Fewer than 13% of Morocco's senior executives are women : the problem may not be in your head

For fifteen years or so, one explanation has done nearly all the work of filling that gap : women hold themselves back. They doubt their own legitimacy, hand their successes to luck, hesitate before applying. "Impostor syndrome" has become the house vocabulary of female ambition, sold in workshops, staged on conference panels, packaged into coaching programmes.

The story has one real merit. It names an experience thousands of women recognise on the spot. It also has a flaw that recent research documents with growing precision : it moves the weight of the problem. A question about how power is distributed becomes a question about personal confidence. And the repair job is assigned to women rather than to the places that employ them.

Where does the concept actually come from ?

From 1978, and under a different name from the one in circulation today. The American psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes published in *Psychotherapy : Theory, Research and Practice* an article called "The Imposter Phenomenon in High Achieving Women". Working from their clinical practice, they described an inner experience of intellectual fraudulence in women who were, by every external measure, high performers : the conviction of having fooled everyone, and the dread of the day someone notices.

Two details matter, and both got lost somewhere between the 1978 paper and the conference circuit.

The first is the word. Clance and Imes wrote about a *phenomenon*, not a *syndrome*. The distinction is not cosmetic. In medicine, a syndrome denotes a coherent set of clinical signs. The impostor phenomenon has never appeared in any psychiatric diagnostic manual and is not a pathology. Pauline Rose Clance's professional website, which catalogues her work and the measurement scale she designed, uses the term phenomenon throughout.

The second is who was studied. The 1978 article rested on a clinical sample of women in the United States, largely white, university educated and from privileged backgrounds. As the starting point for a clinical observation, that is entirely legitimate. As the foundation for a general theory of female ambition worldwide, rather less so.

What is actually being measured ?

The measured gap between women and men is real. It is also modest. That is the central finding of the widest synthesis available to date.

In 2024, Paul C. Price, Brandi Holcomb and Makayla B. Payne, of California State University, Fresno, published in *Current Research in Behavioral Sciences* a meta-analysis covering 108 studies and more than 42,000 participants. Women do report higher impostor feelings than men. The effect size, Cohen's d, is 0.27. In statistical terms that sits between small and moderate, and the female and male distributions overlap very widely.

Put plainly : the difference exists, and it is nowhere near large enough to carry thirty-four points on its own.

Two secondary results from the same meta-analysis deserve a look. The gap between women and men is roughly half as large in studies conducted in Asia as in those conducted in Europe and North America, which points to a substantial cultural component. And it shifts with the measurement instrument used : the scales do not capture quite the same thing, which weakens the idea of a single, well defined object.

That weakness is flagged explicitly elsewhere. A meta-analysis of the impostor phenomenon in medical education, published in *Advances in Health Sciences Education*, covers 34 studies and 9,550 participants and arrives at a pooled prevalence of 49%, with extreme heterogeneity between studies. Its authors judge the conceptual and methodological foundations of the construct to be unstable. A prevalence that swings between extremes depending on the threshold chosen and the scale used is not measuring very much.

Set that against the figures that circulate in the media. The 2025 barometer on entrepreneurship and gender inequality (Entrepreneuriat et inégalités de genre), run by the Créatrices d'Avenir scheme in the Île-de-France region, reports that 93% of the women business leaders surveyed (615 women) have experienced impostor syndrome. The same survey reports that 56% of them have faced sexist discrimination. The first figure went everywhere. The second travelled far less, though it is the more verifiable of the two, and the one you can actually do something about.

Why does the research accuse the concept of psychologising ?

The most widely circulated criticism fits in a sentence : what gets called a feeling of imposture is often an accurate reading of the situation, not a distortion of it.

In February 2021, Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey published in *Harvard Business Review* an article titled "Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome". Their argument is direct. For many women, feeling foreign to the place they occupy is not an illusion but, in their phrasing, "the result of systemic bias and exclusion". The individual diagnosis, they write, places the burden of adjustment on the very people already subject to the bias, and lets organisations off the hook.

They add a charge aimed at the concept's lineage. Formulated in the 1970s from a narrow sample, it was built without regard for racism, class origin or the status of being an outsider, and it converted a fairly universal professional discomfort into a female trait requiring correction.

The reasoning is easy enough to check. A woman is the only one of her rank at the table. Her contributions are attributed to the man beside her. She is assessed on results delivered while her colleagues are assessed on potential assumed. The sense of not belonging, at that point, is not a perceptual error. It is information about the environment. Treating that information as a confidence defect amounts to asking her to read reality less accurately.

One qualification is needed here, and the research does not settle it. Nothing establishes that impostor feelings are *only* a reflection of external bias. Perfectionism, anxiety and self-esteem are robustly associated with them, independently of context. The structural critique does not claim the inner experience is fake. It claims that calling it a "syndrome" and stopping there is an attribution error.

What do the Maghreb figures say ?

The Maghreb offers the sharpest case of the mismatch between qualification and power, because women there are heavily educated and very thinly present wherever decisions get made.

The figures in Algeria

• Female economic activity rate : 19.2%, against 63.9% for men (National Office of Statistics, Office national des statistiques, ONS, October 2024 data) • Women hold 55% of intellectual professions (ONS) • They account for only 11.6% of the occupational group "directors and managers" (ONS)

The Algerian sequence reads itself. A majority in the professions of expertise, a narrow minority in the professions of decision. No feeling of illegitimacy explains a drop from 55% to 11.6%. Selection at the door of leadership does.

In Tunisia the filter shows up earlier still, the moment women enter the labour market. The 2025 annual report of the Central Bank of Tunisia puts unemployment among women with higher education degrees at 30.5%, against 11.7% for men holding the same level of qualification. At equal qualification, a Tunisian woman is close to three times less likely to be employed than a Tunisian man. No self-confidence survey produces that ratio.

Company boards tell a different and more encouraging story. According to the annual corporate governance report on companies listed on the Tunis Stock Exchange, the share of women on boards rose from 13.5% in 2020 to 17.7% in 2024, then to 19.5% in 2025 : 139 women directors across 714 seats, spread over 75 companies. Twelve listed companies still have no women on their board at all. The progress is real and steady. It came from governance rules and institutional pressure, not from a collective improvement in Tunisian women's self-esteem.

Which may be the most economical argument the structural reading has. When the figures move, they move because the rules changed.

The movement is continuing. In 2025, the Tunisian Ministry of Women and the German international cooperation agency GIZ worked, at the headquarters of the Centre for Research, Studies, Documentation and Information on Women (Centre de recherches, d'études, de documentation et d'information sur la femme, CREDIF), on a national strategy to promote women's leadership in small and medium enterprises by 2035. Here too the targets are access to finance, to markets and to networks. Not the psychology of the women running the businesses.

Should the concept be thrown out ?

No. It should be cut back to its actual size. The impostor phenomenon describes an inner experience that is identifiable, imperfectly measurable, and common enough to be worth a name. What it cannot do is serve as a general explanation for career gaps.

The practical distinction states itself. When an overqualified woman hesitates to apply for a post she is already effectively doing, the vocabulary of imposture illuminates something real. When an organisation counts 47% female graduates and 13% female executives, it illuminates nothing at all. It looks away.

The risk for a reader is not recognising the feeling in herself. It is accepting that something be handed to her as inner work when it belongs to a collective negotiation : explicit promotion criteria, pay transparency, the composition of selection committees, shared parental leave, mandatory female presence on governing bodies.

The Sultane view

Inhabiting your role is not a matter of convincing yourself that you deserve it. It is sometimes a matter of noting, very clearly, that the organisation never planned for you to occupy it, and of no longer mistaking that information for personal doubt.

The constraints are real. In a region where fewer than one woman in three takes part in the labour market, where domestic work remains largely unshared and where access to finance is still unequal, the instruction to "take your place" rings hollow if it stops at the individual.

The Tunisian board figures say something useful all the same. They moved by six points in five years, and not because women grew more assured. Because the rules changed, and because somebody counted.

Houda Chouk