Imposter Syndrome in Women: What the Research Really Shows

9 min read · Reviewed against current psychological research

You’ve been told this is a women’s thing so many times that you stopped questioning it. Maybe it was a conference panel, maybe a manager who meant well. It fits, right up until you notice that the most quietly terrified person on your team is a man who has never once said so out loud.

The research here is more interesting than either version you’ve heard. This article covers what the meta-analysis found, why individual studies keep disagreeing, and the finding that reframes the whole question.

What the meta-analysis actually found

The best available answer comes from a 2024 meta-analytic review that pooled 115 effect sizes from more than 40,000 participants. Women scored higher than men, with a mean effect size of d = 0.27 (Price et al., 2024).

So yes, there’s a difference. Now the part that gets left out: 0.27 is small. By the usual convention, 0.2 is a small effect and 0.5 is moderate. This sits nearer the floor. It means the distributions overlap heavily, and that knowing someone’s gender tells you very little about whether they feel like a fraud at work.

Why individual studies keep disagreeing

Before that meta-analysis, the literature looked genuinely contradictory, and the earlier systematic review shows why. Among the studies it examined, 16 found greater imposter symptoms in women and 17 found no gender effect at all (Bravata et al., 2020).

That near-even split isn’t a sign the field is broken. It’s what a small effect looks like when individual studies are too small to detect it reliably. Half the time you catch it, half the time you don’t. Pooling them, as the meta-analysis did, is how the signal becomes visible.

It also explains why you can find a confident citation for whichever position you already hold.

The gap moves depending on how you measure

Two details from the meta-analysis are more revealing than the headline number.

The difference was smaller in studies conducted in Asia than in those from Europe and North America. And it was smaller when researchers used the Harvey scale than the more common Clance scale (Price et al., 2024).

Both matter. A gender difference that changes size depending on the country you measure it in is not describing something fixed about women. It’s describing something about contexts. And a difference that partly depends on which questionnaire you hand out should make anyone cautious about treating the number as a fact of nature.

The finding that reframes the question

Here’s the result that deserves more attention than the headline gap.

Research on early career starters examined performance pressure as an external predictor of imposter feelings. Performance pressure raised imposter feelings, and being female intensified that relationship.

Read what that says. The driver is the pressure. Gender changes how strongly the pressure lands, rather than acting as a standalone cause. That’s a different claim from “women have more imposter syndrome,” and it points somewhere more useful.

A 2025 set of six studies with 1,288 participants found the same shape from another angle: when a workplace emphasises competition, employees’ impostorism rises, partly because competitive climates prompt people to compare themselves with higher-performing colleagues (Feenstra et al., 2025).

Put those together and the picture is environmental. Certain conditions manufacture imposter feelings. Women are more often in those conditions, and the conditions may land harder on them.

The experiment that shows it is the room

Correlational findings can always be read the other way round, so it is worth knowing that this has been tested experimentally.

Murphy, Steele and Gross showed maths, science and engineering majors a video of a conference. The only thing that varied was the ratio of men to women in the footage. Women who saw the unbalanced version showed more cognitive and physiological vigilance, reported a weaker sense of belonging, and reported less desire to attend, compared with women who saw the balanced version. Men were unaffected by either (Murphy et al., 2007).

Nothing about those women changed between conditions. They were randomly assigned. The only difference was what the room looked like, and their bodies responded to it before any interaction had taken place.

This connects to a broader finding about belonging uncertainty: the question of whether people like you belong here is felt most acutely by those whose group is underrepresented or negatively stereotyped in a setting, and it predicts disengagement independently of ability (Walton & Cohen, 2007).

Which gives the gender gap a mechanism that has nothing to do with women being more prone to self-doubt. If feeling like you might not belong is produced by being outnumbered, and women are more often outnumbered in the settings where this gets measured, then a small average difference is exactly what you would predict.

What Clance and Imes were actually saying

The original 1978 paper studied high-achieving women, which is where the gendered framing comes from. But their explanation was never that women are constitutionally prone to self-doubt. They pointed at societal stereotypes about gender and intelligence (Clance & Imes, 1978).

In other words, the founding paper located the cause outside the person. The popular version has spent decades relocating it inside her.

The earlier review also found imposter feelings particularly high among ethnic minority groups (Bravata et al., 2020), which fits the same pattern. Being the only one of something in the room does reliable work on how legitimate you feel.

What the framing costs

Calling this a women’s issue has been useful for getting it discussed at all. It also has two prices.

Men lose the language. If the condition is coded female, a man experiencing it has no acceptable way to name it, so it comes out as dismissive jokes about his own work or as nothing at all. The meta-analysis found men score lower on average, not that men don’t experience it.

Structural problems get personalised. If a woman’s imposter feelings are produced by a competitive climate, being underrepresented, or pressure that lands harder on her, then a confidence workshop is treating the wrong thing. Worse, it tells her the problem is her perception when her perception may be accurate. Our research-backed guide covers the structural critique in more depth.

What this changes for you

If you’re a woman who has been told this is simply what women feel, the more accurate frame is that you’re likely in conditions that produce it, and those conditions are describable. Ask what specifically is generating the feeling: the comparison culture, being the only one in the room, pressure with no calibration. That question has answers. “Why am I like this” does not.

If you’re a man reading this and recognizing yourself, the numbers say you have plenty of company that nobody talks about. The seven signs are the same regardless of gender.

When to talk to a professional

Imposter feelings aren’t a diagnosis and there’s no threshold to clear before they’re worth taking seriously.

Worth raising with someone qualified: if the pattern has followed you across roles rather than tracking one job, if it’s shaping decisions you regret, or if it arrives with sustained anxiety or low mood. Imposter feelings commonly co-occur with both, and those have real treatment evidence behind them, which the evidence on overcoming imposter syndrome largely does not.

One trigger comes up so often it deserves its own piece. If this started or sharpened when you took a new role, our guide to imposter syndrome at a new job covers the first ninety days, when the gap between what you were hired for and what you can yet do is at its widest.

The takeaway

Women do score higher, and the difference is small enough that it explains very little about any individual person. What explains more is the room: competitive climates, performance pressure, being the only one of something.

That’s better news than it sounds. A trait is something you’d have to live with. A condition is something that can be named, and sometimes changed, and at minimum stops being evidence about your character. The 1978 paper had it right when it pointed outward. The forty years since have mostly pointed the finger back at the person feeling it.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

1. Price, P. C., Holcomb, B., & Payne, M. B. (2024). Gender differences in impostor phenomenon: a meta-analytic review. Current Research in Behavioral Sciences, 100155. DOI
2. Bravata, D. M., Watts, S. A., Keefer, A. L., et al. (2020). Prevalence, predictors, and treatment of impostor syndrome: a systematic review. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 35(4), 1252–1275.
3. Feenstra, S., Phillips, F., Begeny, C. T., & Ryan, M. K. (2025). Are you better than me? Competitive work climates fuel impostorism via upward social comparisons. Social Psychological and Personality Science. DOI
4. Murphy, M. C., Steele, C. M., & Gross, J. J. (2007). Signaling threat: how situational cues affect women in math, science, and engineering settings. Psychological Science, 18(10), 879–885.
5. Walton, G. M., & Cohen, G. L. (2007). A question of belonging: race, social fit, and achievement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(1), 82–96.
6. Clance, P. R., & Imes, S. A. (1978). The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice, 15(3), 241–247.