oment when I realized that in addition to facing institutional obstacles, women
face a battle from within.

When I gave a TEDTalk on how women can succeed in the workforce, I told this story to illustrate
how women hold themselves back, literally choosing to watch from the sidelines. And yet as
disappointed as I was that these women made that choice, I also deeply understood the insecurities
that drew them to the side of the room and kept them glued to those chairs.

My senior year of college, I was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. At that time,
Harvard and Radcliffe had separate chapters, so my ceremony was for women only. The keynote
speaker, Dr. Peggy McIntosh from the Wellesley Centers for Women, gave a talk called “Feeling Like
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a Fraud.” She explained that many people, but especially women, feel fraudulent when they are
praised for their accomplishments. Instead of feeling worthy of recognition, they feel undeserving and
guilty, as if a mistake has been made. Despite being high achievers, even experts in their fields,
women can’t seem to shake the sense that it is only a matter of time until they are found out for who
they really are—impostors with limited skills or abilities.

I thought it was the best speech I had ever heard. I was leaning forward in my chair, nodding
vigorously. Carrie Weber, my brilliant and totally-not-a-fraud roommate, was doing the same. At last,
someone was articulating exactly how I felt. Every time I was called on in class, I was sure that I was
about to embarrass myself. Every time I took a test, I was sure that it had gone badly. And every time I

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didn’t embarrass myself—or even excelled—I believed that I had fooled everyone yet again. One day
soon, the jig would be up.

At the joint reception that followed the ceremony—an after-party for nerds, so I fit right in—I told
one of my male classmates about Dr. McIntosh’s fantastic speech explaining how we all feel like
frauds. He looked at me, confused, and asked, “Why would that be interesting?” Carrie and I later
joked that the speech to the men was probably something like “How to Cope in a World Where Not
Everyone Is as Smart as You.”

This phenomenon of capable people being plagued by self-doubt has a name—the impostor
syndrome. Both men and women are susceptible to the impostor syndrome, but women tend to ╩╩網╩
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experience it more intensely and be more limited by it. Even the wildly successful writer and actress
Tina Fey has admitted to these feelings. She once explained to a British newspaper, “The beauty of the
impostor syndrome is you vacillate between extreme egomania, and a complete feeling of: ‘I’m a
fraud! Oh god, they’re on to me! I’m a fraud!’ So you just try to ride the egomania when it comes and
enjoy it, and then slide through the idea of fraud. Seriously, I’ve just realized that almost everyone is a
3
fraud, so I try not to feel too bad about it.”

For women, feeling like a fraud is a symptom of a greater problem. We consistently underestimate
ourselves. Multiple studies in multiple industries show that women often judge their own performance
as worse than it actually is, while men judge their own performance as better than it actually is.
Assessments of students in a surgery rotation found that when asked to evaluate themselves, the
female students gave themselves lower scores than the male students despite faculty evaluations that