When it turned out that she’d got an A, her mother said, “I never want to hear about this again.” But her accomplishment didn’t make the feelings go away it only made her stop talking about them. Imes particularly remembered crying after a Latin test, telling her mother, “I know I failed” (among other things, she’d forgotten the word for “farmer”).

Imes had grown up in Abilene, Texas, with an older sister who early on had been deemed “the smart one” as a high schooler, Imes had confessed anxieties to her mother that sounded exactly like the ones Clance had to hers. Clance began comparing notes with one of her colleagues, Suzanne Imes, about their shared feelings of fraudulence. In the early seventies, as an assistant professor at Oberlin College, Clance kept hearing female students confessing experiences that reminded her of her own: they were sure they’d failed exams, even if they always did well they were convinced that they’d been admitted because there had been an error on their test scores or that they’d fooled authority figures into thinking they were smarter than they actually were. But, everywhere she went, Clance felt the same nagging sense of self-doubt, the suspicion that she’d somehow tricked everyone else into thinking she belonged.

in psychology, at the University of Kentucky. She was the first in her family to go to college-a high-school counsellor warned her, “You’ll be doing well if you get C’s”-after which she earned a Ph.D. After nearly every test she took (and usually aced), she would tell her mother, “I think I failed it.” She was shocked when she beat the football-team captain for class president. Tiny was ambitious-her photograph appeared in the local newspaper after she climbed onto a table to deliver her rebuttal during a debate tournament-but she was always second-guessing herself. Born in 1938 and raised in Baptist Valley, in Appalachian Virginia, she was the youngest of six children, the daughter of a sawmill operator who struggled to keep food on the table and gas in the tank of his timber truck. Long before Pauline Clance developed the idea of the impostor phenomenon-now, to her frustration, more commonly referred to as impostor syndrome-she was known by the nickname Tiny.

Middle finger drawing with female