You’re a Social Identity Enthusiast (Even If You’ve Never Called Yourself One)
From an overdue hello to a deeper look at feminist critique, writing in public, and why a disruptive Substack essay struck such a nerve.
I realised I’ve never really said hello.
Huge thanks to
for the impressive photo, the pink shoes pop!(public announcement, I’m recovering from Covid - the audio is croaky).
Did you arrive midway through my blogging journey, did you go back to the beginning and read all the posts? - I wouldn’t expect you to, I rarely do, unless I fall hard for a writer, my fan girling knows no limits. I’m pleased you are here right now, my writing is an exercise in improvement, the blog should do better with age. The main reason I write here because I thought it would be a great idea to do a PhD in my late 40’s, and in my teens and 20’s I thought it would be a great idea to avoid homework and I don’t know the difference between prepositions, conjunctions, a dash and an em dash, but I do understand hyphens, I have one in my name Leila-Jane, and multiple in my career.
For your reference though, if psychologically speaking were a book you’d find it tucked between Popular Psychology and Memoir, with pages borrowed from Feminist Poetry (I love Margaret Atwoods poetry, though I have not enjoyed the dystopian books since I was made to read them for A-level English,) , a touch of Self-Help (but I am suspicious of it), and sociology (just don’t tell my PhD supervisors, sociology is not psychology)
So, hello. I’m Leila. I’m a psychologist and researcher living in the National Forest in the Midlands with my family, husband Dave who I met when I was 17 and a major source of homework avoidance, and my son Mikey (nearly 10) whose poetry I proudly share on substack notes, his english homework baffles me. I’m really selling myself as a professional writer here aren’t I?
I write from my bed mostly, that’s where my ideas are noted in my phone, then picked up the next day at the kitchen table where 99% are discarded and 1% makes it to the blog, it is my worst writing habit to hold back and edit to the point of not posting.
Our house is mostly surrounded by fields, 70 ish -inherited goldfish that will probably survive us all, and one recently rescued brown labrador/staffie dog named Steve. Say hi, he’s cute and has zero recall, he also acts before thinking which makes him the entire opposite of me.
I think and write and research about trust, identity, and what makes people feel seen or misunderstood. I like messy questions more than neat answers. This is why I’m suspicious of self help, there is no route 66 folks, think more slow travel by boat, and a river that changes it tributaries just as you were getting used to the lay of the land.
I’d like to get to know you, too. Whether you’re here for the psychology, the writing reflections, the coaching-adjacent thinking, or just to look at photos of my cute dog, I’m really glad you're here.
Professionally, I study how identity, trust, and belonging play out in online and freelance spaces, especially for women. I’m interested in what happens when people are seen before they feel safe, or scrutinised before they’re trusted. Imposter phenomenon is one of my main research areas, though I think we talk about it in overly individual terms. I see it more as a psychological response to precarious environments, not a personal defect, a phenomenon and definitely not a syndrome.
My job here is to tell you that Social identity research is just as sexy as neuroscience, because it is everywhere. And you don’t need electrical wires to figure it out.
If you’re in the business of writing, and your writing features people, even fictional ones, you’re already doing it. You’re a social identity enthusiast whether or not you’re subscribed to the theory.
The best way I can explain and explore social identity with you is through what I observe. And Substack is full of material. It’s a platform constantly defining and redefining itself: its rules, its categories, its tone. It’s not just publishing—it’s performance, belonging, soft hierarchy. Who counts. Who gets to take up space.
I wrote about this in Who Gets to Belong Here Now, a piece on the quiet group dynamics baked into the Substack feed, proving that don’t need a lab to study social cues. You just need a viral note or comment thread.
This week gave us a more volatile example. A rupture and rebuttal from Jameela Jamil, an activist, actress and presenter, who announced on her Substack that she’s done being interviewed by women. Too many, she says, show up looking for a flaw to frame, wheras men let her speak and they don’t arrive with an angle or sharpen their questions into weapons.
The essay tells the story of a breach of trust, Jamil is saying: I thought I was one of you. I no longer believe that I am.
In social identity theory, group membership isn’t just about values or labels. It’s about self-concept, the theory goes like this, we define ourselves through our affiliation. So when critique comes from someone within your perceived group, it can feel harsher and It destabilises.
Feminist theory has plenty to say about this. bell hooks called out the ways women can become enforcers of the very systems we claim to resist. Rosalind Gill has written about the postfeminist push for visibility and self-surveillance, how women are encouraged to be empowered, but only within aesthetic and emotional constraints. Jamil, isn’t saying women shouldn’t critique each other. She’s saying some critiques feel more like correction than curiosity, it’s misogynistic and upholds the patriarchy.
Psychologically speaking, the gold standard for understanding how sexism is internalised is the work of Glick and Fiske (1996), whose Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI) is one of the most widely cited tools in gender psychology. Their framework shows how sexism operates notthrough hostility, and protective or flattering attitudes, they call this benevolent sexism. The ways women are positioned as needing control, praise, or protection in order to remain acceptable. A decade or so later, we got the Szymanski et al. (2009) developed the Internalized Misogyny Scale (IMS), for the first time, this is a validated measure that allowed us to isolate and examine internalised misogyny as a distinct psychological phenomenon. The IMS gave language and structure to the ways women may devalue themselves and others, aligning with systems of gendered power and it allows us to study its psychological effects.
But as Jameela’s essay reveals on closer reading, there are layers of complexity that sit beneath any internalised misogyny scale, intersections of celebrity, media, power, and public performance. The piece wasn’t written as self-reflection, but if it had been, it might have explored directly questions of privilege and platform. And that’s where this gets personal for social identity enthusiasts, you don’t need to be celebrity-famous to benefit from social capital. If you write publicly, if your voice carries even a little, and there is someone paying or subscribing for your view, you hold a form of power. That means you’re not immune to internalised misogyny, or to reproducing the very systems you wish to critique. We could argue along with Jamil, that the journalist, in writing critically, wasn’t just doing her job, she was playing out a well-worn misogynistic pattern. One that punishes the wrong kind of woman for saying things out loud.
Of course, the journalist does have a right to look for a story. That’s part of the job, especially when interviewing a public figure who holds cultural attention and does activism.
Psychologically, the dynamic is familiar to Imposter phenomenon, where visibility is conditional, and the rules of belonging keep shifting. That’s why Jamil’s account, though blunt, taps into something real. She’s not describing interpersonal drama, she’s describing the loss of psychological safety in a space where she expected solidarity or allyship.
Criticism from outside a group can be dismissed, and we see that othering unfold in gendered language by Jamil, towards the ‘bitchy’ journalist. Social identity is so curious isn’t it? I see it as a word based psychological combat strategy. Criticism from inside rewires your internal sense of fit. That’s not softness. That’s cognitive dissonance.
Jamil’s tone is defensive. Understandably so, the criticism came from an internal group, another woman and it reqires our sense of fit when it happens. When Jamil, says she no longer wants to be examined by women looking to cut her down, she’s naming something bigger than one bad interview. She’s naming out loud a fracture in social identification.
The journalist wasn’t wrong to ask hard questions, allyship isn’t about avoiding critique, but it needs curiosity, not control. The piece leaned into contradiction without exploring context, missing a chance to ask why Jamil provokes discomfort. In reducing her to inconsistencies, it mirrored the system it could have examined: one that rewards visibility but punishes imperfection.
These tensions between trust and exposure, between critique and control are exactly what I study. And I’m excited to say that I’ve recently partnered with
at The Wilder Collective where we are going on a research journey, to take that internalised misogyny scale and test it with women in business, but also develop our own Index. – more on this to come!These issues of social identity, are also what I see writers wrestling with every time they hit publish: Will I still belong if I say this out loud?
So here are the coaching adjacent questions I’m sitting with today:
What makes critique feel like betrayal, and when is that feeling a clue rather than a distortion?
Whose voices do we trust to hold us accountable, and why?
Is there such a thing as feminist feedback, or are we still performing objectivity inside a structure that rewards conformity?
When we criticise other women, are we enacting care, or showing how well we’ve learned the rules?
And crucially, what happens to our sense of self when the people we thought were our in-group start to feel like evaluators?
Jamil’s essay isn’t subtle, I suspect that was the point, but it invites a subtler reading and one that I encourage to do, it feels less about her and more about the conditions that make her reaction feel familiar to so many. The double bind at play here is textbook: women are expected to be visible, but not too bold; credible, but not threatening; open, but not too messy. And when they inevitably get it wrong, by being too loud, too sure, too unlikeable, too critical - like the journalist , they’re called by their peers.
Social identity research helps us see that belonging is not static, we’re always negotiating it, especially in spaces that are still defining themselves, like Substack, like feminism, like freelance creative work. Identity is not a badge, it’s an interaction that needs feedback, and that feedback isn’t going to be neutral.
The sense of rupture I noticed by reading Jamil’s essay, is what happens when psychological safety collapses in plain view. That’s when imposter phenomenon stops being a background hum and becomes a full volume script: You’re not one of us. You never were.
As a psychologist, I don’t find that script irrational, it’s completely adaptive and full of data. When women say they feel like frauds, they’re often reporting on a social ecosystem that’s asking for perfection and punishing realness.
So what’s the takeaway? Not that critique is bad. Not that women shouldn’t interrogate one another. But that the quality of critique, and the frame it sits within, matters. Feedback offered without trust isn’t accountability. It’s policing, and when it comes from someone who looks like you, it hits like shame.
This is the heart of the work I do in research, with writers, creatives, and reflective professionals who are holding a question and want something more than vague advice and self help.
Coming up!
My next substack piece is called Powder & Set: The Unspoken Scripts of Women's Restrooms, it will be for paid subscribers as part of my Working Theory Series.
The next free read is through my Field Notes, and it will be on ADHD, this is essential reading for folks who write about neurodivergence, menopause etc and want to get their science and claims right.
There will be a companion paid piece that goes into recent research on claims over wellbeing interventions in schools, useful if you write about SEND or Parenting.
Here’s how you can subscribe
Ways to work with me:
Your question might be personal: Why am I hesitating here? What’s holding me back from sharing this?
Or it might live inside a piece of writing: Why doesn’t this land the way I thought it would? What’s missing? What’s the science? latest research?
That’s what Psych Insights is for.
You bring a real question. I bring a research-informed reading of what’s going on beneath the surface, drawing from social psychology, identity theory, and trust research. This isn’t editing, and it’s not coaching. It’s applied psychology for people who think, write, and create in public.
You’ll get a tailored PDF with my psychological insight on your work, what’s working, what might be getting in your way, and why. Plus a 30-minute call to explore it further. The goal is clarity, not critique. It’s designed to help you make meaningful, aligned decisions about what to say and how to say it.
Right now, I’ve opened up 10 spots at a launch price of £150. When they’re gone, they’re gone.
You can book yours at: www.leilaainge.co.uk/insight
References
Gill, R. (2007). Postfeminist media culture: Elements of a sensibility. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10(2), 147–166.
Gill, R. (2017). The affective, cultural and psychic life of postfeminism: A postfeminist sensibility 10 years on. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 20(6), 606–626.
Glick, P., & Fiske, S. T. (1996). The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory: Differentiating hostile and benevolent sexism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70(3), 491–512
Szymanski, D. M., Gupta, A., Carr, E. R., & Stewart, D. (2009). Internalized Misogyny as a moderator of the link between sexist events and women’s psychological distress. Sex Roles, 61(1–2), 101–109.