Why Women in Male-Dominated Fields Still Feel Like Frauds, Even After Years of Proving They Belong There

You volunteered for the panel, you prepared for it, and you were good. You know you were good.

And now it’s midnight and you’re lying in bed running through every sentence you said, scanning for the one that might have made you sound like you didn't know what you were talking about. Your partner is asleep next to you, your chest is tight, and your brain will not stop.

You’ll probably Google “imposter syndrome” tomorrow morning. You’ll find an article that tells you to keep a wins journal, or repeat affirmations in the mirror, or list your accomplishments when the self-doubt creeps in. You might try it. But none of it is going to change the tightness in your chest, the 2am replays, or the way your shoulders climb toward your ears the second you walk into a room where you're the only woman.

I work with women in tech, engineering, aerospace, finance, academia, and other fields where they're often one of the few women in the room. Nearly every one of them describes some version of this, the relentless feeling of not being enough despite every piece of evidence saying otherwise.

And the more I've sat with their stories, the more I've come to believe that calling this “imposter syndrome" is part of the problem.

When We Call It a “Syndrome,” We Put the Problem on You

Think about what that framing does. It says: the issue is your thinking. You need to believe in yourself more, own your accomplishments, stop minimizing your success. If you could just fix the way you see yourself, you’d feel better.

But let's look at what you're responding to…

You're in a meeting with eleven people and you’re one of two women. You make a suggestion, it gets a polite nod, and the conversation moves on. Your male colleague makes a similar point eight minutes later and suddenly it’s the idea everyone’s building on. You notice this, you say nothing, and you spend the drive home dissecting whether your delivery was the problem, whether you should have been more assertive, whether you were too assertive, whether it even matters.

That’s not a syndrome. That's accurate perception. You picked up on a real dynamic and your brain is doing exactly what it's designed to do, scanning the environment, calculating risk, adjusting your behavior to stay safe in a room that has given you reasons to stay on alert.

The research is consistent on this. Women in workplaces that are 85% or more male (tech, STEM, engineering, manufacturing, etc.) show measurably different stress responses throughout the day compared to women in gender-balanced environments.

Women in male-dominated fields report significantly more workplace stress, more time spent “on edge,” more tension in their daily lives. Studies consistently find that women speak less than men in meetings regardless of their seniority, face backlash when they do speak up, and have their contributions dismissed or credited to someone else.

You're not imagining it and your body knows it. Calling it "imposter syndrome" takes a problem that exists in the room and relocates it inside your head.

The Part the “Women in Tech/STEM” Self-Help Articles Always Miss

Most advice about imposter syndrome treats it as a thinking problem. Change the thought, change the feeling. But if that worked, you would have fixed this by now, because you are excellent at thinking.

You already understand the dynamics at play. You can articulate exactly why your workplace is the way it is, who has power and who doesn't, what's bias and what's just how things are. You're not lacking insight. So why does your jaw still clench before the Monday morning standup? Why does your stomach drop when your name shows up on a meeting invite with certain colleagues?

Because what you're carrying isn't a set of incorrect beliefs waiting to be corrected. Your body developed a physical response through hundreds of small moments over months and years. The first time you were talked over and no one noticed, the time you were called "aggressive" for the same directness that got your male colleague called "decisive," the performance reviews that praised your work and then suggested you "build more relationships" in a way no one ever said to the men on your team.

Each of those moments was small enough to dismiss on its own. But your body kept the tally. And over time it learned: these environments require vigilance. Monitor how you're perceived. Rehearse before you speak. Scan for threat before you open your mouth. Stay ready.

That response doesn't live in your thoughts. It lives in the tightness in your throat before a presentation, in the shallow breathing you don't even notice anymore, in the tension across your shoulders that you've been carrying so long it just feels like your body. And because it's physical, you can't think your way out of it. You can tell yourself “I belong here” every morning and your body will still brace the second you walk into that conference room, because the bracing isn't a belief. It's something your body does automatically, below the level of conscious thought, based on what it's learned about where you spend your days.

This is why the wins journal doesn't work and the affirmations don't stick. You're applying a cognitive solution to something that isn't a cognitive problem.

The Cost That Follows You Home

The self-help articles also tend to frame imposter syndrome as a work problem. You feel like a fraud at work, so here are tools to feel more confident at work. But the women I work with aren't just struggling at work. The struggle has spread.

You've spent eight or nine hours calculating how you're perceived, moderating your tone, managing your reactions, swallowing responses you wanted to give, staying composed when you were interrupted for the third time in a single meeting. And now your kid wants to play, and you have nothing left. Or your partner asks how your day was and you say "fine" because explaining the accumulation of a hundred small moments would take more energy than you have, and also, none of them sound like a big deal when you say them out loud.

So you scroll your phone, or pour a glass of wine, or go to bed early and lie there reviewing the day, rehearsing tomorrow, running through what you should have said, planning how you'll handle it differently next time.

Your relationships get the depleted version of you. Your sleep is fragmented by a brain that won't wind down because it's still processing, still scanning, still preparing. Your weekends are spent recovering from the week just enough to get through the next one. You're physically present with the people you love but mentally still at work, still strategizing, still braced for something.

And if someone told you to quit, you'd resist, because you worked hard to get here and you're good at what you do. You don't want to leave. You want to be able to stay without it costing you everything outside of work.

Why I Work With the Body, Not Just the Story

I'm a somatic therapist and an expressive arts therapist, and I chose these approaches specifically because of what I kept seeing with high-achieving women in male-dominated fields: the insight was all there, but the relief wasn't following.

The women in tech and engineering I work with can all explain exactly what was happening in their workplaces, name the bias and misogyny, the double standards and the exhausting politics, and they had language for all of it. And they were still grinding their teeth at night, still snapping at their partners over nothing, still lying awake replaying conversations from twelve hours ago.

Somatic therapy works with what your body is holding rather than asking you to analyze it. In practice, that might mean noticing where tension shows up when you talk about a particular meeting, or paying attention to what happens in your chest and your throat when you imagine speaking up in a room full of men. It's not about relaxation and I'm never going to ask you to take three deep breaths in a conference room. It's about helping your body learn, gradually and specifically, that it can let go of the guarding it's been doing.

Expressive arts therapy gives you a way to process things that don't always have clean, linear narratives, the kind of experiences that are hard to talk about not because they're hidden but because they're diffuse. The frustration that doesn't have an obvious source, the grief of pouring yourself into a career that doesn't value you the way you've earned, the anger you've learned to swallow so smoothly you almost forget it's there. Sometimes putting paint on paper or moving through an experience in your body reaches something that words keep circling around but never quite land on.

Neither of these is a quick fix, and neither is about pretending the environment doesn't exist. The bias in your workplace is real, the double standards are real, and therapy doesn't fix those things. I would never suggest that the answer to systemic problems is individual healing.

But I can help you stop carrying the full weight of those environments in your body.

How Somatic Therapy Helps With Imposter Syndrome

This is the type of change my clients describe after a few months of working together:

Your colleague interrupts you mid-sentence in a meeting, and you pause, finish your thought, and move on. Not because you've practiced some assertiveness technique, but because your body didn't flood with adrenaline the second it happened. After the meeting you grab coffee and think about your afternoon, and it's not until you're driving home that you realize you never replayed the interaction at all.

Your partner asks about your day and you tell them something real instead of “fine.” Not the whole saga, just the thing that frustrated you, and they listen, and the conversation stays easy. Later you're on the couch together and you're there, not pretending you’re relaxed while your mind runs through tomorrow’s agenda, but sitting with your legs tucked under you watching something dumb on TV and laughing at the same parts.

You sleep through the night. Not the kind of sleep where you pass out from exhaustion and wake up already behind, but the kind where you get in bed at a reasonable hour and your body actually settles. You wake up and the first thing you think about isn't work.

The promotion comes up and you sit with it for a few days. You talk to your partner, you think about what the role would mean for your schedule, your energy, your weekends. You say yes or you say no, and either way the decision comes from what you want your life to look like rather than from the need to prove you can handle it or the fear that you can't.

You set a boundary with a colleague on Thursday, something you would have agonized about for a week six months ago, and by Friday you’ve moved on. Saturday morning you're at the farmers market with your kid and your mind is right there, picking out tomatoes, not running a background simulation of how Monday might go.

The feeling of being on-edge quiets down. Not because the environment has magically changed, but because your body has learned it can hold its ground without bracing for impact every time you walk through the door. And the energy you used to spend on self-monitoring, rehearsing, and replaying becomes energy you can put toward the things you care about.

You’re Actually Not an Imposter

You’re someone whose body got very good at protecting you in environments that required protection. That response made sense when it developed and it makes sense now. But it’s costing you more than it should, and it doesn't have to stay this way.

The shift doesn't come from thinking differently about yourself. It comes from giving your body a different experience, one where the bracing can soften, the vigilance can ease, and you can be in a room without your whole system going on alert before you've said a word.

That's the work I do. And if any of this sounds familiar, I’d love to work with you.

I'm Jeniffer Duncan, a licensed therapist in Oregon and Washington. I work with women in tech, engineering, finance, academia, and other male-dominated fields through somatic therapy and expressive arts therapy. All sessions are virtual. Contact me to talk about whether this is the right fit.