"You don’t know you’re good. You feel you just maybe made it by accident—you know, the imposter syndrome… ‘And, gee, I didn’t do well on this test, so that proves I should drop out.’ Those thoughts really bind women from the very start. You don’t have that drive that the guys do… A lot of the guys don’t know the jargon either, but, if necessary, they’ll fake it… Whereas, you ‘fess up when you don’t know, and don’t expect them to value your opinion if you do know. You don’t have that confidence that you can do this… and that’s what you need."

Female white engineering student. Elaine Seymour and Nancy M. Hewitt. Talking About Leaving: Why Undergraduates Leave The Sciences (1997), p. 105.