[bradjohnson]

I may be wrong because it is worded unclearly, but I think the first is referring to the magnitude by which men and women are affected, i.e. those that are affected, be they men or women, experience the same impact to their self esteem/worth. The second is referring to the fact that women are more frequently affected by it.

[P-ala-din]

That makes sense, thanks. I was misled by the use of "prevalence" in the first part of the sentence.

[mattkrause]

In this context, prevalence means something like "the proportion of affected people in some group."

Men and women could be equally likely to develop some form of imposter syndrome (thus, equal prevalence), but the women could be more severely affected (scores of, say, 5 vs. 3 on some kind of test or questionnaire).

[P-ala-din]

yeah, the definition of prevalence is clear to me.

but it's the other way around. Men and women are affected with the same severity but women are more likely to develop it. ( or at least that's what I understood from bradjohnson's comment).

[mattkrause]

No, I don't think that's a correct interpretation: if women are more likely to develop it, then the prevalence isn't equal. Affect and prevalence just focus on rates, not severity.

I can only see two ways to make both statements consistent:

- Men and women are both likely to have an general 'diagnosis' of imposter syndrome, but women experience more 'acute attacks' of it per unit time. Half of of men and women feel like imposters during a year, but the affected women feel that way twice a week, while the affected men feel it once/week.

- Women experience it more severely than men: a male colonel feels like a lt. colonel, but a female colonel feels like a major)

Could be some combination of the two...or the writing is just a mess!

[FridgeSeal]

I’m pretty sure it’s the other way around:

Severity is the same for both genders (those that have it, feel it with similar enough degree and frequency), but in equal sized groups of men and women, there are more women who exhibit it.

[mattkrause]

It occurred to me that the original sources might be a lot clearer:

From Wikipedia's ref #1 (Langford and Clance, 1993)

"Studies of college students (Harvey, 1981; Bussotti, 1990; Langford, 1990), college professors (Topping, 1983), and successful professionals (Dingman, 1987) have all failed, however, to reveal any sex differences in impostor feelings, suggesting that males in these populations are just as likely as females to have low expectations of success and to make attributions to non-ability related factors."

And Ref #9 (Kumar and Jagacinski, 2006)

"Women expressed greater imposter fears than men and were also higher on ability-avoid goals."

The writing in the Wikipedia article is not great though, so it could have gone either way...