It has become increasingly clear that academia is rife with a condition known as the ‘impostor phenomenon’. The term was coined in 1978 by psychologists Clance and Imes in describing a sample of high-achieving women who were not able to internalise their many successes. Like many others today, these women felt that they had gotten to their place in life only by a series of flukes. The so-called syndrome can be debilitating; those with it feel like frauds and, worst of all, that at any moment they could be found out and exposed (Gravois, 2007). Recently, more and more people in academia have ‘admitted’ to having the impostor syndrome.
