When Impostor Syndrome is structural

Four things have happened to me recently which have really made my imposter syndrome rear its ugly head and trip me up:

• I was omitted from a podcast alongside some co-authors of a book

• I wasn’t invited to meetings I would previously be part of

• I was missed off from the guest list of an event I have always attended

• Announced as an after-thought on a joint webinar with a brilliant male colleague

My rational self tell me that none of these things were personal. I am moving abroad…whatever. However, as someone who has always struggled with Imposter Syndrome, of course, these events made me feel that I am not good enough, not clever enough, irrelevant.

Let us start with a small but important act of scepticism. “Impostor syndrome” is one of those phrases that has become so culturally portable that it now explains everything and, therefore, almost nothing. It can be used to describe a wobble before a presentation, a bad first term in a new job, or a much deeper and more chronic sense of illegitimacy. The problem is not that the term is useless. The problem is that it is often treated as a private psychological quirk when, for many people, it is at least partly a social experience. For me, for example, I have always felt like a fraud as I was the first in my family to go to university and came from a disadvantaged background. I have spent my whole life fighting to inhabit institutions that were not built with my background in mind. In my own particular case as well, when I was 24, I learnt that the person I thought was my dad was not. When I met my biological father, he rejected me…hence the issues with not feeling good enough. This has led to a lifetime of being obsessed with over-achieving…an “I’ll show you what you have missed out on” mentality which means I never rest on my laurels. For example, I won’t just complete one Master’s degree - I will do 3. I won’t just write one book - I will write 10.

Of course, we all have these stories I am sure. Yet, the research on the impostor phenomenon is not as tidy as popular culture suggests. A large systematic review found prevalence estimates ranging from 9% to 82%, which tells you two things straight away: first, the experience is common; second, the measurement and definition are highly inconsistent. That should make us wary of lazy certainties. It is not a neat clinical category with a single cause and a single fix. It is better understood as a pattern of self-doubt, fear of exposure, and difficulty internalising success, often intensified by context.

And context is the point. If you come from a more disadvantaged background, impostor feelings may not simply be evidence that you are irrational. They may be an understandable response to entering spaces coded by different norms, language, assumptions and forms of cultural knowledge. Sociological work on impostorism in academia argues that lower-social-class backgrounds are associated with heightened concerns about being an impostor, and that these feelings can help reproduce inequality by making people doubt whether they truly belong.

This should not surprise us. We already know a great deal about the barriers faced by first-generation students and professionals. Research on social-class achievement gaps shows that first-generation students often arrive in institutions without access to the same tacit knowledge as their more advantaged peers: how to ask for help, how to interpret expectations, how to build relationships with authority figures, and how to read the unwritten rules of the place. These are not trivial matters. They shape whether people feel that a moment of struggle means “this is hard” or “I was never meant to be here in the first place.”

This is where the standard self-help script starts to fray. The usual advice is to challenge your inner critic, keep a list of your achievements, and remember that everyone feels this way sometimes. None of this is entirely wrong. It is just not enough. Because if your sense of fraudulence has roots in classed experiences of not quite fitting, of lacking the language, accent, networks, confidence or money that others seem to carry effortlessly, then the problem is not just in your head. Some of it is in the institution. Some of it is in the social distribution of confidence. Some of it is in who gets to feel native and who has to learn the customs at speed.

There is a further difficulty. Once you have “made it” into a profession, people often assume the problem has been solved. But upward mobility does not automatically produce ease. In fact, it can produce a persistent form of tension. You may feel grateful and estranged at the same time. You may have objective success and still feel that you are performing a version of yourself for an audience that knows the code better than you do. Research on marginalised students in elite institutions has described impostor feelings as a form of unevenly distributed emotional work, not merely an individual deficit. That phrase is useful because it puts the burden back where some of it belongs: on the unequal conditions under which confidence is produced.

It is also worth saying that institutions often worsen the problem while pretending to diagnose it. If you work or study in a culture with low belonging, weak mentoring, high comparison, vague expectations and constant judgement, then you have created ideal conditions for impostor feelings to thrive. A systematic review of impostor phenomenon at work points to the role of felt inclusion and organisational context, rather than framing the issue purely as a fixed trait in the individual. Likewise, research on belonging shows that when people feel they do not fit, the consequences are not only emotional. Belonging affects wellbeing, persistence, help-seeking and performance.

What I keep coming back to is how early these feelings begin. They do not suddenly appear in adulthood, in a first professional role or postgraduate seminar. For many of us, they are planted much earlier, at school, when you first start to notice who seems naturally at ease and who is always slightly translating, slightly second-guessing, slightly aware that the rules are clearer to other people than they are to you. I often think how different things might have been if those feelings had been named and challenged while I was still at high school. Not indulged, not wrapped in false comfort, but properly addressed through belonging, explicit teaching, and the steady message that intelligence, legitimacy and potential are not the private property of the already confident.

So what should we do with this? Not wallow. Not sentimentalise. But nor should we individualise a partly structural problem. Here are three things that seem worth doing for our students:

First, make the hidden curriculum explicit through access to powerful knowledge.
If people from disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to feel that success depends on codes they were never taught, then leaders need to teach those codes directly. That means making tacit expectations visible: how to speak in meetings, how to ask for help, how to interpret feedback, how decisions are made, what good work looks like, and what counts as expertise in that setting. In other words, do not leave access to powerful professional knowledge to chance or social inheritance.

Second, build confidence through schema, rehearsal, and feedback, not reassurance.
People are less likely to feel like impostors when they have secure mental models for what success looks like and repeated opportunities to practise it. Rather than vague encouragement, provide clear models, worked examples, deliberate rehearsal, and feedback that focuses attention on the task and next step. Confidence should be treated as something that grows from competence, and competence grows from well-designed practice.

Third, create psychologically safe environments where uncertainty is normalised, not punished. Impostor feelings intensify in cultures where people feel they must already know, already fit, or already perform certainty. Leaders can reduce this by making it safe to ask questions, admit confusion, make mistakes, and learn publicly. Psychological safety does not mean low standards. It means high standards without humiliation. When people do not have to hide uncertainty, they are far more able to learn, contribute, and develop a stronger sense of belonging.

The final point is this. We should be careful not to romanticise disadvantage. Coming from a tougher background may build resilience, perspective and determination. It may also leave people carrying persistent uncertainty into spaces that ask for polish before they offer welcome. That is not weakness. It is often the psychological afterlife of inequality. If we want to address impostor syndrome seriously, then the task is not simply to make individuals think more positively. It is to build institutions in which fewer people need to spend quite so much energy convincing themselves they belong.