How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

by liberatus • 14 years ago

72 76 14 years ago

VMG• 14 years ago

> “You only got that internship because you’re a woman,” P. said. I was floored. [...]

> “Good one,” I said. After all, we were talking about my Microsoft internship. Microsoft has a program for women and underrepresented minorities, but I wasn’t in it. I was a regular old SDE intern.

Yes - but what if you had been in one of those programs? That is the problem with explicitly preferring some group over another, not based on their skill level, when the people you select want to only be selected for their skill and nothing else.

I'm not saying that sexism in the industry isn't a problem, but the solution is more difficult than "just hire more women"

andrewcooke• 14 years ago

you're right - it is more difficult than that. which is why i am little surprised that you said "that is the problem...". it is a problem. there are also other problems and other advantages. as you said - it's complicated (and i'd hate for you to be misunderstood as claiming to draw some simple conclusion from it).

masterzora7• 14 years ago

> I'm not saying that sexism in the industry isn't a problem, but the solution is more difficult than "just hire more women"

This is true, but one of the biggest steps you can take toward fixing the various forms of explicit and implicit sexism in the industry is to hire more women. It's not sufficient, but it is necessary. Moreover, the existence of such programs can be beneficial in the short term, as well. They really only skew significantly problematic if they are willing to compromise on standards in order to meet the goal of hiring more from underrepresented groups but we have no reason to think they are.

That is, think of it another way: the programs exist to provide more opportunities than would otherwise exist but getting in doesn't imply you only got in because you were of a given demographic. You're still being selected for your skill above all else.

petercooper2• 14 years ago

Say, "You so deserve that promotion/scholarship/interview offer."

I read something recently that suggested using language like "You really earnt that [whatever]" when complimenting people. That is, you define the merit in terms of the person's effort which, hopefully, the recipient of the compliment is less able to deny. We often deserve nice things, but when we think we earnt them it's a more concrete achievement that's harder to wave away with impostor syndrome.

samspot• 14 years ago

Good suggestion. I never really liked using 'deserve' for this anyway.

espyb3• 14 years ago

I agree, using the term 'earned', rather than 'deserved' is an excellent suggestion. For some reason 'deserve' has always bothered me. I believe in working for and earning what I receive. Deserve in my mind implies something given to you, or perhaps something you feel you are entitled to, rather than something you earned. So for me, earning something would provide a greater sense of accomplishment/achievement, than being told I 'deserved' it. Though I've never heard the reference to 'Imposter Syndrome'. That to me seems like a case of low self-confidence?

shrikant• 14 years ago

From here perhaps:

> The point is to praise children's efforts, not their intelligence, she said.

http://news.stanford.edu/pr/2007/pr-dweck-020707.html

petercooper2• 14 years ago

It wasn't that, but it does seem to tie into that whole idea for sure. Good link.

esrauch6• 14 years ago

Unfortunately I think the dismissive attitude of your friend is a direct product of very real reverse discrimination. Anecdotally it really does exist; a female friend of mine was able to easily get interviews at Google, Microsoft and Apple every year despite lousy technical chops and a 2.5 GPA at a mediocre state university. My ex girlfriend had her hand held for literally years by Microsoft recruiters on the stated basis of being a female cs major. Policies of reverse discrimination are definitely not limited to the special programs with women in their name.

Note that the former never was able to pass interviews, but it was only enough to get a foot in the door. It goes without saying that I have worked with many extremely capable women that no one would question they deserve everything they have, but it is easy and to see why some insecure college students have some backlash at having explicit discrimination against them (usually for the first time ever), since they are not being able to see how the less explicit but very real institional discrimination against women.

erikpukinskis3• 14 years ago

a female friend of mine was able to easily get interviews at Google, Microsoft and Apple every year despite lousy technical chops and a 2.5 GPA at a mediocre state university

There's more to aptitude than GPA and "technical chops". A student who started from zero (as is common for girls in CS) and had a 2.5 GPA after four years would look much more appealing to me than a student who had been programming since they were 12 and had a 3.0 GPA. They're on a steeper trajectory.

And whether you to a "top tier" or a "mediocre" university I don't think says much about your aptitude. I know people who slacked off in world class courses, and I know people who Did The Work at a no-name university, and I know who I would hire.

esrauch6• 14 years ago

The trajectory theory is interesting, if two applicants were otherwise similar you would count it against someone for having experience before college? In this case, she was actually someone who took 2 years of computer science in highschool, though her resume didn't say that so so I'm not sure how someone could assess her trajectory that way.

Honestly all of that is irrelevant. What I was actually trying to get at was at the time I was minorly irked (probably just like the guy in this story) due to a perceived unfairness against me due to gender. I've since come to the conclusion that reverse discrimination really is as huge as it seemed then, but that companies are making such big efforts because there is an even larger but less visible bias against women that simply isn't obvious to college kids or even most industry professionals.

The friend's position is totally understandable given the totally different levels of visibility of the two directions of discrimination; that doesn't make him correct.

glaak• 14 years ago

Anecdotally it may exist; statistically, however, it does not.

Let's think about your "female friend" who has lousy technical chops and a 2.5 gpa at a mediocre state university. Is every woman with a 2.5 GPA at a lousy state university getting an interview at all three companies? No? Hmm. I suspect there's something much more to her resume than what you're telling her. These companies are not all simultaneously saying, hey, let's go interview this one woman who happens to have a 2.5 gpa at a crappy school. You're just seeing it that way because you think reverse discrimination is an issue.

Fortunately, this has been studied. And guess what? Equally qualified women have a harder time having their resume selected for technical positions. A similar study was done for black people vs. white people (or, technically, black-sounding names vs. white-sounding names).

It turns out that the conscious thought people have of wanting to hire more women is secondary to their more subconscious bias.

esrauch6• 14 years ago

Regarding the overall statistics; I agree, hence what I wrote about there being real discrimination against them. What I intended to claim (but perhaps could have been more clear about) is that women have these out-in-the-open advantages and even more hidden-behind-closed-doors disadvantages.

You seem to be attaching an argument to my statement that I did not intend to convey; I don't think that reverse discrimination is an issue. I think it is extremely visible, and gives you really lousy visible situations like the ones I mentioned that are obvious errors, that doesn't mean that it is a bad idea.

Smudge2• 14 years ago

> Anecdotally it really does exist

You can take just about any conceivable trend and anecdotally "confirm" its existence based on a small enough sample size or the right anecdote. That doesn't mean it is statistically relevant.

kylebrown2• 14 years ago

And yet when people make decisions, they are much more influenced by anecdotal relevance than statistical soundness. Reminds me of the time when my buddy was trying to get a spot doing research as an undergrad in one of the biochem labs. More than one prof had labs where female undergrads outnumbered the males, so he said he wished he was female so he could "wiggle my ass" to get into a lab.

edit: Also, there are statistics of overall populations and statistics of subpopulations. Sometimes the smaller sample sizes (the subpopulations) are more relevant.

esrauch6• 14 years ago

Can you clarify this, are you claiming that reverse discrimination for women in CS doesn't exist? I wasn't aware that there was any question about that; I understand it to be publicly stated policy at all big tech companies. Note that I'm not making a claim that women are more likely to be hired or promoted; as I said there is a lot of discrimination against women that is less visible which is exactly what reverse discrimination is trying to, well, reverse.

codex7• 14 years ago

A long time ago, I was once a Microsoft intern attending a party at Bill Gates' house. At that party, a high-ranking Microsoft HR employee told me that it was Microsoft's goal to have twice the percentage of female interns in their program than female CS majors.

For example, if women only made up 10% of college CS majors, Microsoft wanted to have 20% female interns.

I replied that, if that were their goal, they would most likely have to lower the bar as compared to a male intern, or else pay the female interns more, give them more perks, or purposefully interview fewer qualified male interns.

My argument was that if Microsoft's hiring bar was the top 1%, most likely only 10% of that candidate pool is female. So, one must either drop the bar for females, interview more females in that pool than males, or somehow double the chance that a female in that 10% of 1% accepted your internship offer. However, in those days almost nobody rejected Microsoft offers, so that last route seemed difficult.

The only way to maintain equality of pay and skill without purposefully rejecting male applicants is to spend a huge amount of effort finding more female applicants than male applicants in that 1% and persuading them to apply. But that's still not really fair, as that really implies that recuiters pay less attention to males, e.g. spending less time and money finding them and recruiting them.

The HR representative got very angry, but couldn't articulate why.

masterzora7• 14 years ago

Okay, first, can we drop the overuse of female/male? It makes us sound like we're talking about specimens in a bio lab rather than people and introduces issues wrt the nonequivalence of female and woman or male and man.

That said, to a large extent you are correct but you are framing it poorly. One of the major steps of breaking the gender gap is to spend more resources on, not just finding women, but also encouraging women. The net result may be in paying disproportionate amount of attention to the group of women compared to the group of men but it should not imply either of the more obvious ways to interpret "pay less attention to males". That is, it shouldn't involve ignoring men or spending less time with any individual nor should it mean reducing any focus on finding good people regardless of gender. It should involve adding focus on the women, which is substantively different despite the ability to describe it with the same words. It's also not necessarily feasible for everyone but it certainly is for Microsoft, especially with the sort of focus they put on trying to bridge the gender gap.

codex7• 14 years ago

You have a budget of one hundred identical recruiters and need to get 1000 female applicants and 500 male applicants to apply for up to 100 internship slots to meet your goal of hiring twice the percentage of women in CS programs. In your country, all of the colleges are segregated; there are 100 all-male and 100 all-female colleges. All of them are having job fairs next week. For each job fair you attend, you know you will get 10 applicants. How do you assign your recruiters?

erikpukinskis3• 14 years ago

But that's still not really fair, as that really implies that recuiters pay less attention to males, e.g. spending less time and money finding them and recruiting them.

You're wrong. It is fair. "Normal" recruiting promotion budgets are obviously paying more attention to males. For example, if you market primarily to CS departments which are 90% male, then that is money largely spent on recruiting males. Spending money specifically on recruiting females brings the budget to parity.

pervycreeper• 14 years ago

Parent meant "fairness" to apply on the individual level, rather than on a collective level, I believe. That is, resources expended per candidate would be comparable, rather than having the total sum of resources expended on female candidates be equal to those spent on male candidates (mutatis mutandis: hires, members of the public, etc.). Which is presumably what you mean.

jules• 14 years ago

> You're wrong. It is fair. "Normal" recruiting promotion budgets are obviously paying more attention to right handed people. For example, if you market primarily to CS departments which are 90% right handed, then that is money largely spent on recruiting right handed people. Spending money specifically on recruiting left handed people brings the budget to parity.

Dividing up the population into two groups using your favorite method and then demanding that the amount spent on each of the groups is equal is ridiculous. Not only that, but mathematically you almost surely can't even satisfy two people that have that philosophy simultaneously.

What you want here is that the amount spent on a person is conditionally independent [1] of characteristics that are irrelevant to that persons performance given the characteristics that are relevant to that persons performance.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_independence

rdw2• 14 years ago

Do you have evidence that talent can be linearized in such a manner that it is possible to tell objectively within 1% how well an intern will fit at the company? Of course you can linearize on test scores or number of publications or something, but is there evidence that these values will translate precisely to job performance? In my experience, such evidence does not exist, so the zero-sum reasoning is fallacious from the start.

In my experience, when looking for people to fill a position, that we end up with some quantity who exceed our requirements, all of whom we'd be happy to hire. The correlation between that quantity and the number of available slots is not strong. Once the candidates cross the "happy to hire" threshold, the decision comes down to what, in retrospect, seem like random factors (if we vaguely think the company might need a certain type of skill later, we might bump up candidates who have that skill, if someone on the team particularly got along well with some candidate that's a plus, etc etc). Evaluating people is not very precise at all.

The line about spending a "huge" amount of effort finding more females seems a bit misogynist on its face. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that it would be a particularly huge expense. If the goal is to have an incoming ratio with 10% more females, it seems that the additional expense could reasonably be only 10%. It also is fallacious to assume that this is a zero-sum equation; that additional 10% (or 50%, or whatever) could be provided solely for that purpose, and would be unavailable otherwise.

Congratulations on successfully trolling the HR representative, though.

esrauch6• 14 years ago

I'm interested in your position. I mainly don't agree about the non-zero sum or definite ordering parts (the BigTechCos that I've worked out explicitly stack rank applicants, so that means they do think there is some definite ordering that can at least be approximated), but I don't think that is a really interesting debate to have.

I think more interestingly, it seems like what I've seen is looking to hire interns where we can't even fill the spots we want with people who appear that they are likely to be actually qualified, they hire interns who are unlikely to be qualified because its worth it to filter down to the few that are. It seems that your suggestion that you get more qualified applicants than you have positions for, which really flies in the face of my experiences. Is it really true or were you exaggerating somewhat to make a point?

jackpirate• 14 years ago

... But that's still not really fair ...

"Fairness" as you use it should have no part in a business decision. The Microsoft HR team identified that for them to maximize their competitiveness (i.e. profit), they need more female staff members. That means that an "underqualified" woman suddenly becomes more qualified because she brings a business advantage to the table that a man does not. I have no problem with this.

krichman• 14 years ago

So it's also fine if they determined that having half as many women would increase their competitiveness?

nostrademons7• 14 years ago

Not really - there's a really simple solution for hiring more women without dropping the bar for them. Make your company the most desirable place for anyone to work, so that you have vastly more applicants than positions, and then you can pick whoever you want as the incoming cohort. Math:

Say that your goal is to hire from the top 1% of the field, and the top 1% is indistinguishable from each other. There are 1 million people in the field, and you will be hiring 1,000 this year. Also say that women make up 10% of the field. In this scenario, there are 10,000 people that you would be happy to work for you, and 1,000 of them are women.

If only 10% of prospective employees would even consider working for you (which is the case for many startups, and probably for present-day Microsoft), then you're trying to fill a class of 1000 from a universe of 1,000 candidates, and only 100 of the women both apply and meet your hiring threshold. The best you can do is 10% female interns.

If, however, everyone in the field wants to work for your company, you have a universe of 10,000 candidates, 1,000 are women, and you're trying to fill a class of 1,000. You can have a female proportion anywhere from 0-100% with no loss of quality.

codex7• 14 years ago

The strategy you describe drops the bar for all employees in order to achieve a gender target.

This is not how companies operate, for the most part. If a company wants to hire 1,000 people and 10,000 applicants are in the top 1%, they will move the bar up to hire the top 0.1% instead.

Given a normal distirbution of applicants, there is a huge difference in talent (10x?) between top 1% and top 0.1%. The bar always automatically adjusts higher; otherwise, a competitor will hire the fraction of the 0.1% that you've passed over. Now the competitor has a 1,000 workers, and you have 1,000 workers, but the competitors are 10x more talented for the same pay (most of the 0.1% didn't get an offer from you, so there's no bidding war for their talents).

Actually, if a company spends more money recruiting each equivalent female employee than male employee, they do effectively drop their total hiring bar if spending more money lets the company climb the bell curve, because it's effectively a reduction in spending efficency, but that effect is small, and skill parity is still achieved.

bradleyjg• 14 years ago

If you have way more indistinguishable applicants than positions you are paying too much.

azakai5• 14 years ago

> Say that your goal is to hire from the top 1% of the field, and the top 1% is indistinguishable from each other.

That's not how the world is.

swampthing• 14 years ago

Deeper thoughts aside, what kind of good friend says that to someone?

DrHankPym• 14 years ago

Probably just friends with her because she's a girl.

NegativeK• 14 years ago

Everyone says stupid shit now and again, whether it's to a random person on the street, your best friend, or your spouse.

espyb3• 14 years ago

Exactly. A good friend wouldn't. That's a comment from someone looking to find a reason to explain their own lack of success. A good friend would congratulate you, regardless of whether you beat them out for the job or not. Sounds like a case of sour grapes to me... and some people don't just have a few, they have entire vineyards. Nothing will ever be their fault, it can't be because the other person was more skilled, or had more more experience, they must have had an unfair advantage. That's easier than taking a hard look at yourself, being honest and addressing the real issues.

kylebrown2• 14 years ago

A good but insensitive friend. And maybe he was right (though overstated), perhaps being female was an advantage in getting the intership. If she wasn't sensitive, she could have responded, "maybe so, but you had the advantage of being male." And she'd be right.

scott_s• 14 years ago

Anecdotally, I know that myself and most of my friends deal with the impostor syndrome.

But, I also think it's important not to fall prey to what I think is the opposite problem: the narrative fallacy. It's easy to feel that you were "fated" for many positions. Or, if not some form of predestination, then some notion that things were "bound" to happen. I know that there was an enormous amount of luck in how I ended up where I am today. While your abilities may have enabled you to be in an elite pool of candidates, there may still be some random chance that landed you the position instead of one of your fellow elite candidates. I can think of three instances that afforded me opportunities that have made enormous impact on my career that were essentially luck.

What you can control is that when you are lucky, make sure you make the most of it. When fellow grad students would ask me for advice on finding jobs, the best I could do was reply, "Be lucky and be good."

jobu2• 14 years ago

Your post made me think of a recent comic: Luck > Good (http://abstrusegoose.com/494)

I'm not sure that's true in the long run, but in some very important situations it certainly can be.

dkarl• 14 years ago

When they want to flatter students or buck up their spirits, professors at selective colleges are prone to saying things like, "The fact that you're even here means something." It's a good idea to let that thinking go as soon as possible. The fact that you're here, there, or anywhere means nothing. The world is complicated. In a sense her friend was right to point out that being female in a field that is desperate for more female representation is usually an advantage, but he was wrong to be certain -- sexism is still rampant among computing professionals. More importantly, he was wrong to care. Actually, they were both wrong to think that they could know the answer to the question and both wrong to think it was important.

jobu2• 14 years ago

My personal belief is that a diversity of backgrounds and life experiences outweigh intelligence and skill to a fair degree. It counteracts group-think, and fosters more innovation and creativity.

So don't feel guilty about how or why you got an opportunity. You came by it honestly, and whether Microsoft feels their benefit from you is due to your ability or your gender, the fact is you are benefiting them or they wouldn't give you the opportunity. Enjoy it and use the chance to improve yourself as much as possible.

scarmig• 14 years ago

In my experience, mixed-gender workplaces are a far better environment than the alternative. Last team I worked on was 40% female on the engineering side, and it was an absolute pleasure. Skills and productivity weren't disproportionately on one side or another, either.

Particularly, as a grown-up with a family, I appreciate the salutory effect that women have on subduing frat-house atmospheres. You probably find fewer women who think of themselves as rockstar ninja pirate hackers, but I'm pretty sure that's not a bad or uneconomic thing.

jacques_chester3• 14 years ago

Imposter syndrome is quite widespread. I first learnt about it from a law academic: http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2008/07/12/imposter-syndrome/

On my office wall hangs my degree -- first class honours from a good university. I still half expect that one day they will ask for it back, that they were just being nice because they like me.

My Dad has it bad -- very bad. He has > 50 years experience in his field. He knows more about electricity than most electrical engineers. I tried to convince him to join the IEEE; with his experience and knowledge they'd probably bump him up to Senior Member grade quick smart.

Nope. Not good enough.

This can actually be quite crippling -- he used to give away his services rather than charging for them. "Too simple a job, I couldn't possibly charge for it". He was not a successful small businessman, thinking like that.

It takes most of my willpower to ask people for money. Because surely, I'm not that good. Surely.

AngryParsley2• 14 years ago

That's interesting. Has your dad ever tried partnering with some sort of agent/hustler (I don't know the right term) to do business deals? A confident front-man might be able to sell your dad's expertise to businesses for a pretty penny.

missechokit• 14 years ago

It's too bad he can't be his own frontman. I guess that's impostor syndrome for ya?

jacques_chester3• 14 years ago

Oh, my mother tried. In her prime she was a formidable people-person, a savvy deal broker. And she pushed Dad very hard to charge more, but he really does have crippling modesty.

Another anecdote. He applied to work in Antarctica, a lifelong dream of his, for ANARE (now the Australian Antarctic Division). His CV listed at that point nearly 40 years of experience working on every major class of communication known to man -- radio, microwave, telephone, fibre optic -- and throughout South East Asia and Russia.

So which position did he apply for?

The junior communications officer.

xibernetik• 14 years ago

I'm a former and returning Microsoft intern, who interviewed in her freshman year. I strongly suspect I got the interview as a result of being female and facing discrimination early on (but not because I was female and they wanted to hire someone of my gender).

Long story short, I'm used to being dismissed or looked over by my male peers - often in CS, but also in the hobbies I've taken up over the years. I found the only way to be listened to or respected was that I had to prove myself very quickly to anyone I had to work with. I got my interview after talking to a Microsoft dev doing recruitment for 10 minutes about a project I worked on after identifying he had a personal interest in that field. He didn't even look at my resume, but I saw him star it when I gave it at the end of our chat.

I would never have been able to do that if I wasn't used to being over-looked. I can signal that I'm competent and easily discuss projects or tech interests within a couple minutes of meeting someone because in the past few years, I've learned that when I neglect to do that, I'm going to get ignored. Because of that, I have an incredibly advantage in that many of my male peers CAN'T do that, simply because they've never had to until it came time to search for a job.

FWIW, one of the biggest reasons I'm returning to Microsoft is that it's one of the few places I've ever felt like I was respected off the bat regardless of age or gender. I couldn't imagine working with most of my peers back in school because of the lack of respect. There are bad apples everywhere, and certain teams are definitely geared towards older folk - but there are highschool kids doing internships there, in some very coveted areas. The guy was out of line, but he's definitely the exception and not the norm.

andrewguenther• 14 years ago

I'm just going to leave this here...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Rinearson

How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

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