Once again, Christine Lagarde is breaking the glass ceiling — and facing a chorus of doubters. They have valid concerns this time.

Ms Lagarde is not a monetary policy specialist or an economist by training, skills which, in a perfect world, ought to be part of the job description to succeed Mario Draghi at the helm of the European Central Bank. The eurozone crisis underlined how critical the institution is to the still incomplete currency union and emphasised the outsized role of the ECB chief in swaying the bank’s council over untested policies.

Yet her nomination conveys a positive message to women having to deal with another kind of critic: the inner voice of self-doubt psychologists call imposter syndrome. This feeling of “not being up to the job”, first described by US researchers Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes in 1978, disproportionately affects women in senior jobs and partly explains why they often hold back from pursuing top leadership roles.