How Can You Overcome Impostor Syndrome? You Don’t

I get asked about impostor syndrome a lot—by colleagues, by mentees, by my closest friends. And I get where they’re coming from. I’ve taken some big swings in my career, from running for office to building an advocacy movement for moms and founding Girls Who Code without knowing how to code myself. I know what it feels like to worry that you’re not ready or prepared or “good enough.” 

So when Smith College asked me to speak to the class of 2023 at this year’s commencement, I knew the lesson I wanted to share with the next generation of leaders—leaders who might not be feeling ready or prepared or “good enough” themselves. With all the challenges facing women today, how can we overcome our impostor syndrome? 

The answer is simple: We don’t. 

Impostor syndrome isn’t our problem to solve. And I’m not just talking about the graduates. 

For a long time I’ve had this nagging sense that something is wrong with the way we talk about impostor syndrome, but I couldn’t quite articulate why. I’ve sat across from CEOs and senators and thought to myself, My girls could run circles around these guys. It just wasn’t adding up. 

Then I heard a story that brought the whole problem into focus: what’s wrong with impostor syndrome—and why it’s holding women back.

Back in the 1890s cycling was taking off in Europe and North America, especially for women. But just as the cycling craze reached a peak, doctors identified a never-before-seen medical malady, one that threatened to wreak “permanent havoc” on the female body. 

It was called…bicycle face. 

The new condition afflicted women who dared—gasp—go for a bike ride. And it came with a litany of supposed symptoms, from “flushed” cheeks and “bulging eyes” to “an expression either anxious, irritable, or at best…stony.” 

That’s right: Before there was resting bitch face, there was resting bike face.

To be clear, it wasn’t just women riding bicycles. In fact, the majority of those taking up the hobby were men. But bicycle face was strictly a women’s disease. And that’s because it’s hard not to believe that bicycle face was invented purely to scare women away from their wheels. 

It wasn’t a syndrome; it was a strategy.

In those days the bicycle was a symbol of a budding feminist movement. Women could go further, faster, without waiting around for a gentleman on horseback to come to their aid. Suffragists were able to meet up with one another and campaign from town to town. Women even started to demand different clothing, trading big hoop skirts for breezy bloomers.

To men, bicycles—and the behaviors they enabled in women—were a threat to the status quo. So they invented this disease to put women back in their place.

A century later, the idea of bicycle face sounds laughable. It’s easy to see it for what it is: a misogynistic scheme. But what if impostor syndrome is just a scheme too? 

The way our culture talks about impostor syndrome, you could easily mistake it for a medical condition. But it’s not. As Leslie Jamison recently explained in The New Yorker, the two researchers who first identified impostor syndrome in the 1970s didn’t call it a syndrome at all. Back then, it was termed “impostor phenomenon,” and it was based on high-achieving women. It was never intended to be pathologized.

Still, like bicycle face before it, impostor syndrome was a reaction to women’s progress. It’s probably no coincidence that the concept emerged just as Title IX became law and more and more women began attending college. Or that it gained traction as Roe v. Wade was decided, and women—now able to control their own body—started joining the workforce in droves. 

But this time the backlash was more insidious.  

We’ve been sold a series of misogynistic myths about what it means to show up as a woman in the world. So let’s debunk some of them, here and now. 

Myth #1: There’s something wrong with us. 

This impostor scheme has deluded an entire generation of women into thinking that we’re somehow deficient.

But think about it this way: If you ride your bicycle up a big hill, and you clench your jaw as you pedal your way to the top, that doesn’t mean you have bicycle face. It means you’re riding a bicycle. 

Impostor syndrome is based on the premise that we’re the problem, but, in my experience, discomfort is a normal, human reaction to my environment. 

When I showed up at my first job at a fancy corporate law firm, I had two Ivy League postgraduate degrees. But I still felt like everyone else was speaking a different language—and that’s because they basically were. Most people there had unearned privileges that I didn’t. Big law firms like that were built by, and for, people who don’t look like me. It makes sense to feel like you don’t fit in when you literally don’t fit in. In fact, it’s by design. 

Myth #2: It’s our job to fix ourselves.

When it comes to impostor syndrome, that’s basically the message we send to women: It’s your job to make it go away or at least, cover it up.  

There are countless courses, articles, and books out there with tips and tricks on how to power-pose your way to success—including my own book! It’s not bad advice, per se. But all those shoulds (“Get a mentor!” “Learn to say no!”) are ultimately just another burden we place on women. What’s more, if you do all those things and still feel like an impostor, the unspoken assumption is: If you don’t stick up for yourself, it’s your own fault. Of course, in reality, the problem—and solution—is bigger than any one of us.

It’s a lot like the gender pay gap in America, which hasn’t budged in two decades. To fix that problem, we’ve been telling women, one by one, “Know your worth!” “Ask for more!” “Slay your negotiation!” In reality, we should be telling companies: Pay women fairly. Provide salary transparency. Offer paid leave and childcare, both proven to help close the pay gap. 

Myth #3: Impostor syndrome is inevitable.

We can put impostor schemes to rest. But we have to go to the source.

Dr. Sarah Hackett Stevenson, the first-ever woman member of the American Medical Association, decided to take a closer look at bicycle face. She didn’t tell women to fix their bicycle face. She certainly didn’t tell women to stop riding. She challenged the entire premise—and in 1897 dismissed it as not being a medical condition. 

When as many as 82% of women report feeling impostor syndrome, it’s pretty clear this is the result of structural inequality, not individual inadequacy. It’s never really been about whether we’re qualified enough, or smart enough, or prepared enough. 

Instead it’s about the barriers that are designed to keep us out of those rooms in the first place. It’s leaders looking around and saying that the biggest problem facing women isn’t paid family leave or pay gaps, a lack of childcare or a culture of misogyny; the problem is us. 

The impostor scheme, then, is just a tool—to keep our concentration on our own inadequacies, not the system that is set against us.  

Which means our job isn’t to overcome impostor syndrome at all. It’s to focus less on fixing ourselves and more on healing a broken world. Marginalized people, especially women of color, have been leading that fight against systemic injustice for generations. Now all of us—whether we’re in school or decades out, new moms, or in new careers—need to take the energy we use to change ourselves and put it toward changing the world.

If we do that, we can create a society in which impostor syndrome and bicycle face are equally laughable—just two more failed attempts to hold women back. 

Getting there will be the work of a lifetime. But there’s one thing we women can do today and every day of our lives.

Just ride our damn bicycles. 

Make our case, lead our movement, pursue whatever it is we want to pursue. Live as if impostor syndrome were just two made-up words on the page. 

Because they are.

Reshma Saujani is the founder of Girls Who Code and the author of Brave, Not Perfect.