The doubt you feel may be an accurate reading of a biased room, not a defect in you
Standard advice tends to come across as soft and sensible. You feel like a fraud in rooms you fought your way into, so your inner dialogue must be the culprit. Hire a coach. Start a list of your accomplishments. Tell yourself you belong until it sticks. Most women leaders have been given the term imposter syndrome at some point, and it is a convenient name for all of this.
The trouble with that name is that the unease you feel in those meetings is frequently not a glitch. It can be a correct response to how the room is treating you, and labeling it a personal defect steers you toward repairing the wrong thing.
Start here. The term locates the problem in a feeling, not in the workplace
In a 2021 Harvard Business Review piece titled "Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome," Tulshyan and Burey argued that the diagnosis takes a structural issue, how particular people get received at work, and moves it inside the individual. Once the problem is filed under your psychology, you are the one expected to fix it, and the office can carry on unchanged.
Next up. The room is in fact reading you differently
According to McKinsey and LeanIn's 2025 Women in the Workplace study, women in leadership roles are roughly two times more likely than men to be mistaken for a junior employee. Among 7,500 women surveyed across 15 countries for Deloitte's 2025 research, 28% reported experiencing microaggressions during the prior twelve months. So if you enter a meeting in a Columbus office tower and sense that some people are unsure you belong at the table, that sense is not a distortion. Some of them, honestly, are not yet sure of themselves. Your read is accurate.
Finally. If confidence were the root cause, coaching should have closed the gap
That same McKinsey and LeanIn dataset reveals that while 100 men advance to manager, only 93 women do, and among women of color the figure drops to 74. The gap in who wants the promotion is small, with 80% of women and 86% of men interested, and it shrinks when women receive the same sponsorship men do. A confidence shortfall would not disappear just because the reporting line changed. A support shortfall would.
Situations in which the traditional guidance still holds up
Some of the doubt is ordinary new-role nerves, and that kind is useful. The first ninety days in a bigger seat should feel a little unsteady. A running list of wins is worth keeping. Overlooking the emotion itself is where people go wrong. Assuming that the emotion always originates from something about you is where people go wrong.
A better way to check
Whenever that feeling surfaces again, take a moment and sort it out using two columns. Under the first heading, list the specific things you may have actually done wrong. In column two, write what the room did. If column one is blank and column two reads "called me by the admin's name" or "my idea got traction once he repeated it," you are not dealing with a syndrome. You have evidence.
Then name that evidence aloud, once, to one person who has the power to act on it. For instance: "My recommendation picked up momentum only once Tom repeated it." "Next time, I would like to be the person who walks everyone through it." Saying this is not a complaint. It is a fix, applied in the setting where fixes belong.
Therefore, when someone in a Columbus or Central Ohio meeting pins that label on you, start by asking them what the room is doing that produces this feeling in you.