Eva Vazquez
Years ago I wrote an article about the precariousness and lack of expectations of my generation, and they called me to comment on it in the gathering of one of the radio programs with the highest audience.
I accepted excitedly and, immediately afterwards, they told me that my companions in the gathering would be a political scientist and a psychologist whom I did not know.
I hung up the phone with some discomfort and as the days went by, restlessness began to overwhelm me.
What was I going to say in a live program? And if I was wrong, got stuck, made an unforgivable mistake...?
Besides, what were we going to comment specifically on my article? And if I didn't know the answer and a trail of babbling followed one another that exemplified the fraud of the article itself... and my own?
Two days later I called to invent some random excuse and, with shame —and guilt— I said that I couldn't go.
In
I won't do it right.
How we women learned not to trust ourselves
(Arpa)
,
the journalist Emma Vallespinós tells that whoever feels like a real impostor never rests, it's like a
drugstore
open 24 hours.
Throughout this lucid essay, with humor and irony, she starts from the impostor syndrome to define the historical consequences of the systematic "shut up, you're prettier" and delves into the silencing of women in the workplace and public sphere.
Described for the first time in 1978 by the American clinical psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes and initially baptized as the impostor phenomenon, men are not free of it either, but it is in women that it wreaks havoc.
What in them can be a personality trait, in the case of women has a structural component.
Clance and Imes analyzed 150 objectively talented women and the vast majority had often felt that feeling of not being up to the task, of being insufficient,
giving rise to a cognitive dissonance according to which their achievements were perceived as minor, the result of fortune and not of their talent.
They believed that they got there because they were nice, or because they got lucky, or because their employers overestimated their abilities.
The mistakes were always his;
achievements, not so much.
More information
Women who think they are not up to it.
It's the 'impostor syndrome'
Impostor syndrome is a steamroller that doesn't work the same across the board.
In other words, it is less likely to doubt whether the pasta has turned out well than whether you will be able to give a good lecture.
It is almost always played in the workplace, in the public sphere.
In 2011, when the writer Ana María Matute received the Cervantes Prize, she began her speech by confessing that she would rather write three novels and twenty-five short stories, without taking a breather, than having to deliver a speech.
“I don't look down on them,” she said, “I fear them, and my inadequacy for them will soon be apparent.
Be benevolent, ”she asked those present.
I wonder: what else did Matute have to prove? Did she also feel invited, an impostor?
That other great writer, Maya Angelou, felt something similar: “I have written 11 books, but every time I publish one I think, oh, oh,
now they will find out.
I have deceived all of them and they are going to discover me”.
So many factors influence this feeling of inadequacy that it is impossible to cite them all here: mansplaining
,
the
absence of references, that education based on going unnoticed, suffocating gender roles, but also condescension or paternalism towards women with those girl, flat , beautiful that certify that women are always growing, but never become fully adult people.
Thus, the real problem addressed by Vallespinós's acute and timely book is no longer this syndrome that is on its way to becoming a cliché, but rather the breeding ground that has allowed and still allows a resounding silencing.
That we women feel "invited" to the public space, a space that we have not begun to occupy until now, is a fact that has nothing to do with personal insecurity —as I had thought until a few years ago—, but rather with the conquest of a space that until now has been eminently masculine.
Until recently, we were not surprised to find panels of experts made up exclusively of men.
In fact, a popular blog demonstrated it with images on a Tumblr account called
Congrats, you have an all male panel!
Or its version in Spanish:
Don't tell me: were there only expert men again?
Currently, the absence of women in certain areas is beginning to call our attention and perhaps this is a sign that things are changing.
However, Vallespinós says that in the journalistic field, for example, it continues to be more difficult to find experts than experts.
In general, a man is less shy about going live to give his opinion, while a woman, if she finally agrees, she will do so if she has all the information, if she can prepare it, if..., and the list can be long.
Although many of them end up simply saying no.
Inventing a new excuse in a sort of guilty and constant self-sabotage.
Leslie Jamison was recently writing an article in
The New Yorker
questioning the validity of this ubiquitous syndrome.
He brought up interesting testimonies such as that of Lisa Factora-Borchers, a Filipino American author and activist, who told him the following in a conversation: “Every time I heard white friends talk about impostor syndrome, I asked myself: How can you think that you're an impostor when all the molds were made for you?
When you see reflections of yourself everywhere and versions of what your success could look like?
Jamison mentions that in
Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome
(Stop telling women they have impostor syndrome), published in the
Harvard Business Review
In February 2021, authors Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey argue that the impostor syndrome label implies that women are experiencing a crisis of self-confidence and that fails to emphasize the real obstacles to women—especially women. women of color—face off in different professional settings.
It is a label that reformulates systemic inequality into an individual pathology.
They state: “Impostor syndrome directs our vision toward correcting women at work rather than correcting the places where women work.”
Despite the fact that questions arise about its existence and validity, about whether it is false humility or a white problem —a somewhat reductionist statement—, the achievement of essays such as that of Emma Vallespinós is to put this topic on the table to emphasize and remember that the insecurity that many women feel is not a defect that comes as standard, but the result of an overwhelming and systematic questioning of ourselves.
The impostor syndrome exists and affects us, so let's start from its recognition not to stop at the complaint or lament, but to realize its scope and that this allows us to look back at those environments in which we have been, until now , perfect guests.
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