What women can learn from Kamala Harris about imposter syndrome

When Vice President Kamala Harris told “Call Her Daddy” host Alex Cooper, “there are a whole lot of women out here who … are not aspiring to be humble,” it turned some heads. It was bold — without a trace of the imposter syndrome you might expect to see from a woman under intense pressure to shatter America’s highest glass ceiling and pull the country back from the brink of extremism.

But here’s the thing: It’s not Harris who has a massive case of imposter syndrome. It’s us.

Our society has fallen for a massive imposter syndrome con — and that’s a problem we ignore at our own peril. If Democrats don’t figure out how to deal with our complicated feelings about powerful women, it could cost us this election. 

Kamala Harris’ chat on ‘Call Her Daddy’ was a big deal — but it shouldn’t have been

I’ve spoken before about how imposter syndrome is a scheme that holds women back. When we feel like we don’t belong, we delude ourselves into thinking that there’s something wrong with us, and that it’s our responsibility to “cure” our imposter syndrome. (Power pose your way to the top, girlboss!) 

But none of that is true. Feeling like you don’t belong is a totally normal response to inhabiting a space that was literally built to exclude you — whether that’s the Ivy League or the corporate boardroom or the halls of Congress.

Indulging questions about whether we’re good enough or smart enough or prepared enough is just a distraction. The best thing we can do to combat imposter syndrome is to reject the premise of the question entirely. 

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And VP Harris seems to have that figured out. She’s been saying as much for years, telling one young supporter, “You never have to ask anyone permission to lead … When you want to lead, you lead.”

Since she became the Democratic nominee, she’s imbued this race with a sense of energy that most people couldn’t have imagined just a few months ago. The enthusiasm is showing up in the polls, even as the race remains close — putting multiple battleground states back into play. 

I can’t, of course, claim to know what’s running through the Vice President’s head at the end of a long day on the campaign trail — if doubts ever manage to creep in. But, from the outside, it doesn’t look like it. She’s been a “first” everywhere, from the San Francisco district attorney’s office to the vice presidency, and yet she seems to have shed the self-imposed label of “imposter.”

But what about the rest of us? In abandoning imposter syndrome, Harris is doing the thing that many women aspire to do — I’d argue, that many women should do. Yet, in reality, many were shocked to see her soar. Watching a woman step into her power as a leader makes a lot of people uncomfortable, maybe even a little bit wary. 

Look at how the pundits have already trotted out the same tired questions about whether Harris is up for the nation’s top job: Is she ready? Is she “electable”? Will people vote for her? 

Or dig a little deeper into the polling data: voters are split pretty much evenly on the question of whether they’ll vote for VP Harris or Donald Trump. But when asked what they predict the outcome of the election will be, only 40 percent said Harris would win, while 56 percent said Trump.

In other words, voters are willing to support a qualified, woman of color vying to be president — but they don’t think that everyone else will. That holds true even among Harris’s most vocal supporters. Another survey indicated that while the vast majority of Black women say that they’ll personally support Harris, two-thirds thought the country might not be ready to elect a Black woman.

This is the danger of imposter syndrome. It’s not just that we’ve been conditioned to doubt ourselves. We’ve been conditioned to doubt each other.

And that doubt has real consequences. Studies have found that raising the question of a hypothetical woman’s electability suppresses votes for female candidates.

Academics have a term for when people decide that a candidate is doomed to fail, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy: strategic discrimination.

It’s not unlike what we saw play out during Harris’s time in the Biden administration, where persistent doubts about her (including from inside the White House) prevented her from fulfilling her full potential in the role. 

We can’t let that happen again. Not when losing this election means jeopardizing the future of IVF, abortion access, affordable child-care and much, much more.

So, with early voting already underway in many states, I have a message for everyone about to cast their ballot: stop questioning whether she can win. Stop qualifying your support for her with an asterisk. Stop fueling the imposter syndrome narrative that saps women of their power. Don’t text your group chat and say “I’m excited, but…” If you support her, don’t apologize for it. We have nothing to gain from hedging our bets on the question of whether or not she can win — but we sure as hell have a lot to lose. 

When this real estate broker defeated imposter syndrome, her confidence soared – and so did her business.

There are a lot of women out there who know what it feels like to be underestimated by powerful men. Lately, I’ve been thinking about one in particular: Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman nominated to be vice president by a major political party. In 1984, one voter described Ferraro’s candidacy this way to the New York Times: “We [women] look at ourselves and think ‘I couldn’t handle it so I don’t know if she could, either.’”

But then she paused. “Maybe that’s the wrong thing to do … men don’t do that.’’ It was wrong then, and it’s wrong now. If we want a strong woman to lead, then we need to step back and actually let her lead.

Reshma Saujani is a leading activist, the founder and CEO of Moms First, and the founder of Girls Who Code. Opinions expressed here are her own, not those of Moms First.