The term impostor syndrome was coined about women who weren't faking anything
Two psychologists in 1978 studied high-achieving women who felt like frauds — and found the fraud feeling had nothing to do with their actual competence.
In 1978, psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes published a study of more than 150 highly accomplished women — professors, executives, graduates with top honors — who privately believed they'd fooled everyone into thinking they were talented. They called it the impostor phenomenon, and the detail that made it interesting wasn't the anxiety. It was that the women's actual performance records contradicted their self-assessment almost point for point.
Clance and Imes found something sharper than low confidence: their subjects had built explanations that made every success unusable as evidence. A good grade was luck. A promotion was charm. A compliment was someone being kind. Failure, on the other hand, always confirmed the original theory. The mechanism wasn't a shortage of proof. It was a filter that only let the wrong kind of proof through.
The original paper focused on women partly because Clance and Imes were treating them in clinical practice, not because men are immune — later research found the pattern shows up across gender lines once you go looking. What doesn't show up is a correlation with actual ability. Some of the most airtight impostor feelings in the literature belonged to people with the strongest paper trail of competence in the room.
Which makes the usual advice — just be more confident — miss the actual bug. The problem was never a lack of evidence. It's a rejection filter running silently underneath it.