Why Does Imposter Syndrome in Women Entrepreneurs Get Worse the More You Succeed?

A client came to me last year after closing the biggest deal of her career,

and instead of celebrating, she spent the week convinced the client would eventually realize she'd gotten lucky. That reaction is one I've seen play out again and again in my coaching practice with women entrepreneurs and professionals: the bigger the win, the louder the voice insisting it doesn't count.

If you've ever accepted a compliment on a project and immediately thought of three reasons you didn't really deserve it, you already know the feeling. It has a name, and it's one of the more counterintuitive patterns in business psychology.

Why Imposter Syndrome in Women Entrepreneurs Gets Worse With Every Milestone

You'd expect confidence to rise in a straight line as you gain experience. In practice, it doesn't. A 2024 Fortune interview with Qualtrics workplace psychologist Ben Granger explained that confidence and competence move on separate timelines: early on, people tend to feel confident despite limited experience, but as real expertise builds, they start noticing everything they still don't know, and confidence temporarily dips well below where their actual skill level sits. Eventually, with enough time, confidence catches back up. Many capable entrepreneurs stall out in that dip, mistaking a normal and temporary gap for permanent evidence that they don't belong.

The term itself dates back to 1978, when psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes published research describing what they called the "imposter phenomenon" in a pattern they noticed specifically in high-achieving women: despite clear, measurable evidence of competence, these women consistently credited their success to luck, timing, or charm, while quietly believing they'd fooled everyone into overestimating them.

Clance later said she preferred the word "phenomenon" to "syndrome," since a syndrome implies a clinical condition, while this is a widely shared psychological pattern rather than a diagnosis. Almost fifty years later, the pattern hasn't gone anywhere. A 2024 Korn Ferry survey found that 71 percent of U.S. CEOs report experiencing imposter syndrome, which tells you plainly that reaching the top of an organization does not resolve the feeling of not belonging there.

What It Looks Like Once You're Actually Succeeding

The pattern rarely announces itself as low self-esteem. More often, it shows up dressed as humility, caution, or being a perfectionist, which makes it easy for both the person experiencing it and everyone around her to miss.

Emily Lyons, founder of the event-staffing agency Femme Fatale Media Group and the matchmaking service Lyons Elite, built her first company from $80 and a cracked laptop into a multimillion-dollar agency serving clients like L'Oréal and Sony. In a widely shared post, she described crying in a parking lot the first time she made real money, not from happiness but from fear she'd lose it all. As she put it, wealth didn't erase the fear, it just exposed it more clearly, and she had to consciously relearn that her success wasn't a fluke that could be taken back at any moment.

Katrina Lake took Stitch Fix public in a $120 million IPO, one of the few women to lead a company to a successful listing. She has said that growing up without female role models in business contributed directly to her own imposter feelings, despite every external marker suggesting she'd more than earned her seat.

Closer to the ground, I've worked with a coaching client who ran a boutique branding agency and quietly priced her services roughly 30 percent below market rate for nearly two years, even as her client roster grew to include recognizable national brands. She'd tell herself she wasn't ready to charge what more established designers charged, despite delivering the same caliber of work. It wasn't a pricing strategy. It was the imposter pattern setting her rates for her, and it cost her real revenue for two full years before a mentor pointed out the gap between her portfolio and her invoices.

The Founders Who Feel It Most

Imposter syndrome touches people across every industry and gender, but it doesn't land evenly. A 2020 KPMG Women's Leadership Summit study found that 75 percent of female executives have experienced imposter syndrome over the course of their careers, a statistic still widely cited today, and a notably higher share than reported among their male peers. Researchers point to a combination of factors: women are statistically less likely to see people who look like them in leadership, entrepreneurship language itself was built around traditionally masculine imagery like "trailblazer" and "captain of industry," and women tend to receive more scrutiny and less benefit of the doubt when they do take up space.

Research published in early 2025 on women transitioning from traditional employment into entrepreneurship found the pattern particularly pronounced during that specific shift, when the external validation of a title and a paycheck disappears and gets replaced by the much less certain feedback loop of running your own business. Mentorship, peer networks, and structured support consistently showed up as the factors that helped women move through it rather than stay stuck in it.

Signs You're Dealing With More Than Modesty

Everyone feels a flicker of self-doubt occasionally. The pattern becomes worth addressing directly when it starts steering real decisions rather than just passing through as a feeling.

• You attribute your wins to luck, timing, or other people, while attributing your setbacks entirely to your own shortcomings.

  
  

• You over-prepare dramatically for situations you're already qualified to handle, because you don't trust your existing knowledge to be enough.

  
  

• Compliments and positive feedback bounce off you, while a single piece of criticism sticks for days.

  
  

• You hesitate to raise your prices, apply for the opportunity, or claim the title you've already earned, waiting for a level of certainty that never quite arrives.

  
  

• Achieving a goal brings relief rather than satisfaction, followed quickly by a new worry about maintaining it.

  
  

None of these signs mean you're not capable. They mean the internal story running underneath your capability needs some honest examination.

How Coaching Helps You Build Confidence That Sticks

Coaching won't erase every doubt, and it isn't meant to. A healthy amount of humility keeps you sharp. What a transformational coach can help with is the distortion: the gap between the evidence of your competence and the story you've been telling yourself about it.

As a life coach for women entrepreneurs, this is where the ASI Method™ spends real time: not manufacturing false confidence, but closing the gap between who you actually are professionally and who you're still privately afraid you might be.

You don't need to wait until the doubt disappears entirely before you claim what you've built. Most successful people never fully stop feeling it. They just stop letting it write the invoice, decline the opportunity, or set the ceiling on what they'll ask for.

Ready to Close the Gap Between Your Doubt and Your Track Record?

If this pattern sounds familiar, you don't have to keep working around it alone. Let's talk through what's driving the doubt and what it would take to finally trust what you've already proven 👉 Book your free 30-minute chat here

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