A decade ago, Anna Delvey was hobnobbing with New York City’s elite, posing as a moneyed German heiress while wielding a fake credit card, swindling countless social acquaintances, major banks and luxury hotels out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

Anna Delvey, as it turned out, is actually Anna Sorokin – a Russian-German con artist who has since spent several years behind bars and is currently on house arrest. Here we have a real-life, bona fide imposter. And yet, somehow, it’s the rest of us – the qualified, the capable, the credentialed – who spend our days convinced we’re the frauds.

According to a US, cross-industry women’s leadership report, 75 percent of female executives experience ‘imposter syndrome’ at some point in their careers. Recent research on women in STEM found that almost all respondents grappled with it. Closer to home, studies of competitive work cultures show both men and women struggling.

But here’s the thing. Imposter syndrome, much like Anna Delvey, isn’t real. 

Yes, we endure a fear of being found out. We battle anxiety, intense perfectionism and can’t seem to metabolise genuine praise. But what we are experiencing, while unpleasant, is not pathological. These are not medical symptoms. They are a set of feelings that, over the last half century, have earned themselves a cultural diagnosis.

That said, this label did originate in legitimate research.

In 1978, clinical psychologists Dr Pauline Rose Clance and Dr Suzanne Imes published a paper called “The Imposter Phenomenon in High Achieving Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention”. In it, they identified an “internal experience of intellectual phoniness” as, like their paper’s title suggests, a phenomenon. 

In the decades that followed, as the phenomenon gained media attention, the descriptor shifted to ‘syndrome’ – some suggest simply because it’s easier to spell and say. By the 2010s, the term had exploded into a cultural touchstone, adopted by self-help books, TED Talks and corporate wellness programs alike — transforming a nuanced academic observation into a catch-all label for every type of self-doubt. By the 2020s, ‘imposter syndrome’ had become so ubiquitous it was practically a rite of passage. And with that came scrutiny — critics and researchers alike began questioning whether packaging ordinary human uncertainty as a medical-sounding syndrome was, in fact, making things worse.

Dr Pauline Rose Clance coined a ‘phenomenon’. The publishing industry turned it into a genre.

Now, in 2026, the conversation shows no sign of quieting with some industries reporting that feelings of fraudulence have intensified over the past year, fuelled by job insecurity, rapid AI-driven change and workplaces that keep shifting the goalposts. The label endures. But so does the debate about whether it was ever the right one.

Associate Professor Jody Evans, a marketing and social impact specialist at the University of Melbourne, believes that dubbing this particular discomfort a ‘syndrome’ is damaging – especially for women.  

“We need to stop calling it imposter syndrome and call it what it really is: completely natural, reasonable reactions to doing something new, difficult or where we might be unsupported,” she said in an article for Melbourne Business School. 

Seeking to remedy an invented ailment is, according to Evans, an unhelpful diversion. 

“It’s keeping you concentrated on your potential inadequacies rather than identifying the systemic issues you’re facing, and that’s where women need to move,” she explained. 

“The question you should be asking is: ‘what is it about this environment that’s making me feel like I don’t belong?’ Is it because I feel like the only one like me in this room?” 

This was a likely reality for founder Melanie Perkins — as a young, Perth-based woman rather than an older, Silicon Valley-based man — when pitching her idea for Canva to investors. Women still receive only a sliver of venture capital. And back in the early 2010s, Perkins chose not to see more than 100 rejections from investors as a personal failing.   

“I knew this was the future — there was no doubt in my mind,” she said of her tech platform, now valued at US$65 billion. “I think one of the most important things is to have a really clear picture of where you’re going.”

Entrepreneur Emma Grede – who helms several ventures and is a founding partner of $5 billion shapewear brand Skims – takes a similar approach to quashing uncertainty.   

“I made sure – and make sure on a daily basis – that my world and my life are not run by my feelings, but rather run by the goals and the vision that I have for myself,” she told Time Magazine. 

We can also take a leaf out of the playbook of Australian comedian and Booie Beauty founder Celeste Barber, who doesn’t experience feelings of fraudulence at all. 

“You know how people talk about imposter syndrome? I don’t have it,” she said on the How to Fail podcast. “I’m not someone who’s like, oh my god, I shouldn’t be here. I’m like, why hasn’t this happened quicker? Why not me?” 

Maybe it’s time we stopped diagnosing ourselves and instead start to ask, “Why not me?”