The Perfection Trap

“Why are girls to be told that they resemble angels; but to sink them below women?”

Mar 31, 2025

Dear GFPs, it’s the last day of Feminist Christmas! I trust everyone had a great month and that sexism has now been solved…ah well, maybe next year.

I opened Women’s History Month (I mean, just on here; not in general, not internationally) with my mega-essay looking back at the witch hunts, the population decline that contextualised them, and asking what they could tell us about the anti-diversity backlash we’re living through today (along with the mash-up of Cordelia Fine and Paul Kingsnorth that no-one asked for). If you somehow missed that, and are thirsty for my baby-themed analysis you can still read it here.

And I am closing Women’s History Month with another essay! Don’t worry, it’s about a third of the length. No witches, historical or otherwise, this time, but I do have some Mary Wollstonecraft in there, don’t say I never spoil you…

In other news, I just want to say thank you to all the people who organised events I spoke at, and all the people who came to events I spoke at; it’s always so invigorating for me to get to meet readers. After the Women in Data event I did last week the number of women who told me while I was signing their copy of Invisible Women that they had gone into data specifically because of Invisible Women made me feel hopeful really for the first tine this year — so thank you in particular to all of you. I can’t wait to see what you all do!

The problem that very much does have a name…

GFPs, I want to talk today about “imposter syndrome”. For those of you who have no idea what it is, imposter syndrome is the term used to describe a feeling experienced by certain people, often women and ethnic minorities, when they are in positions of leadership or authority. They feel inadequate. They feel fraudulent. They feel like they don’t belong. In short, they feel like an imposter.

And this feeling, we tell them, is evidence of a problem with them — hence labelling it a “syndrome.” This feeling is pathological. This feeling is a disorder. This feeling is an indication that the woman experiencing it must be in some way fixed.

I have been thinking about this term ever since a woman in the audience at a talk I gave this month came up to me afterwards to ask about it. Why do women still have this syndrome, she wanted to know, and what can we do to combat it?

I’ll be honest: I was tired after three events back to back and I can’t even remember what I told her, but here is what I wish I had said.

I don’t believe imposter syndrome exists.

This is not to say that women don’t experience feelings of inadequacy in positions of authority. It’s not to say that female leaders don’t feel like frauds, or, indeed, imposters. I know I feel that way on a daily basis. My quarrel is not with the “imposter” part of this so-called syndrome. It’s with the syndrome part. It’s with the implication that the problem with this feeling lies with the woman experiencing it. My problem with this term is that it implies that women who feel like imposters in positions of authority are behaving irrationally.

And I don’t think they are. I think that women in positions of authority who feel like imposters are reacting very rationally to a culture that treats them as imposters.

A perfectionist workaholic

The other day I was talking to someone about how absurdly stressed I feel at the moment, trying to fit in all the speeches and writing that I have to do, alongside trying to deliver my next book manuscript in something resembling on schedule. I am working, I told them, like a machine. Their analysis was that I am a workaholic.

I disagree. I don’t believe I am a workaholic. I don’t believe I am addicted to work, or that I work compulsively. I think, rather, that I am a perfectionist. And so whatever work it is that must I do, must be, well, perfect. It must be flawless. It must be bullet-proof.

Of course, I accept (not really, but I tell myself I do), that I am human and that mistakes are inevitable. I cannot be flawless. I cannot be perfect. But that doesn’t mean I don’t try, with every ounce of effort I have in me, to overcome my flawed humanity.

And again, I don’t believe that my perfectionism is a syndrome or a disorder or an irrational position. I think, rather, that it is a very rational response to a world that I know judges me more harshly as a woman — in particular, a woman who is violating several gendered norms at once. A woman who is writing and speaking in public, taking up space that gendered norms tell us “belongs to men”. A woman who is writing, moreover, about politics, data and science, all of which are male-marked domains. Even worse, a woman who is writing about these things from a feminist perspective. I am simply crying out to be taken down a peg or two.

Hence the very rational perfectionism. I felt a huge pressure while writing Invisible Women to deliver a book that it was impossible to pick apart; I knew that a single error from me could be used to unravel the entire thesis. Not only this, I knew that there would be people out there who would be looking for that error that they could use to unravel the entire thesis. I felt a huge responsibility to women not to allow that to happen through any error of mine. So, it had to be perfect. It couldn’t afford to be anything else. (Naturally, because I am human, it was not, in fact, perfect but I guess it was perfect enough 🥵)

At this point, some readers may be thinking that in fact I do have a perfectionism pathology. Others might be thinking that any non-fiction writer should be striving for this level of perfection — and of course, yes, we should all be striving for an error-free book, but here’s the point: the consequences of delivering a non-error-free book are not the same for my white male colleagues. They do not face the same penalties for making mistakes; and they also do not generally face the same concerted effort to uncover those mistakes in order to apply said penalty. Because white men who write about politics and data and science are not violating gender norms and do not need to be taken down a peg or two. White men who write are not imposters.

Mary Wollstonecraft intervenes

In A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft asked, “Why are girls to be told that they resemble angels; but to sink them below women?” This question arises in a chapter where she engages in “Animadversions on some of the Writers who have Rendered Women objects of Pity, Bordering on Contempt,” specifically, in this section, James Fordyce’s popular Sermons to Young Women.

In brief, Wollstonecraft is not a fan.

Dr Fordyce may have had a very laudable end in view; but these discourses are written in such an affected style, that were it only on that account, and had I nothing to object against his mellifluous precepts, I should not allow girls to peruse them, unless I designed to hunt every spark of nature out of their composition, melting every human quality into female meekness and artificial grace. (Wollstonecraft, p.92)

OUCH. Dr Fordyce to the burns unit, stat.

More specifically, she objects to Fordyce’s focus on a woman’s pleasingness to men (here in the 21st century we might refer to this as objectification) over her own internal development as a human being. A woman must be beautiful and meek and endlessly, lovingly indulgent of everything her man does. She must be, in short, angelic.

Indeed, Fordyce and his contemporaries argue, she is angelic. She is meek, submissive, virtuous, graceful and, above all, beautiful — and that’s how, therefore, she must be treated by men. In this worldview, men must not abuse women not because they are human beings who deserve humane treatment, but because they “resemble angels.”

Far from being an elevation, however, Wollstonecraft correctly identifies the angelification of women as a trap. If woman is conceived of as perfect, in both looks and demeanour, her inevitable humanity renders her a failure. And indeed, Fordyce does blame women for their ill-treatment at the hands of men.

If only, he writes, you had “behaved to them with more respectful observance, and a more equal tenderness; studying their humours, overlooking their mistakes, submitting to their opinions in matters indifferent, passing by little instances of unevenness, caprice, or passion, giving soft answers to hasty words, complaining as seldom as possible, and making it your daily care to relieve their anxieties and prevent their wishes, to enliven the hour of dulness, and call up the ideas of felicity,” in short, if only you had been an angel, if only you had been perfect (in a context in which “perfection” means being submissive to your ass of a husband), you too could have been deserving of being treated like a human being.

Making mistakes while having the bad taste to be female

Women are no longer generally compared to angels, but that doesn’t mean we are no longer expected to be perfect. And it also doesn’t mean that when we deviate from perfection, we don’t have to pay a disproportionately heavy price.

In Cordelia Fine’s new book, Patriarchy Inc. (and I promise, this newsletter is not becoming a Cordelia Fine fan page, or at least not exclusively), she writes about the differences in how men and women are punished following misconduct in the finance sector:

A detailed analysis of data collected by the US Financial Industry Regulatory Authority between 2005 and 2015 found that female financial advisers who engaged in misconduct were punished more harshly than male ones. They were 20 per cent more likely to be fired and 30 per cent less likely to find new work. This gap wasn't explained by differences between women and men in firm, branch, role, time period, costliness of misconduct, productivity, or being a repeat offender. Moreover, the gap was larger in companies with fewer female managers, pointing to straightforward in-group gender bias as the explanation. Reinforcing that explanation was a similar finding of an 'ethnicity punishment gap' for ethnic minority men, exacerbated in firms with lower representation of those men in management. (Among firms, Wells Fargo Advisors stood out as having the biggest gender punishment gap.) (Fine, p.83)

Of course misconduct is not the same as mistakes, but the evidence suggests that female leaders are also judged more harshly for errors too — in particular when they are in male-marked leadership roles, which, let’s face it, is most of them.

So what’s going on here? Of course it could be partly white men protecting white men; the in-group protecting their own. In the previous edition of this newsletter, I cited the philosopher Janet Radcliffe Richards…

What, for instance, must be happening if an employer passes over a competent woman in favour of a less competent man? It means that the job will be less well done, and therefore (to put it schematically) that he will be losing money by appointing the man. Why should he do that? He is actually willing to pay for something or other, and it is hard to see what it could possibly be other than the simple cause of male supremacy.

Radcliffe Richards (1980), p.83

…and I think her interpretation of discriminatory hiring practices could equally, or even more convincingly, apply to this failure to penalise male misconduct as heavily as female misconduct.

But I think it’s also arguable that it’s not so much that men are punished less harshly, as that women are punished more harshly; and that women are punished more harshly not only because they aren’t men, but because they are women.

Women are not meant to behave badly. We are meant to be caring and kind and selfless. Sugar and spice and all things nice. Perhaps, even, angels. We are not meant to be rule-breakers and risk-takers. A rule-breaking woman is breaking the rules twice: first by breaking whichever workplace rules she is actually breaking, and then by breaking the rules of gender — according to which women do not break the rules.

Similarly, a female leader who makes a mistake also breaks the rules twice: first by being a leader in the first place (how ambitious and unfeminine of her — see Invisible Women, pp.266-270), and then by daring to be human while she does it.

Being human

To return to that woman in the audience, this is the answer I wish I had given to you.

There is nothing wrong with you. You do not have a syndrome. You are not irrational. Rather, you are responding very rationally to a culture in which to be in a position of authority while female is to be an imposter — a culture which will, as a result, disproportionately penalise you when you are anything less than perfect. Only a perfect imposter can be allowed — which is the same as saying that no imposter will be allowed, because women are not angels. We are not perfect. We are no more and no less human than men.

As for the second part of her question, how do we combat it, that one’s easy — at least it’s easy to answer: we combat it with feminism. We combat it by changing this culture in which women are elevated above humans in order to sink them below women. And that bit, the actual doing of it, isn’t easy — after all, women have been trying to attain human status for hundreds of years. But until we do, until we develop a culture that no longer traps women in the false promise of being allowed to be a perfect imposter, women will continue to suffer from this syndrome-that-isn’t-a-syndrome. Because this “syndrome” is nothing more than an accurate reflection of the reality in which women live.

So, let’s stop calling it that.