You Belong at This Table
Why imposter syndrome is philanthropy’s most expensive hidden cost, and why Gen X women pay the steepest price
By: Senior Advisor, Leslie Gross
A $124 trillion wealth transfer is already in motion. That sum will move across generations over the next 25 years: the largest in recorded history. A meaningful share will flow through family foundations, donor-advised funds, and philanthropic portfolios.
A growing number of the people who will steward that wealth are Gen X women.
We’re already in the room. A wave of Gen X women has been appointed to lead major foundations, including the Ford Family Foundation, the Meyer Memorial Trust, and the Pohlad Family Foundation. They have the lived experience, the institutional knowledge, and in many cases, the wealth, or the imminent inheritance of it.
Despite this, a quiet, corrosive force is costing philanthropy their full engagement: imposter syndrome.This is not a personal failing. It’s a structural one. Understanding why it falls heaviest on Gen X women in philanthropy isn’t a personal confidence conversation. It’s a field-wide strategy conversation. The next chapter of American giving cannot afford to leave its most prepared generation standing at the threshold, wondering if they’re allowed to walk through the door.
What Imposter Syndrome Is, and What It Isn’t
The term “imposter phenomenon” was coined in 1978 by psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes, who studied high-achieving women who, despite “outstanding academic and professional accomplishments,” persisted in believing they had fooled everyone around them. Research since then has confirmed that up to 70 percent of people experience it at some point, and it remains disproportionately acute among those who are underrepresented in their fields.
Two distinctions matter here, and they matter especially in philanthropy.
Imposter syndrome is not the same as humility. Humility is the honest recognition that we do not know everything, that lived experience and formal credentials are both valuable, and that good grantmaking requires listening. Imposter syndrome is something else entirely: the irrational conviction that you do not belong at all, that your credentials are fraudulent, and that your perspective, however hard-earned, does not count.
One makes you a better philanthropist. The other makes you invisible.
Imposter syndrome is also not the same as pretending to be an authority on something you are not. Philanthropy has a real and distinct problem with people overstepping expertise and funding based on proximity to power rather than proximity to problems. That’s a different issue entirely. What we’re naming here is its opposite: women who have walked the ground, done the work, built the relationships and then disqualified their own knowledge before they’ve said a word.
“I felt like an imposter for the first ten years [at the Gates Foundation]. I never felt qualified to speak credibly about our work because I wasn’t professionally trained in global health policy or medicine.” Melinda French Gates
The Generation Nobody Thought to Brief
Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980, is a generation shaped by self-sufficiency born of necessity: Latchkey kids, children of divorce, teenagers who absorbed the cultural whiplash of stagflation, the AIDS crisis, and the rise of the internet before anyone had built guardrails for processing any of it. They entered workplaces in the 1990s that talked about equality, but still expected them to be grateful for the view of, if not a seat at, the table.
Then, quietly, they became the forgotten generation, bookended by the cultural dominance of Boomers and the demographic force of Millennials. They were routinely skipped in conversations about the future of philanthropy and civic leadership. Studies on next-gen donor trends frequently leap from Boomers to Millennials as if the 65 million people born in between do not exist.
They do exist.
Gen X is projected to inherit nearly $1.4 trillion per year over the next decade, more than any other generation in the near term. Over the full arc of the wealth transfer, Gen X stands to receive approximately $39 trillion. The philanthropic implications are enormous, and Gen X women are already in motion: taking over family foundations, being appointed to lead major grant-making institutions, and positioned as the demographic most likely to reshape how philanthropy operates in the next two decades.
The Compounding Weight
For Gen X women in philanthropy, imposter syndrome does not arrive as a single, identifiable pressure. It arrives as a compounding accumulation of messages, most of them delivered not by strangers but by the people and institutions closest to them.
Start with the generational messaging: Gen X was raised to prize stoicism. Claiming authority was pushy. Asking for recognition was unseemly. Add to that the structural reality of the sandwich generation. Many Gen X women are currently raising children while managing aging parents, carrying a caregiving load that leaves less bandwidth for the deliberate investment in professional identity that confidence-building requires.
Then there’s the questioning: from siblings and parents challenging decisions about family wealth, from institutional funders who ask for credentials rather than recognizing field expertise, from previous generations of philanthropic leaders who may be reluctant to yield space. The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s 2024 reporting noted that many new foundation leaders feel isolated, that boards are not always fully behind them, and that “there is no playbook.”
This is not paranoia. Marcus Walton of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations has warned that there is a real risk boards will stop looking to women and people with diverse backgrounds to lead if the field does not actively counter the forces working against them.
“It doesn’t go away, that feeling that you shouldn’t take me that seriously. What do I know? I share that with you because we all have doubts in our abilities, about our power and what that power is.”Michelle Obama
Three Ways to Dismantle the Pattern
Addressing imposter syndrome in philanthropic practice is not a matter of positive thinking alone. It requires structural support, community, and a deliberate reframing of what counts as expertise.
1. Build Accountability Kitchen Cabinets
Every philanthropic leader, especially those navigating family dynamics around inherited wealth, needs a small, trusted inner circle explicitly charged with reflecting back her competence and calling out self-undermining behavior. This is not a board of advisors. A kitchen cabinet is personal, candid, and operates outside formal institutional hierarchies. It is the colleague who says: “You just discounted everything you said with a two-sentence apology at the end. Stop.” It is Melinda French Gates’s colleague who looked at what she had built and said: you already know enough.
2. Audit What You Count as Expertise
Philanthropy tends to weight formal training and prestigious prior positions heavily, while undervaluing lived proximity to the issues being funded. For Gen X women who have built their knowledge through field immersion, community relationships, and years of watching what actually works, this creates a systematic devaluation of exactly the knowledge that makes good grantmaking possible. Name it. Challenge it. Build cultures that explicitly credit experiential expertise alongside formal credentials.
3. Reframe the Inner Critic as a Systems Problem
Psychologist Valerie Young, one of the leading researchers on imposter syndrome, argues that the most important first step is normalization: understanding that the inner critic is not evidence of your inadequacy, but a predictable response to operating in environments that were not designed for you. The questioning from funders, the family dynamics, the structural invisibility of your generation. These are not reflections of your limitations. They are conditions to be named, worked around, and ultimately changed.
A Call to the Field
The great wealth transfer is not waiting. The philanthropic challenges of the next two decades: climate, health equity, democratic infrastructure, economic mobility. These challenges need the generation that has been building the knowledge, carrying the weight, and doing the work without the recognition.
Gen X women are not the next generation of philanthropic leaders. They are the current one. What is needed now is a field-wide commitment to creating the conditions in which these leaders can step fully into what they already are: qualified, experienced, essential.
So, for the Gen X women reading this: the table you’re sitting at was not built for you, but you are there anyway. You are there because of what you know, what you’ve built, and who you’ve fought for. The imposter is not you. The imposter is the voice that tells you to stay small.
About Grant Philanthropic Advisors:
We’re an independent firm helping clients to focus and maximize their philanthropy—in turn, strengthening the fabric of our communities. Founded in 2019, we help donors move from responsive patterns of giving by assisting clients to identify values and become more strategic in their philanthropy. Our goal is to help donors to become more effective as change-makers. We work with foundations (large and small staff teams), donor advised fund holders, multi generational families, individuals, philanthropy supporting organizations and corporations to design philanthropic strategies.