Sheryl Sandberg’s battle against imposter syndrome

Regardless of being the embodiment of confidence, there are days Sheryl Kara Sandberg still feels like a fraud.

In August 2011, Forbes magazine released its annual list of World’s 100 Most Powerful Women. Instead of feeling elated, Sheryl was horrified to learn that Forbes ranked her as the fifth most powerful woman in the world.

She was positioned after German chancellor Angela Merkel, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi. This placed her ahead of First Lady Michelle Obama and Indian politician Sonia Gandhi.

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When colleagues congratulated her in the hallway of Facebook headquarters, in Stanford Research Park in Palo Alto, California, she cringed in embarrassment and declared the list ridiculous.

Friends posted the Forbes list link on Facebook and she asked them to disassemble it. After a few days, Sheryl's veteran executive assistant, Camille Hart, chastised her absurdity of subjecting everyone who complimented her to derogation.

Regardless of her enormous success and being second-in-command to Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, Sheryl still found it rigorous and laborious to proclaim her deserving acclamation.

Professional ambition is expected of men, but is fervently considered negative for women. 'She is very ambitious' is not a compliment to women.

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Aggressive and hard-charging women violate unwritten rules about acceptable social conduct. Men are continually applauded for being determined, powerful and successful, but women who convey these traits often pay a social penalty.

During a meeting with US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner at Facebook headquarters, Secretary Geithner’s team, consisting of women, sat on the chairs off to the side of the boardroom table.

Sheryl, Facebook’s chief operating officer, motioned to the women to sit at the table.

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They demurred and remained on their seats. During her six-and-a-half years managing online sales and operations groups at Google from 2001 to 2007, Sheryl hired a team of 4,000 employees and starkly scrutinised how women faced obstacles from within.

Instead of feeling worthy of recognition, they felt undeserving and guilty. This is despite being lofty achievers and experts in their fields. Most women don't seem to obliterate the detrimental sense that it's only a matter of time before they are exposed for impostors with limited abilities.

Genetic remnants and negative psychological strokes of oppression have caused women to feel unworthy of their success.

This phenomenon of capable people being plagued by self-doubt is called impostor syndrome. In her inspirational book, Lean in: Women Work and the Will to Lead, Sheryl states that both men and women are susceptible to impostor syndrome, but due to women being historically subjected to subjugation, they disproportionately experience it more intensely.

Multiple studies in numerous industries indicate that women often judge their own performance as worse than it actually is, while men judge their own performance as better than it is.

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Studying at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, every time Sheryl was called upon in class, she concluded she was about to embarrass herself.

When she took a test, she was certain that she would flank, and whenever she excelled without embarrassing herself, she believed that she had fooled everyone yet again. Like so many perceptions, lack of confidence can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

When a man is asked to explain his success, he will typically credit his own innate qualities. When a woman is asked the same question, she will attribute her success to external factors, insisting she did well because she “worked really hard,” “got lucky,” or “had help from contemporaries.”

During her term at Google, whenever Sheryl announced the launch of a new project, the men banged on her door to explain why they should lead the charge. Men were also more likely to chase a growth opportunity.

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In situations where men and women each received negative feedback, Sheryl watched women’s self-confidence and self-esteem drop significantly. The internalisation of failure and the insecurity it breeds intercepts future performance in women more and this pattern has profound, extended consequences.

Worsening women’s progress is the societal pressure for women to keep an eye on marriage from a young age. As much as Sheryl's parents esteemed academic achievements, they emphasised marriage even more.

When she joined Harvard at 19, they had already implanted in her psyche that eligible women marry young to acquire a 'good man' before they are all taken.

Sheryl obediently complied with their advice and during her time at Harvard, she vetted every date as a potential husband and in turn, ruined every date.

After graduation, she rejected the idea of international fellowship on the grounds that a foreign country was not a likely place to turn a date into a husband. Instead, she relocated to Washington, DC, which was full of eligible men.

At the age of 24, in her first year out of Harvard, she met a man who was not just eligible, but also pleasant and married him.

The relationship quickly unravelled and by the age of 25, she was divorced. At the time, this felt like a massive personal and public failure.

For many years, she felt that no matter what she accomplished professionally, it paled in comparison to the punitive and inescapable spell of marriage. The result of such polarisation by society on women is that countless women subconsciously view ‘ambition’ as a dirty word.

The writer is a novelist, Big Brother Africa 2 Kenyan representative and founder of Jeff's Fitness Centre (@jeffbigbrother).