Here’s the number that should end the “just be more confident” advice for good: 75% of executive women say they’ve personally experienced imposter syndrome, according to KPMG’s 2020 Women’s Leadership Summit report, which surveyed 750 high-performing women one or two steps from the C-suite. These aren’t early-career women waiting to prove themselves. They’re the ones who already did.
If you’ve built a business, closed a client, or gotten the promotion and still feel like you’re one bad quarter from being exposed as a fraud, you’re not broken and you’re not behind. You’re in the majority.
The data nobody wants to admit
The KPMG report didn’t just measure whether women feel this way — it measured how they explain it. 85% of the women surveyed believed imposter syndrome is more commonly experienced by women in corporate America than by men. 81% said they put more pressure on themselves not to fail than they believed their male peers did. 74% believed their male counterparts simply don’t carry the same weight of self-doubt.
Whether or not men privately feel the identical thing (some research suggests they do, just less often and less intensely), what matters here is the practical result: women in leadership and business are operating with an extra tax that has nothing to do with their actual competence. That tax shows up as under-charging, under-negotiating, and turning down opportunities you were qualified for six months before you finally said yes.
Name the pattern — it’s older and better-studied than you think
The term “impostor phenomenon” was coined in 1978 by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, who noticed a specific pattern in high-achieving women: despite clear external evidence of competence — degrees, promotions, praise, results — they remained privately convinced they were frauds who’d somehow fooled everyone, and lived in quiet fear of being “found out.”
That description from 1978 reads like it was written yesterday. Which is the point: this isn’t a personal flaw you failed to grow out of. It’s a well-documented pattern with a name, a body of research behind it, and — more usefully — known ways to interrupt it.
Build the evidence file
The instinct is to fight a feeling with a feeling — to try to talk yourself into confidence. That rarely works, because imposter syndrome isn’t a logic problem you can argue your way out of in the moment. It’s a discounting problem: real evidence of your competence exists, and in the moment of doubt, you’re simply not weighing it.
The fix is to make the evidence impossible to ignore. Keep a running, dated document — a note, a spreadsheet, whatever you’ll actually use — and log concrete wins as they happen: the client who renewed without being asked, the pitch that landed, the problem only you knew how to solve, the number you hit. Not vague impressions. Specific, dated, factual entries.
The point isn’t to read it once and feel better. It’s to have it open the next time you’re about to talk yourself out of raising your rate, applying for the opportunity, or taking the meeting — so you’re arguing against a feeling with a document instead of with more feelings.
This matters most at exactly the moments imposter syndrome shows up to sabotage you: right before you negotiate your salary, right before you set your rate, right before you pitch a client who feels one size too big. Those are also the moments where undercharging and under-asking quietly become a habit — not because the market said no, but because you talked yourself out of asking at all.
Competence is a skill you’re building, not a bar you clear once
Part of what makes imposter syndrome so persistent is the assumption that competence is a finish line — that at some point you’ll finally “arrive” and the doubt will stop. It doesn’t work that way for anyone, at any level. Every stage of growth puts you back at the edge of your skill, which is exactly where the feeling of not-quite-qualified lives.
Reframe it: feeling in over your head is not evidence you don’t belong. It’s the normal sensation of doing something at the edge of what you’ve done before — which is the only way anything gets built. The people you assume have it figured out are, in most cases, at their own edge too. They’ve just stopped treating the feeling as proof of anything.
Say it out loud
Imposter syndrome thrives in private. It loses a surprising amount of power the moment you say the actual sentence — “I feel like I’m about to be found out” — to someone else, especially someone a few steps ahead of you.
Two things tend to happen. First, you find out almost everyone who looks confident has said some version of that sentence too, often about the exact achievement you’re intimidated by. Second, saying it out loud forces you to hear how disconnected it is from the facts in front of you — which is much easier to notice in your own voice than in your own head.
You don’t need a therapist for this (though that helps if the feeling is constant rather than situational). A mentor, a peer a stage ahead, or a founder group where the norm is honesty over performance all work. The goal isn’t sympathy. It’s a reality check from someone who has your evidence file, or one just like it, and can hold it up next to the feeling.
The fraud you’re afraid of being caught as does not exist. The evidence already proves it. Your job is to start using it.
Frequently asked questions
How common is imposter syndrome among women in business?
Very. KPMG’s 2020 Women’s Leadership Summit report surveyed 750 high-performing executive women and found 75% had personally experienced imposter syndrome at some point in their career. 85% believed it was commonly experienced by women in corporate America specifically, and 81% said they put more pressure on themselves not to fail than they believed their male counterparts did.
What’s the actual definition of imposter syndrome?
Psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes coined the term “impostor phenomenon” in 1978 to describe high-achieving people who, despite external evidence of their competence, remain convinced they’re a fraud and fear being “found out.” It’s not a diagnosis — it’s a well-documented pattern of discounting your own evidence of success.
What actually helps with imposter syndrome, beyond just “being more confident”?
Confidence is a symptom, not the fix. What works: keeping a running, dated log of concrete wins so you have evidence to argue against the feeling in the moment it shows up; naming the feeling out loud to someone who’s already where you’re trying to go; and treating competence as a skill you’re building rather than a threshold you either have or don’t. All three replace a vague feeling with something specific enough to counter.