Transcripts
Transcript for Figure 8.2, Imposter Syndrome Is A Scheme: Reshma Saujani’s Smith College Commencement Address
[Crowd cheering.]
Madam President, I have the honor to present Reshma Saujani the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters Honoris Causa.
[Audience cheering and applauding.]
[Kathleen McCartney, President, Smith College]: Reshma Saujani, activist and founder of Girls Who Code.
[Audience cheering and applauding.]
A leading activist for gender equality. You have exposed some of this country’s most glaring inequities. More importantly, you have provided solutions. Your groundbreaking nonprofit organization Girls Who Code is galvanizing girls and young women around the world to see themselves as leaders in the tech industry, a place where they have not always been welcome. The inspiration for Girls Who Code came to you in 2010 as you campaigned as the first Indian American woman to run for Congress.
[Audience cheering and applauding.]
While visiting classrooms along your campaign route, you kept asking yourself, why are there so few girls in computing classes? You vowed to make a change. Today, the impact of Girls Who Code is clear. 10,000 Girls Who Code clubs exist across America and more than 600,000 girls have participated in programs offered by your organization.
[Audience cheering and applauding.]
As you have said, Girls Who Code is more than an international nonprofit. We are a movement. Not wanting to rest on these laurels, you are also a leading voice in the effort to change discourse around girls’ self-esteem. Your influential TED Talk, Teach Girls Bravery, Not Perfection, sparked a national conversation about the need to socialize girls to be risk takers and to find power in their imperfections. “If we can do that,” you have said, “We will build a better world for each and every one of us.” For your visionary activism and passionate call for women and girls to be fearless, not flawless, Smith College is proud to award you the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters Honoris Causa.
[Audience cheering and applauding.]
And now it is my great pleasure and honor to present your 2023 commencement speaker, Reshma Saujani.
[Audience cheering and applauding.]
[Reshma Saujani]: Thank you for that kind introduction. President McCartney, deans, faculty, distinguished guests, and most importantly, class of 2023! Woo!
[Audience cheering and applauding.]
Thank you for having me here today and for allowing me to not only address all of you, but the people who got you to this moment, the friends you count as family and the family you count as friends. It’s a privilege to be here where so many women I admire once planted ivy alongside their classmates or shared a cup of tea on a Friday afternoon. And it’s a joy to celebrate with you at the end of one journey and at the beginning of the next. I think a lot about how I can support tomorrow’s leaders especially women, non-binary folks, and gender nonconforming individuals.
[Audience cheering and applauding.]
I created an organization that’s literally taught hundreds of thousands of girls to code, and now I’m leading a movement to put moms first in a country….
[Audience cheering and applauding.]
To put moms first in a country that always seems to put us last. In my career, cis men have been well, few and far between, so I got to admit I feel quite at home here at Smith.
[Audience cheering and applauding.]
But look, it hasn’t always been that way. For most of my life, I felt like I didn’t belong. I grew up in a small town in Illinois as a daughter of refugees where no one looked like us and nobody wanted us there either. I heard that message loud and clear. Sometimes, it was literally spray painted on the side of my house.
So as I got older, I couldn’t shake that feeling that no matter how much I accomplished, no matter how much recognition I received, no matter how many lines I added to my resume, I’ll never feel like I’m a part of this place. So I tried to fade into the background where at least if I didn’t fit in, I wouldn’t be found out. When I got into Yale Law School, I would sit in the back and just slouch and raise my hand a little like this, terrified to answer the question, even when I knew the answer. When my classmates went off to white shoe law firms, I followed suit and bought a suit, disguising myself, someone else’s job. When I ran for office, I stopped wearing my favorite gold hoops and my red red lipstick, thinking that I had to be someone else to succeed. Fake it till you make it, right? Maybe that experience sounds familiar. Maybe you’ve walked into a room and thought, “I feel like such a fraud here.” Or maybe you’ve heard friends and moms and other women talk on TikTok about their feelings of self-doubt. It’s an experience that so many people just describe with two words, imposter syndrome.
Hearing people talk about imposter syndrome, it feels like less about if it’s going to strike, but when it’s going to strike. So people ask me all the time, “Rashma, how do I overcome imposter syndrome?” The class of 2023, I am done answering that question. And you all can hold me to it because you see, imposter syndrome, it’s not my problem to solve. And it’s not yours either. So today, if you’ll humor me, I want to squeeze in one last history lesson before we leave this place.
Let’s go back to the 1890s, a few short decades after Smith was founded. Doctors had identified a never before seen medical malady, one that threatened to wreck havoc on the entire female population. That condition was called bicycle face. You see, the original bicycle had one gigantic wheel in the front and one tiny little wheel in the back. Imagine a hula hoop and a dinner plate, not easy to ride, but then along comes this revolutionary concept, two wheels of the same size. Go figure, the power of equality, baby. And as a result, cycling takes off and it takes off in Europe and North America and it takes off for women. But with the rise of women riding the bicycle comes a rise of bicycle face. Here are the symptoms of this terrifying condition. These are direct quotes, by the way, flushed cheeks, hard clenched jaw, bulging eyes, an expression that is either anxious, irritable, or at best, stony. That’s right. Long before there was resting bitch face, there was resting bike face.
[Audience laughing.]
Now, here’s the thing. It wasn’t just women who were riding bicycles. In fact, the majority of those who had taken up the hobby were men. But bicycle face, that was strictly a woman’s disease. Why? Because bicycle face was invented to purely scare women off their wheels. Here’s what was really going on. Back then, the bicycle became a symbol for a growing feminist movement. All of a sudden, women could go further and faster and they didn’t need to wait around for a gentleman to show up with his horseback and give him a ride. Suffragists can now meet with one another from town to town and they would take their signs and they would fix them to the front of their handlebars. Because of the bicycle, women even started wanting different clothes. Victorian hoop skirts, so last season! Women wanted breezy bloomers better for peddling. As one magazine wrote in the 1896, “To men, the bicycle was merely just a new toy. But to women, it was the steed upon which they rode into the new world.”
Of course, it wasn’t long before men started seeing bikes as more than just a new toy, too. To them, bicycles and the behavior they were enabling with women were jarring, dangerous, threatening to the status quo. More than a century later, we can see bicycle face for what it is, for what it was. Not a medical mistake, but a deliberate tool, a strategy wielded by powerful men to put women back in their place, to make us stop pedaling. Ridiculous name aside, I think that there’s something deeper here. I think that there’s a lot we can learn about imposter syndrome from bicycle face. Both of them are strategies used to hold women back and it’s up to us to not take the bait.
The way our culture talks about imposter syndrome, you also could mistake it for a medical condition, but it’s not. Leslie Jamison wrote about the origins of the phrase in The New Yorker a few months ago, and she talked about how the two researchers who had first talked about imposter syndrome didn’t call it an imposter syndrome at all. In fact, they refer to it as imposter phenomenon. And it was based on high achieving white ladies. It was never meant to be pathologized.
Still, like bicycle face before it, imposter syndrome was rooted in misogyny. It’s no coincidence that the concept first emerged as Title IX became law and women started going to college or that it gained traction just as Roe v Wade was decided. And now that women had control over their bodies, they were starting to enter the workforce in droves. Just like bicycle face before, imposter syndrome was a reaction to women’s progress. But this time, the backlash was even more insidious, which is why today, instead of telling you how to overcome imposter syndrome, we’re going to question the whole concept.
And I want to do that by breaking down some lies we’re told about imposter syndrome, starting with the big one, that maybe there’s something wrong with you, that imposter syndrome is grounded in actual deficiency. Imagine you’re riding a bicycle up a hill and as you pedal your way to the top, you fixate on your destination and you clench your jaw. That doesn’t mean that you have bicycle face. That means you’re riding a bicycle. Imposter syndrome is based on the premise that we’re the problem. That if we feel underqualified, it’s because we are. That if we worry that we don’t have what it takes, it’s because we don’t. But in my experience, I have found that discomfort and anxiety to just be a natural human reaction.
You know, when I showed up at that fancy corporate law firm for the very first time, I had not just one, but two Ivy League post-graduate degrees, but still, I felt like everybody was speaking a different language. And that’s because they were. So many people there had unearned privileges that I didn’t. Big law firms were built by and for people who didn’t look like me. So it’s normal to feel like you don’t fit in when you don’t fit in. So as much as I love Taylor Swift, it’s me. Hi, I’m not the problem. It’s not me!
[Audience cheering and applauding.]
And it’s not my responsibility to fix the problem. That’s our second lie. That’s your job to fix yourself. If your face is flushed at the end of a bicycle ride, I wouldn’t tell you to powder your nose, but that’s pretty much what we do when it comes to imposter syndrome. That’s the message that we send to you all, that it’s your job to make it go away or at least cover it up. I’m sure you’ve heard all the tips and tricks. Get yourself a mentor, learn how to say no, power pose your way to the top. There are countless, countless books and articles out there. And yes, I’m counting my own on that list. For years, I too have been telling women how to overcome imposter syndrome. And look, none of it is bad advice, per se. I really do believe that we should focus less on being perfect and more on being brave. But all those shoulds, there’s just ultimately another burden that we put on women that is just not solving the problem.
A great example of this is the gender pay gap. You know, in the United States, the gender pay gap has not budged in two decades. Two decades. But still, we keep telling women that you all should one by one know your worth, slay your negotiation, ask for more, when instead, we should just be telling companies to pay women fairly, right?
[Audience cheering and applauding.]
Provide salary transparency, offer paid leave and childcare, both proven to close the pay gap. Companies, not individual women have the power to erase disparities overnight. Similarly though, when it comes to imposter syndrome, the unspoken assumption is that if you don’t stick up for yourself and you feel like an imposter, it’s your own fault. It’s extraordinarily unfair and it’s unhelpful if we really care about closing the gender gap. The problem, the solution, it’s just bigger than any one of us.
And that brings me to my third and final lie, which is that imposter syndrome is inevitable. So if we don’t fix ourselves, what do we do? We go to the source. The notion of bicycle face was debunked by Dr. Sarah Hackett Stevenson. She was the first ever woman admitted to the American Medical Association. She didn’t tell women to fix their bicycle face and she certainly didn’t tell them to stop pedaling. She challenged the entire premise.
When as many as 82% of women report feeling imposter syndrome, it’s hard to believe that this is just about individuals. Imposter syndrome is the result of structural inequality, not individual inadequacy. Look, I’ve sat across from some powerful dudes, CEOs, presidents, senators, you name it. And that experience has truly been a gift. Not because they are smarter than I am, but because they’re not.
[Audience cheering and applauding.]
I told you about the hundreds of thousands of girls that I’ve taught to code. Well, any one of them could run circles around these dudes. But it took me 30 years to learn this lesson. And this is why I’m sharing it with you today because right here, right now, I need you to know this. It’s never been about whether we’re qualified enough, smart enough, prepared enough. If you are here today, it is because you are. Instead, it’s always been about the political, the financial, the culture barriers that are designed to keep us out of these rooms in the first place. It’s leaders who look around and tell women the biggest problem facing you is not childcare or paid leave or misogyny. The biggest problem is you, which is all to say that imposter syndrome, it’s a distraction, it’s a strategy. It’s a way to keep our concentration on our own alleged inadequacies so we don’t turn it towards the sexism, the racism, the classism, the homophobia, the transphobia that is baked into the system in the first place!
[Audience cheering and applauding.]
Which means our job is to stay focused, to focus less on fixing ourselves and more on healing a broken world. Now, for many of you, I know this work is not new. Marginalized people, women of color, we’ve been leading the fight against systematic injustice for generations. And your generation has been fighting the status quo your whole lives. So here is the task ahead of you, class of 2023, is to know that you are more than good enough so that you can dedicate your precious limited time on the things that aren’t. My great hope is that you will want to take up this work, that you will want to build a better world than the one you inherited. And I am absolutely certain that you are up to the task because your Smith education has prepared you for this moment.
This is a special place. For the past four years, you’ve been part of a community where no team captain, no club president, no valedictorian has ever been held back because of their gender. And I know it’s bittersweet to leave that behind. But consider this, you’ve had a tiny glimpse of what the world could be, what it should be. Now bring that audacity, that agency, that authenticity to the world beyond North Hampton because you…
[Audience cheering and applauding.]
You are uniquely qualified to make that world a reality. Imposter syndrome is modern day bike face. My hope is that one day Smithies of the future will see them both as equally laughable, just two more failed attempts to hold us back. Getting there though will be the work of a lifetime. But I believe that there’s one thing you can do today on this first day of the new chapter of your life and every day moving forward, just ride your bicycle.
[Audience cheering and applauding.]
And what I mean by that is pursue what you want to pursue as imposter syndrome is just too made up words on a page because they are. Do your work, make your argument, lead your movement because there’s nothing wrong with you. It’s not your job to fix yourself, but it is your job to fix the system. And from everything I’ve heard about this class, you’re going to do a damn good job doing it.
[Audience cheering and applauding.]
Because you have what it takes to lead. And you have an entire community because if you fall, they’re right here to pick you up. So start pedaling. Feel the sun on your face. Feel the wind in your hair. Feel the joy, feel the freedom, feel the love. Congratulations class of 2023 on reaching this incredible milestone. You’re ready, go!
[Audience cheering and applauding.]
Transcript for Imposter Syndrome Is A Scheme: Reshma Saujani’s Smith College Commencement Address Licenses and Attributions
Transcript for “Imposter Syndrome Is A Scheme: Reshma Saujani’s Smith College Commencement Address” by Reshma Saujani for Smith College is included under fair use.
