The impostor syndrome and female empowerment

For years, women have been in a constant fight against gender differences, misogyny, lack of equity, and the false idea that men have superior capabilities and aptitudes in comparison to women.

However, due to years of fighting, woman have achieved great progress in favor of their rights, which has led them to hold high positions in all areas.

Although there is still a long way to go, in order to continue promoting and encouraging female empowerment, a fundamental point is that women feel worthy of their achievements, however, a large number of women still not feel that way.

This phenomenon is known as “imposter syndrome”, which implies an internal experience of intellectual falsehood that turns out to be particularly frequent and intense among women.

For this reason, despite their outstanding academic and professional achievements, women who experience the impostor phenomenon minimize their achievements, and think that they have been the result of luck and not of their abilities and aptitudes.

This phenomenon obviously derives from the social constructs with which women have experienced and that have unconsciously internalized.

As a simple example we have the fact that some women tend to explain failure with lack of ability and/or aptitude, and, on the contrary, some men attribute failure to lack of luck or to the difficulty of the task; this derives from the low expectations that women have of themselves, since woman success was frowned upon by society for many years, so it is not surprising that women need to find an explanation for each of their accomplishments rather that their own intelligence and ability.

The statistics on this syndrome are alarming, a shocking number of successful women in all professional fields and at all levels feel as if they are pretending to be impostors in their own lives and careers, which has as a consequence that women unconsciously seek to compensate with excessive preparation, seek to keep a lower profile, hide their talents and opinions, or stop getting involved in important projects.

All of the above has a striking impact on the empowerment of women, since, despite social advances in favor of them, now it is the women who limit themselves due to this intellectual falsehood that hunts them.

lt is necessary to talk about this issue so that women, and in the specific case, female lawyers, become aware of this phenomenon in order to accept that each one of the accomplishments that we have achieved has been a consequence of our effort, work, and dedication.

Let’s not let the social burden placed on women stop us from owning our achievements, because once female lawyers in this country accept their achievements and feel worthy of their successes, they will use it as an impulse to go for more.

Let’s learn to own our successes, overcome self-doubt, and eliminate the ideas that undermine our
abilities so we can continue challenging ourselves academically and professionally.