Is Impostor Syndrome just for women? There are some men I can think of...

At around the same, distant time that I was meant to be studying comparative – animal – psychology, a couple of US psychologists, Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes, came up with something never yet observed in a herring gull, but frequently – they concluded – afflicting successful women: the Impostor Phenomenon.

It designated, they wrote, “an internal experience of intellectual phoniness, which appears to be particularly prevalent and intense among a select sample of high-achieving women”.

Understandably – with the concept then in development – the select sample had to be supported in identifying their feelings as imposture-related. “Evidence,” wrote Clance and Imes, “has typically emerged after an individual has been in a group or individual psychotherapy for several sessions.”

Once coined, the catchy, portmanteau label for female insecurity rapidly became as useful as you’d expect at a time when professionally successful women were unusual, often deeply unwelcome and regarded, unless they were teachers or nurses, as freaks. Clance and Imes were operating in an academic world not much advanced from the one described in Meg Wolitzer’s The Wife, where talented female students eagerly internalise the condescension of less able male contemporaries.

Or as the authors put it, in 1978: “Since success for women is contra-indicated by societal expectations and their own internalised self-evaluations, it is not surprising that women in our sample need to find explanation for their accomplishments other than their own intelligence – such as fooling other people.”

It might have been predicted, then, that as women progressed educationally and at work, there would be diminishing evidence of the impostor phenomenon (or syndrome), a colourful term for a non-pathological condition that, arguably, did little more than codify the impact of historical sex discrimination and stereotyping. Or is it possible, since self-doubt is also reported (at least, privately) by men, that some level of what Clance and Imes described is not so much female deviation as the responsible, admissible norm: a natural reaction to pressure and high expectations in anyone not drunk on entitlement, conceit and privilege?

Shouldn’t Jacob Rees-Mogg, for instance, be introduced to self-doubt? Who has the most unrealistic sense of their own competence: someone who fears public speaking or Boris Johnson, informing his more accomplished staff: “They love it when I talk French”?

In fact, why not use the Clance Impostor Syndrome Self-assessment Tool, then decide which might be the more desirable accompaniment to, say, prime ministerial ambition: the classifiably impostorish “Sometimes I’m afraid others will discover how much knowledge or ability I really lack” or our previous leader’s “I think I’d be rather good at it”.

Given the relative collateral damage, there’s surely a case for more research into the extent of impostorism’s opposite, the phenomenon whereby a preening fool – let’s call him ex-Brexit secretary Dominic Raab – sees no conflict between high office and his self-certified ignorance. One might name this immoderate male complacency – if it did not suggest a purely British, class-based aetiology – Eton Phenomenon or, after its most celebrated case, Cameron Syndrome.

Michelle Obama has recently hinted at the alarming prevalence of CS. “I have been at probably every powerful table that you can think of,” she told British schoolgirls. “I have worked at non-profits, I have been at foundations, I have worked in corporations, served on corporate boards, I have been at G-summits, I have sat in at the UN: they are not that smart.”

On the same book tour, however, Obama also submitted to the public ritual whereby a brilliant and high-status woman is expected to out herself as a lifelong Impostor Syndrome sufferer. “I still have a little Impostor Syndrome, it never goes away,” she said, echoing previous IS confessions by, in no particular order, and to name only a few: Emma Watson, Arianna Huffington, Lena Dunham, Tina Fey, Maya Angelou, Lady Gaga and Sheryl Sandberg. True, given recent revelations, Sandberg may have unexpected limitations, but they are not of the kind cited in Lean In, when exam success at Harvard proves no remedy to besetting insecurity. “Every time,” she writes, in a passage cherished by fellow sufferers, “I didn’t embarrass myself – or even excelled – I believed that I had fooled everyone yet again. One day soon, the jig would be up.”

For whatever reason, this sort of self-abasing account from famous women admitted to elite institutions has so far found a more receptive audience than more critical, potentially more helpful reports, by other outsiders, on the public nuisance represented by over-promoted CS sufferers.

Expertly done – when they aren’t just a variation on a top model’s “I was always the ugly kid” – women’s claims of inner insecurity may be, of course, disarming, and certainly less embarrassing, when proofs of femininity are required, than material about cookies/housekeeping. Just last week, the Mail offered this, on May’s husband: “The City banker sees it as his duty to back her rather than expect his tea on the table.” May had already, in a previous crisis, obliged with vintage stuff about putting on the washing.

As with laundry confessions, accounts of Impostor Syndrome are not, you notice, extracted from prodigiously successful men (except for Tom Hanks); not even now, when research confirms that feelings of inadequacy can affect both sexes. Maybe, as with May’s tales from the spin-cycle, it would better advance sex equality if celebrated women held back from reinforcing the idea, promulgated since 1978, that this condition principally afflicts – not unlike period pains or the menopause – only half of the working population.

Mercifully, if survivors really must mention it, IS does appear to be treatable. Sufferers, male or female, can benefit from Ms Clance’s therapy and exercises, or – as a last resort – by stopping being so high-achieving. Like gout, IS seems to leave huge parts of the population entirely untouched.

• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist