men tend to overestimate their abilities and their performance, while women consistently underestimate both, even when their actual output is equivalent in quality and quantity. The performance gap is not real. The confidence gap is.

Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, in their influential 2014 Atlantic essay and subsequent book The Confidence Gap, argue that success correlates as closely with confidence as it does with competence and that the natural consequence of chronically low confidence is inaction: opportunities not pursued, hands not raised, promotions not sought.

Eagly  and  Johnson’s  foundational  1990  meta-analysis  across  162  studies in Psychological Bulletin adds important nuance here. Their research found that while women and men do not differ significantly in task-oriented leadership effectiveness in organisational settings, women consistently tended toward more democratic and participative leadership styles. This matters in the context of the confidence gap: women’s collaborative, consensus-building approach to leadership is genuinely effective, yet it may be less visible, less self-promoting, and therefore less likely to be recognised without deliberate institutional attention.

High Achievement Offers No Immunity

One of the more unsettling findings in this space is that professional success does not dissolve self-doubt, it can intensify it.

A 2020 KPMG study surveyed 750 high-performing executive women, all within one or two steps of the C-suite, representing over 150 organisations. Three-quarters reported having personally experienced imposter syndrome at some point in their careers. Nearly half said their feelings of self-doubt stemmed from never having expected to reach the level of success they had achieved. Eighty-one percent believed they placed more pressure on themselves not to fail than their male counterparts did.

Data from the Survey Center on American Life paints a similar picture at a broader scale. Among young working women, more than half reported feeling “not good at their job” at least once or twice in a single week, compared to 46% of young men. Strikingly, educational attainment offered little protection: college-educated women reported higher rates of self-doubt than women with less formal education, reinforcing the conclusion that credentials alone do not build internal confidence.

Beyond the Boardroom: The Confidence Gap Across Domains

The consequences of the confidence gap extend well beyond career advancement. Research published in Management Science in 2025 by Bucher-Koenen, Alessie, Lusardi, and van Rooij, drawing on a carefully designed survey experiment, found that what appears to be a substantial gender gap in financial literacy is, to a meaningful degree, a confidence gap in disguise. When women were given no option to answer “I don’t know,” they frequently chose the correct answer. The researchers estimated that approximately one-third of the observed financial literacy gender gap is explained not by a genuine knowledge deficit, but by women’s lower confidence in their own financial knowledge. Both knowledge and confidence, they found, independently predict stock market participation, meaning that underconfidence has measurable economic consequences for women’s long-term wealth accumulation.

The picture is consistent across sectors. A 2025 qualitative study by Khan, Jamil, Muhammad, and colleagues, published in BMC Health Services Research, examined the experiences of women in healthcare leadership in Pakistan. Despite comprising a substantial majority of the academic medicine faculty, women remain severely underrepresented in leadership positions. Among the key barriers identified were not only structural and cultural obstacles, unsupportive work environments, the double burden of domestic and professional responsibilities, but also internalised lack of confidence and self-doubt, even among women who had already achieved significant professional recognition.

A Systemic Problem Wearing a Personal Mask

There is a real risk in framing imposter syndrome purely as an internal condition, one that women must diagnose and fix within themselves. Increasingly, researchers and organisational psychologists are pushing back on this framing.

Not everyone agrees that imposter syndrome is the right lens through which to view women’s self-doubt. In a widely discussed 2021 Harvard Business Review essay, Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey argued that the concept itself does more harm than good, not because the experience is fictitious, but because naming it “syndrome” locates the problem inside the woman rather than inside the institution.

Their critique is pointed: telling women they have imposter syndrome, and coaching them to overcome it, places the burden of repair on the people least responsible for the conditions that created the self-doubt in the first place. Tulshyan and Burey further emphasise that for women of colour, the framing is especially inadequate, their hesitation and guardedness in professional spaces is often not a cognitive distortion but an accurate read of environments where they face compounded racial and gender bias simultaneously. Tulshyan and Burey do not dispute that women experience profound self-doubt; they dispute that the solution is psychological rather than structural.

Corporate environments were largely designed by and for a narrow demographic. Women, particularly women of colour, often operate as minorities in rooms where the informal rules, communication norms, and pathways to recognition were built without them in mind. The self-doubt they experience does not arise in a vacuum. It is, in many cases, a rational response to genuinely ambiguous signals: environments where their competence is more frequently questioned, where their successes receive less attribution, and where the costs of visible failure are perceived to be higher. As the PMC literature on imposter syndrome in academic medicine has documented, the phenomenon is associated with reduced career planning, less ambition-seeking behaviour, and lower likelihood of pursuing leadership at the precise moments when confidence and decisive action matter most.

Carlin and colleagues (2018) are explicit about the organisational dimension: closing the confidence gap is not solely women’s responsibility. Organisations benefit materially when they actively discourage the equation of low confidence with low competence, build mentoring structures that apply equally to women, and create cultures where women’s contributions are attributed accurately and visibly.

The Confidence Curve and What It Requires

Not all the findings point in one direction. Research from Zenger Folkman shows that women’s confidence grows more steeply with age and experience than men’s, suggesting that the gap, though real, is not fixed. With time, with meaningful mentorship, and with organisations that create conditions for women to see their impact reflected back to them, the internal narrative can shift. But that observation also contains an implicit cost: the opportunities lost in the early and middle years, the ideas not shared, the roles not applied for, the negotiations not entered. Confidence that arrives late still arrives after its most consequential moments have passed.

The evidence from education (Colbeck et al., 2001), from business leadership (Carlin et al., 2018; Kay C Shipman, 2014), from healthcare (Khan et al., 2025), from finance (Bucher-Koenen et al., 2025), and from psychology (Clance & Imes, 1978; meta-analysis, 2024) converges on the same conclusion: the confidence gap is real, it is cross-sector, and it is costly. Closing it requires more than encouraging women to believe in themselves. It requires examining and rebuilding the educational and professional environments that make self-doubt so rational in the first place.

Conclusion

by Giulia Randon,
Head of Arts&Culture, Nova Awareness Club

What perhaps matters most, beyond statistics and research findings, is the reminder that a person’s value can never be reduced to their achievements, productivity, or moments of failure. The way we perceive ourselves should not fluctuate entirely according to success or inadequacy, because human worth exists independently from performance.

In many ways, the very existence of doubt can also reflect awareness. The more we grow, learn, and understand ourselves, the more questions naturally emerge. Perhaps insecurity is not always a sign of weakness, but sometimes the consequence of complexity, sensitivity, and intelligence itself. What truly matters is ensuring that these doubts do not turn into self-destruction, but instead become the starting point for building a stronger and more conscious sense of self-worth.

And while research often highlights differences in the way confidence manifests across genders, these reflections ultimately speak to something deeply human and universal. People are inherently different from one another, in personality, experience, emotion, and perception, and it is precisely this diversity that gives richness both to human relationships and to collective environments. The goal, then, is not uniformity, but the creation of spaces where vulnerability does not diminish value, and where uncertainty can coexist with growth.

Perhaps true confidence is not the absence of fragility, but the ability to carry it without allowing it to define our worth.

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