The doubt you feel may be an accurate reading of a biased room, not a defect in you
The usual advice is kind and sounds reasonable. You feel like a fraud in rooms you earned your way into, so the trouble must be your inner voice. Hire a coach. Start a file of your wins. Remind yourself, again and again, that you have every right to be here. The name for all of this is imposter syndrome, and most women executives across the state, from the Bay Area to Los Angeles to the Central Valley, have been handed it at least once.
Here is where the problem with the name actually lies. The unease you feel in those rooms is often not a malfunction. It is an accurate reading of how the room is treating you, and calling it a defect sends you to fix the wrong thing.
One. That label names a mood rather than anything happening in the office.
In 2021, Tulshyan and Burey argued in Harvard Business Review, under a headline that says plenty: "Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome." Their case is that the diagnosis takes a problem built into the system, the way certain people get received at work, and moves it inside the individual. Once it lives in you, the repair is yours to pay for, and the room stays exactly as it was.
Two. Colleagues in the room are genuinely perceiving you in a new light.
According to the 2025 Women in the Workplace report produced by McKinsey and LeanIn, female leaders are mistaken for a junior employee at double the rate of male leaders. In a 2025 Deloitte survey covering 7,500 women in 15 countries, 28% reported facing microaggressions during the previous twelve months. Walk into a meeting in Sacramento or San Diego and sense that some people are not sure you belong there, and that is not a distortion. Some of them are not sure. Your instrument is working.
Three. Were self-assurance the root issue, then coaching alone would have eliminated the disparity.
Based on those same McKinsey and LeanIn findings, for each 100 men advanced into manager roles, only 93 women are, and among women of color the figure drops to 74. It also shows that the gap in who wants the promotion is small, with 80% of women against 86% of men, and that it disappears when women get the same support men do. Confidence issues persist even after a new boss is brought in. A support problem does.
Where the traditional guidance still applies in practice
Some doubt is simply new-job doubt, and it is useful. During the opening three months of a larger role, it is normal to feel somewhat unsteady, as though you have not yet found solid ground. A wins file is a fine thing to keep. Recognizing the emotion itself is not where things go wrong. The error lies in presuming that the emotion always originates with you.
Options to consider instead
The next time this surfaces, work through a simple two-column review. Column one asks: what did I genuinely do wrong? Column two asks: how did the people in the room behave? When column one is blank and column two records something like "addressed me by the assistant's name" or "my idea was embraced only once a man repeated it," then what you are facing is not a personal failing. You have evidence.
Then state the evidence once, out loud, to one person who can act on it. Something like: "I saw that my recommendation gained momentum only after Tom said it again. Next time, I would like to be the person who presents it." Saying this is not whining. It is a fix, raised at the point where such fixes get made.
Therefore, when someone attaches the label to you, begin by asking them this: what precisely is happening in the room that produced this feeling in me?