Gendered Brain Hack: Society Programs Women To Underestimate Themselves

I’ve often met women who begin their sentences with an apology. “I’m not sure if this makes sense, but,” or “This might sound silly, but,” They say it in classrooms, in boardrooms, even in living rooms where they should have felt safest to take up space. It’s not that they lack confidence; it’s that confidence, for women, has always been a quiet rebellion.

When I first read the phrase “imposter syndrome” in graduate school, I felt as if someone had finally named the thing that had followed me for years, that persistent inner voice whispering, 'You just got lucky.' But here’s what struck me later: that voice had a gender.

Because when I spoke to my male peers, they didn’t seem haunted by it in quite the same way. They failed, recalibrated, and moved on. The women, on the other hand, turned their smallest mistakes into evidence against their own worth. One misspoken line in a presentation could spiral into days of self-doubt. One critique could feel like confirmation that they never belonged there in the first place.

Gendered brain hack

Over the years, I’ve come to call it the "gendered brain hack," not a neurological difference, but a psychological conditioning so subtle and so deep that it rewires how women think about themselves long before they even know the word “gender.”

When you look closely, this “programming” starts early.

A little girl gets praised for being obedient, helpful, sweet. A little boy is praised for being curious, brave, assertive. The boy’s interruptions are called leadership; the girl’s questions, defiance. And just like that, the code is written.

By the time she’s a teenager, she’s fluent in self-surveillance. She has learned that confidence without caution looks like arrogance, and ambition without apology looks like trouble. So she learns to soften her words, to lower her hand just a second too late, to shrink her certainty so others feel comfortable.

In classrooms, I’ve watched brilliant girls look down when they know the right answer, afraid to sound too sure. I’ve watched women in offices preface their ideas with “I might be wrong, but…” only for the same idea to sound suddenly convincing when repeated by a man a few minutes later.

And I’ve seen the quiet ache that follows, not anger, but fatigue; the fatigue of constantly negotiating your voice with the world.

Second guesses and countless apologies

A few years ago, I met an engineer named 'R', who told me she had almost dropped out of her program in the second year because a professor told her she “didn’t have the temperament for problem-solving.” She laughed as she recalled it, but her laughter carried the weight of an old wound.

“I used to cry in the washroom,” she said. “Every time I made an error, I thought maybe he was right.”

Today, she leads a team of twenty men. When I asked her how she pushed through, she said something that stayed with me: “I stopped trying to be confident. I started trying to be accurate.”

It was her way of hacking the hack.

The truth is, women’s self-doubt isn’t a personal defect. It’s a cultural inheritance. It’s been polished over centuries of stories that glorified female modesty and punished female assertion. It’s written into fairytales where the kindest women are silent and the clever ones are punished. It’s enforced in homes where ambition sounds beautiful on sons but abrasive on daughters.

We internalise these scripts in ways that feel natural, until one day, they begin to feel suffocating.

I remember a workshop I once attended on leadership and voice. The trainer asked everyone to read a passage aloud. When my turn came, I hesitated. My throat tightened, and the words stumbled out too softly. Afterwards, she looked at me and said gently, “You sound like someone seeking permission to exist.”

That one line unsettled me for weeks. Because she was right. Somewhere between wanting to be taken seriously and not wanting to appear arrogant, I had learned to dilute myself.

It’s a strange thing, this social engineering of self-doubt, how it masquerades as humility and hides behind politeness. It doesn’t tell women you can’t; it whispers are you sure you should?

And that whisper is far more dangerous than an open prohibition. Because it doesn’t come from the outside anymore. It moves in, sets up camp in your own head, and speaks to you in your own voice.

But there’s another side to this story, the women who have begun to debug the system.

I’ve seen it in the journalist who interrupts a panel of men mid-sentence, calmly taking back her time. I’ve seen it in the young coder who mentors teenage girls to speak about their projects without apology. I’ve seen it in mothers who now tell their daughters, “Be kind, but don’t be small.”

These are acts of quiet, radical reprogramming.

To unlearn self-doubt is not about replacing it with arrogance. It’s about neutrality, being able to look at your work, your worth, without the distorting mirrors society hands you. It’s about reclaiming the voice that was always yours before you learned to edit it for approval.

Sometimes I think of this process like restoring an old painting. Beneath layers of dust, the old compliments that were really cages, the advice disguised as warnings, there’s a vivid, original colour waiting to breathe again.

The colour of a woman who doesn’t measure her value by how softly she speaks or how liked she is.

There’s a quote by the writer Adrienne Rich that returns to me often: “When a woman tells the truth, she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.”

Perhaps that’s what undoing the gendered brain hack really looks like: women telling the truth, not just about the world, but about how it has shaped their own self-perception.

When I see young women today speaking on panels, leading companies, writing books, I know they carry the same old whispers in their heads: be nice, not loud; be careful, not bold. But I also see them smiling and doing it anyway.

And that small act of doing it anyway is how revolutions begin.

Because if society can teach women to underestimate themselves, women can teach each other to stop listening.

And maybe, that’s the real brain hack the world isn’t ready for yet.

Authored by Vaishnavi Roy, author and columnist. | Views expressed by the author are their own.