Imposter Syndrome A Symptom of the Struggles Women Face in Academia
[Music]
so let’s start with the basics what is
the imposter syndrome
well it can be defined by many things
but
essentially it’s the feeling of being
inadequate or a fraud and having a worry
of eventually being found out
essentially what it is is you feel like
everybody else has a better idea of what
they’re doing than you do
and the way that this can manifest is
for example by telling yourself
i’m not smart i just work really hard
or i just got
lucky or i got in because they pity me
or i got that because they like me
so as a raise of hands how many of you
in the audience have ever felt like you
were an imposter
either chronically or sporadically
yeah me too
it’s not and i’m glad it’s not just me
um and i see that the majority of you
did raise your hands and i think i speak
for all of us that raised our hands in
saying that if you did not raise your
hands we are extremely envious of you
so what’s interesting about this term is
that it was coined in 1978 by two
researchers pauline clance and suzanne
eimes and originally they described this
phenomenon in women with high achieving
careers
that were usually in male-dominated
fields
now that’s not the case today this is a
very common phenomenon that exists both
in men and women but what i want to talk
about
today is the fact that potentially the
imposter syndrome isn’t only due to some
form of internal insecurity that we have
but potentially also due to external
factors
so a little bit more about
me so i graduated about six months ago
and
i had a pretty
ideal graduate experience
i got to go to international conferences
i got to run pretty much
any experiment i ever wanted and my
supervisor was really supportive
however i did struggle with a really
strong sense of being an imposter
throughout my degree
and it didn’t matter which publications
or awards
or
acknowledgments i got i never felt
like
i belonged
and what this personal experience of
mine i’m going to talk about
demonstrates is potentially this wasn’t
just my own internal insecurity
so here i am one day i’m in the lab
and i get a great idea
and i decide to run an experiment as you
can see i’m super happy i’m running my
experiment doing my thing
and
i get some really interesting results
and i’m super excited about these
results i’m convinced that this could
potentially advance patient care that
this would be really interesting for the
scientific community and i really want
to publish these
so i go show these results to my
supervisor
unfortunately i’m not met with the
reaction i expected
i met with confusion and a general
disinterest so i’m a little bit
disappointed
but i’m also extremely stubborn so i
start showing these results over and
over and over again for the span of
about a year and
every single time i show these results i
get the same response
first of all he’s forgotten about my
results and second of all just
not very interested
so i have been struggling with feeling
like an imposter throughout my degree
but this is getting really bad at this
point i’m starting to question my place
in academia
if
even my scientific ideas are interesting
for the scientific population
but there’s a second part to this story
one day my male coworker who was a new
student that had just started in the lab
he’s a very smart student too
and he decides to run exactly the same
experiment that i did
but in a slightly different system
so you see him he’s here he’s happy
running his experiment
and he gets the exact same results that
i did
but
and so he’s really excited and so he
goes to see our supervisor to show him
the results
and he gets a very different response
from me
i want to point out again here that my
supervisor has forgotten about my
results that i’ve presented over the
past year
and
the response that my co-worker gets is
wow you’re going to cure cancer
this is worthy of publishing
and amazing let me show everyone and he
proceeds to run around the floor to show
all the other professors about these
amazing results
now two things are extremely clear about
this illustration
number one i think we can all agree that
art is my true calling
and number two is that it wasn’t that my
scientific ideas were flawed or not
interesting for the general public
it’s just that i wasn’t the right
vehicle for these ideas to be taken
seriously
so at this point i started thinking
about was this just my experience
or was this very common for women in
science
so i’m going to show you and talk about
three different publications about how
women’s competency has been viewed in
science over the years
and this is three of hundreds if not
thousands of similar publications and
this also applies to any male-dominated
field this isn’t just for academia
for example in 1997
researchers published a paper in the
journal nature and this is important for
my next point so what the journal nature
is is a very prestigious scientific
journal that authors want to publish in
it’s very well recognized by the
scientific community so these
researchers published the results of the
swedish medical research council about
how they attribute their funding
to applicants
and what they find is that
for women to have an equal competency
score to a man
she would have had to produce 2.5 times
more science
if they’ve contributed the same amount
she would have consistently gotten a
lower score in scientific competency
so that sounds outrageous right just off
the bat but what does 2.5 times more
science actually mean
well according to their metrics it meant
not one
not two but three extra nature level
publications to be considered as
competent as a man
so what’s clear
about this is that women aren’t less
competent than men in science they were
just being graded on a different scale
but this was over 20 years ago what
about more recently
well in 2015 there was a really
interesting study that was conducted on
an undergraduate class this class was
done remotely so the students didn’t
have direct interactions with their
instructors and only knew their
instructors by first name
and the students were divided in
multiple groups one group of students
was assigned to an instructor with a
male name that was taught by a male
instructor
one group was assigned to an instructor
with a female name taught by a female
instructor
and then the opposite was the case where
you had one group assigned to an
instructor with a male name topped by
the female instructor and one group
assigned
to an instructor with a female name
taught by the male instructor and what
they found is that it didn’t matter what
the gender of the instructor was as long
as the instructor had a female name they
would consistently get a lower score in
teaching ability
so what’s also interesting about this
study is that this was done on a class
of undergraduate students composed of
men and women so that means that this
unconscious bias that we have
isn’t just
related to men it’s also me and all of
you
and this is something that we can’t
necessarily control
next in 2016 there was also another
study done
asking undergraduate students to rate
their peers in academic performance
what was found is that male
undergraduate students consistently
overestimated the academic performance
of their male peers and significantly
underestimated the academic performance
of their female peers compared to the
actual academic performance
so again this showed that there is no
actual difference in competency academic
performance teaching ability between men
and women it really is the perception of
competency
that is different
so why is this still the case what is
still holding us back from moving
forward why do we still have these
biases unconscious biases that exist
against women in science
well there’s many reasons
and very complex reasons but i’m going
to focus on one particular aspect
and that’s for example publications that
come out like this one and this was a
publication that came out
a year ago exactly in a journal called
nature communications which is also a
pretty prestigious journal
and it was eventually retracted after
causing lots of waves in the scientific
community and when for those of you that
aren’t in science when a journal is or
an article is retracted from a journal
it’s usually because the authors have
come to light to new information that
makes their results either flawed or
their interpretation flawed
what they were showing in this paper
is that if you were in the context of
academia and you were a female mentor
you were hindering the future success of
your female student
so again
demonstrating that women were less
competent as mentors teachers and
academics but the main problem here is
that
they were interpreting correlation with
causation
and completely disregarded the societal
aspects that could easily explain every
single one of their results
so unfortunately what this is doing is
reinforcing this unconscious
negative bias that exists against women
in science even if we’re reading this
article and we know for example it’s
retracted we still have read what they
wrote and we still are reinforcing this
negative bias
now the second part about this
paper
that was problematic is the solution
they were suggesting
what they were suggesting is if you are
a male mentor you should always be
paired with a female student and if
you’re a female student you should
always be paired with a male mentor
which should potentially
um
allow female students to do better in
science
unfortunately this is disregarding the
historical nature of sexual harassment
that has happened against women in
science
specifically relating to academia 52
percent of u.s academic medical faculty
women reported experiencing sexual
harassment
in their careers
that’s one in two women
so not only is this type of publication
reinforcing this unconscious negative
bias it’s also potentially putting women
more at harm
now here’s a quote from valerie young
the secret thoughts of successful women
which is a book about the imposter
syndrome that i highly recommend for any
of you that is struggling with feeling
like an imposter regardless if you’re a
man or a woman
and what this quote says is
being female means you and your work
automatically stand a greater chance of
being ignored
discounted trivialized devalued or
otherwise taken less seriously than a
man’s
now that’s a very powerful quote
and it should make you feel a range of
emotions
you might feel mad you might feel sad
you might feel defensive and what i want
you to do is to sit with that emotion
and really try and understand
where it’s coming from
take into consideration everything that
i’ve talked about earlier
and really try and see why you’re
feeling this way
now to go back to my personal experience
what ended up happening in that case is
that i confronted my supervisor
i told him look
i’ve presented these results
for the past year and didn’t get any
response
and he was genuinely surprised he had no
idea
and i did end up getting the credit that
i deserved
unfortunately that was a year later
that potentially
delayed our publication
now what i want to suggest is
if you are in charge of women in
academia or in any male dominated field
to encourage having these discussions
regardless if they’re taboo or difficult
to have encourage women to claim their
credit to interject when somebody
interrupts them in a meeting
because unfortunately if we don’t have
these discussions and we continue
ignoring discounting trivializing
devaluing
50 or so percent of the scientific
population’s ideas
we’re not only holding back women in
their careers
and potentially their want to continue
in academia
we’re also holding back science as a
whole
thank you
you