Is Impostor Syndrome just for women? There are some men I can think of... | Catherine Bennett

It's now become a public ritual for a successful woman to out herself for having self-doubts

At around the same, distant time that I was meant to be studying comparative - animal - psychology, a couple of US psychologists, Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes, came up with something never yet observed in a herring gull, but frequently - they concluded - afflicting successful women: the Impostor Phenomenon.

It designated, they wrote, "an internal experience of intellectual phoniness, which appears to be particularly prevalent and intense among a select sample of high-achieving women".