Ann Friedman finds that more and more professionals, especially women, are falling prey to it:
We’re all familiar with the gut-level feeling you get when you know you’ve cheated. It often follows specific, concrete acts, like peeking at a classmate’s answers on a test or sleeping with someone who isn’t your boyfriend. The gut-level experience of impostor syndrome is something slightly different—a nervous undercurrent that runs through your day-to-day experience, unacknowledged, only to crop up in salary negotiations or in small phrases like, “It might just be me but….” or “Not sure I know what I’m talking about….”…
Experts note that impostor syndrome thrives when competition is intense and there are few mentors to provide a reality check—which seems to be a pretty apt description of the post-recession American economy. Women—who, despite slow progress in some fields, are increasingly dominant in the professional world—are far more likely than men to suffer from imposter syndrome. Many experts have posited that this is one reason for the so-called “ambition gap.” It’s not that women don’t want to succeed, it’s that, despite their education and experience, they’ve internalized messages about their lack of qualification. This is also true in the earliest stages of a professional career, when the difference between a polite rejection and a modest salary is mostly luck and connections, it can be hard to tell yourself that you earned this entry-level job and that you were qualified above and beyond all of those other applicants.
The Dish 