Roberto Lupi
Aug 9, 2017 · 1 min read

I don’t think this is true, Emma. Intersectionality exist and, from my experience, Google is the largest case of impostor syndrome that I know of. Men can understand and live the stereotype threat as much as women do. Even the study that you cite shows it for ethnical stereotypes in the athletic setting, or for age stereotypes in math proficiency.

In the real world, men are not an homogeneous group. We don’t all come from Ivy League universities. Large parts of tech have an immigrant background.

Am I not as good as other employees because I am mostly self-taught? Am I a worse as a manager because I come from a different culture and I have trouble understanding the subtleties of American corporate? Am I worse at machine learning research because I only have a BSc from a community college while my colleagues are PhD from top tier universities?

Men can internalize these questions as well as women can. All of these situations are hard to change, so they can be internalized as absolutes and be thought as being about the person not the skill. The real world is not as controlled as a psych lab, real people are not as homogeneous as the college students that are the cannon fodder of most psychological studies.

    Roberto Lupi

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