Gender Pay Gap: 8 Ways Women Are Paying the Price for Men’s Imposter Syndrome [Episode 69]

Welcome to episode 69 of the Ditching Imposter Syndrome podcast with me, your host, Clare Josa. And today we're talking about the gender pay gap again.

It's episode three of the four part special series from the 2024 imposter syndrome research study. The white paper link is in the show notes.

And today we're talking about something a little bit controversial is how women are paying the price for men's imposter syndrome.

I'm going to take you through eight core ways that the men in your organizations having imposter syndrome is directly disadvantaging, even if that is the last thing that those men would want and what you need to be doing to fix this. So if you've hung out with me for a while, you know I'm not into playing the blame game and that's absolutely not what I'm doing here.

But we need to stop pretending that men's imposter syndrome is not having a negative impact on women, on their imposter syndrome, on them fulfilling their potential and the gender pay gap. So I want to share with you Today what our 2024 imposter syndrome research study has shown about this.

Make sure if you've got the show notes that scroll down to the link to get the white paper, it's yours as my gift. Or you can go straight to it at www.impostersyndromeresearch.com. so men's imposter syndrome impacts the gender pay gap for women.

One of the reasons for this is that in an organization that is top heavy with male leaders, which the vast majority are masculine, traits will dominate the culture.

And there are certain traits that come through when 62% of your male employees are struggling daily or regularly with imposter syndrome to an extent that's affecting their performance and wellbeing. And these traits will ripple on through the organization and they can be quite destructive to women.

So as a quick recap, men and women we found from our research study tend to experience imposter syndrome at similar levels, but they handle it very differently. Women's coping mechanisms tend to be more about holding back, playing small, keeping quiet, not going for opportunities to be visible or to shine.

Men typically push that emotion down. They push on through the fear.

They can micromanage, they can become more critical of others, they're overworking and they become competitive, which can turn them into toxic managers, creating a culture that specifically hinders women's performance. And there's another layer to this. When men push on through that fear, then what's actually happening is it's still triggering the anxiety for them.

They're still experiencing chronic stress. It can lead to relationship breakdowns, addictions, and mental health health issues.

And all of this will have a ripple effect throughout your wider organization. So here are eight specific ways that men's imposter syndrome can hold women back from fulfilling their potential and keep that gender pay gap open.

Number one, hesitation to delegate. You might have heard me talk about the four P's of imposter syndrome.

It's one of my coaching and research models for imposter syndrome, developed from our research studies. I'm going to put a link to an episode on them in the show notes, so make sure you have a look for that. Have a listen for that.

The four Ps of imposter syndrome are warning signs that someone has slipped into coping mechanism territory. With imposter syndrome, they are perfectionism, procrastination, project paralysis, and people pleasing.

Human biology means that men tend to be less likely than women to do the people pleasing, and they tend to be more likely than women to do the perfectionism. Similarly, these overlap with the fight, flight, freeze, fawn response. So fight is about perfectionism. I'm going to slay that goal or target.

Flight is about run busyness, filling our time with things that aren't moving us to our goals, but they distract us from the thing that is causing imposter syndrome. Project paralysis, unsurprisingly, is the freeze response, and people pleasing is the fawn response, a relatively new category.

Being nice to something or a threat and hoping it then won't attack you. Biologically, men are more likely than women at an unconscious level to turn to the fight response.

So they've got fight perfectionism and a reduction in people pleasing.

One of the side effects of this is that a man in a leadership or management role who is experiencing severe imposter syndrome is more likely than a female counterpart to turn into a micromanaging bully boss. They are taking the perfectionism they are feeling inside where they set their standards impossibly high, and then write it off as fluke or luck.

If they achieve them, they're passing them on down to their teams, so they micromanage. They are reliant on their team's performance, also being perfect for them as the manager or leader to feel safe.

And this fight response, not balanced out by the need for people pleasing again, I'm talking in general terms, means that the person is less likely to be considering the impact on others of their behavior, meaning it's more Likely they're going to turn into bullying, being very critical and judgmental, which we'll come to in a minute. So this micromanaging bully boss can come out of the blue.

It can be a change in a project, a promotion, a shift in a team, because imposter syndrome is context dependent, so it can trigger previously dormant imposter syndrome.

We've seen examples over the last few years where an entire team has turned toxic in just six weeks because the line manager who got promoted was experiencing imposter syndrome and passing that pain on down through their team, projecting it onto them. It got to the stage where team members were actually thinking of quitting.

Some had even drafted their resignation letters because they knew they couldn't handle it anymore. The brilliant news in that particular case is one of our imposter syndrome practitioner graduates who'd been working in the organization.

It was a member of their teams had just four sessions with this leader, their imposter syndrome disappeared. There was some healing of the team dynamics, and after just four sessions, they turned things around and the team is now thriving.

But without that support, those team members probably would have quit.

Now, if somebody is running perfectionism very strongly as a coping strategy for imposter syndrome, it's easy to see how they might hesitate to delegate, because that is then about letting go and trusting, which you simply cannot do in that space. A man experiencing imposter syndrome may avoid delegating tasks to women in their teams, fearing it might expose their own perceived inadequacies.

This limits women's opportunity to take on high profile projects which are critical for career progression.

A second way that men's imposter syndrome can affect women and their performance, their potential in the gender pay gap is through judging and criticizing others, undermining their confidence. We project the inner pain of imposter syndrome onto others. I talk about my light bulb definition of imposter syndrome.

The secret fear of others judging us the way we judge ourselves.

In our research study, we found that 29% of respondents said they feel criticized or judged at work daily or regularly, and that it is impacting their confidence when somebody is pushing on down imposter syndrome, pushing down the emotions, pushing through their fear. They are more likely to judge and criticize others sometimes in their heads. And believe me, we humans have got a radar for that. We can feel it. Yeah.

And sometimes out loud and in public.

Our research showed that women tend to have a more emotional response to imposter syndrome than men, who tend to push on down the emotions and push on through as I've said, but that means that public criticism can actually hit them harder and it hits their public reputation. People hear the criticism and believe there must be substance to it. They very rarely will sit there and think, oh, that's just so and so.

Having a bad day, struggling with his own imposter syndrome and projecting it onto such and such a team member.

So the man's imposter syndrome can cause him to judge and be critical of a female team member in a way that actually negatively impacts her reputation within the organization. So the third ways we've already touched on is this micromanaging bully boss becoming a toxic manager.

This is more commonly seen in men than in women, unless the woman is adopting the masculine imposter syndrome coping strategies that pushing on through that fight response. With men, this pushing on through leads to mental health issues in many cases.

And there's such a taboo around men's mental health and men admitting that they feel scared they might be found out as not good enough. That is my other definition of imposter syndrome. Despite external world evidence, they're doing well.

This pushing on down and pushing on through can exacerbate mental health issues and actually take men to a crisis point, often more quickly than it would with women's coping strategies.

Number four, men are more likely to subconsciously pick the fight response, which can create the alpha male culture that we talked about in episode 67. That was an episode about three hidden causes of imposter syndrome from the research study. It's a bit of a shocker.

So do make sure you've gone, had a listen to that episode 67 of Ditching Imposter syndrome or I will make sure there is a clickable link in the show notes.

So this alpha male culture is at the most senior levels of organizations where collaboration and teamwork kind of goes out of the window for this fight response competitiveness being very judgmental, that unintentionally excludes most women who would not be able to thrive in that kind of environment.

We've been researching why this culture is created and a large part of it is that fight response from men's imposter syndrome that they're having to push on down and push on through.

You can imagine if you've got to push on through, the kind of fear that imposter syndrome can cause, that real gritted, clenched teeth determination that is going to cause somebody to be more aggressive, more short fused, more competitive, and to have that fight response that makes collaboration actually feel quite dangerous.

Number five, we found that men experiencing imposter syndrome are less likely to challenge bias when they see it in the workplace, particularly bias against women. Only 11% of respondents in the research study felt fully comfortable in speaking up with their ideas.

The data showed that male leaders who experience imposter syndrome are less likely to challenge bias against women because they don't want to rock the boat. And they are less likely to challenge the cultural and working environment issues that disproportionately disadvantage advantage women.

Reason number six, why men's imposter syndrome can negatively impact women and keep the gender pay gap going strong is overcompensation with risk aversion. So you've got this secret fear of being found out. It's not good enough. They made a mistake hiring you. Today's the day your luck is going to run out.

At an unconscious level, your biological makeup means that you've been more likely to pick the fight response. You're going to go head to head with this saber toothed tiger. But despite that hardwired fight response, you also want to feel safe.

That is what the whole of imposter syndrome is about. It's about somehow needing to feel safe and that you belong.

So to avoid that risk of being seen as having made a mistake or failure, men who are experiencing severe imposter syndrome may opt for safe choices, bypassing innovative or diverse ideas and even bypassing what they would see as potentially a high risk promotion of putting a female into a mainly male environment and sidelining the them in strategic decisions. Number seven is a personal bugbear, which unfortunately is often a side effect of imposter syndrome.

This is very rarely done by men who feel genuinely confident. This is normally done by men who have deeply hidden inadequacies who are scared of being found out. It's not good enough. It's mansplaining.

So in case English isn't your first language or you've not come across the term before, mansplaining is where a man, usually in public, explains something to a woman in a way that comes across as condescending or patronizing, often implying that he knows more than she does. You can imagine how this coping strategy system that's running with imposter syndrome makes this more likely.

The man comes at this often assuming that the woman lacks knowledge on the subject, regardless of her expertise or qualifications. And one of the saddest ways that this can happen is when a woman finally has that really big courage.

Remember, 89% of people don't feel fully confident speaking up with their ideas. That's men and women.

When A woman has the courage to share an idea that maybe is a bit edgy, controversial, or going against the status quo, challenging groupthink. If the response is then to be mansplained, it makes it less likely the woman will speak up with her idea next time.

And even if it doesn't bash her confidence, it teaches her that her ideas and contributions are not valued by the organization. And remember, other men in the room are less likely to speak up and challenge bias.

They're also less likely to speak up and challenge mansplaining when they see it in meetings or read it in email chains and reports if they are running imposter syndrome. An eighth way that men's imposter syndrome can negatively impact women and keep the gender pay gap open is safety bias.

When you look at organizations where it's a predominantly male leadership team in order to feel safe, remember that is a core driver of the coping strategies for imposter syndrome. Like hires like so you will hear men saying things like, oh, she wouldn't cope or fit in in this environment.

Remember so many organizations that senior level of leadership is actually about alpha male and fighting and competitiveness. So a woman has to be better, perform better in interview and assessment and may still be seen as taking a risk.

If safety bias is one of the coping strategies that the men are using in order to cope with their imposter syndrome, this is why pushing on through coping with imposter syndrome, trying to handle it, trying to succeed despite it, is so harmful.

Instead, we need to have proactive, proven solutions in there to support people to clear this out once and for all so that then suddenly all of these coping strategies disappear along with their harmful impacts. Now I want to share with you a bonus one which is actually probably one of the worst apart from toxic line managers.

This one has been around for years, but fairly recently it got a name. It's called hepeating. Okay, like repeating, but with he at the beginning.

And this is where a woman shares an idea in a meeting, pretty much ignored, and then a few minutes later, a male colleague shares the same idea, effectively passing it off as his own.

This undermines women's voices, makes them less likely to speak up in future, and frankly makes them really, really annoyed, to the point that if it's happening regularly, they are actually going to leave your organization because of hepeating, which tends to be driven by insecurities rather than men's confidence. So imposter syndrome is a core factor there.

And of course, as we've discussed already, if men are experiencing Imposter syndrome, they're much less likely to speak up and challenge bias. And so the who are he peeing get away with it.

And it can very quickly become company culture as others in the organization learn the way humans do by mimicking what we see modeled elsewhere, especially by those in leadership roles.

So I hope this episode has opened your eyes into some of the ways that women are paying the price for men's imposter syndrome and why we need to stop ignoring this. Organizations need scalable solutions that allow them to identify who needs support proactively because people will work really hard to hide it.

That means you can help hundreds for the cost of coaching a handful. What can you do? Well, make sure you've got the white paper@impostersyndromeresearch.com and share that in your organization.

The next thing you can do is We've used our last three research studies over the last 10 years to create a quiz style assessment that gives you insights into how imposter syndrome is really impacting your organization under four key categories and how ready people are for things to change. And it gives you a personalized action plan. The link to take that assessment is in the show notes.

So make sure you go and do that next and then my do one thing for you this in this episode is how would it be if you could remove the taboo for men around imposter syndrome in your organization, supporting them to clear it out once and for all? How might that benefit your teams? We've got a discussion thread. You can find the link to that in the show notes.

Whether you are listening to this on my website or wherever you love to get your podcast pasts, you can register free to get the Imposter syndrome Hacks app and then that link will take you straight to where we are discussing this. And I have a request for women here. Okay, these men need your help.

But the problem is because women we found in our 2019 research study are 20 times more likely than men to talk about imposter syndrome and ask for help. It's almost exclusively women in organizations who are running the events and the awareness sessions and organizing them for imposter syndrome.

This is actually helping to cement the myth that it's a girl thing. And I know that's not your intention. Here's my invitation to you.

If you are going to organize interventions, events, training about imposter syndrome, please make sure that the group that's arranging it has a decent chunk of men in it. Okay?

Men need to know that they are part of this and that they are part of the solution because their experience of imposter syndrome is part of the problem just as women's is. They're not an add on. They're not there for awareness as aligned manager.

This needs to be a collaborative effort where men and women both have the experience where they can talk about this. They gain a common language.

We work together to remove the taboo and to implement the scalable solutions that allow you to create breakthroughs fast with imposter syndrome. But please stop inviting men as an add on. Make them part of organizing this. I hope you found that useful. Well, we're going to be back very soon.

The next episode, episode 70 is the fourth and final part of this miniseries about the imposter syndrome research study and specifically the role of imposter syndrome in the gender pay gap. And in the next episode we're going to look at the role of mental load burnout and imposter syndrome and how that becomes a perfect storm.