"While early research focused on the prevalence among high-achieving women, impostor syndrome has been recognized to affect both men and women equally."
"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?
I may be wrong because it is worded unclearly, but I think the first is referring to the magnitude by which men and women are affected, i.e. those that are affected, be they men or women, experience the same impact to their self esteem/worth. The second is referring to the fact that women are more frequently affected by it.
In this context, prevalence means something like "the proportion of affected people in some group."
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).
yeah, the definition of prevalence is clear to me.
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).
No, I don't think that's a correct interpretation: if women are more likely to develop it, then the prevalence isn't equal. Affect and prevalence just focus on rates, not severity.
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.
It occurred to me that the original sources might be a lot clearer:
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...
the way I parsed the question made it seem that they are incompatible. hence why I asked. it's my bad because I didn't explain myself.
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.
> if a study can't be replicated then the study is wrong isn't it?
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.
This discussion revolves around advice, which set my expectations that these are claims based on experience instead of something that can be cited. If you don’t agree because you’ve had a contradicting experience, that could be a valuable addition to the discussion. It’s also fair to not adopt the advice if you want a study and one cannot be provided.
I’ve experienced the feeling the grandparent post shared.
One qualifying segment is the rarer over performing subset of Dunning-Kruger personalities. That is people who accurately measure their own performance but do not accurately measure their peers and thus improperly devalue themselves in comparison. To compensate for that improper devaluation these people will attempt to over perform in an effort to feel comparable.
Under that condition it is anticipated these people will take criticism and risks with a greater degree of personal sensitivity.
