“Amazing women’s intuition at work here. I love how you just sense these things.”
My jaw clenches before I can stop it. I grip my presentation clicker tighter, forcing a polite smile. “Actually, it’s called predictive modeling.” The words come out too sharp, or maybe just sharp enough.
I click to the next slide, but the damage is done. Six months of research — countless nights analyzing our client’s data, running statistical models, validating every conclusion — reduced to mystical female powers in seven words.
In those seconds, I feel the weight of every late night I spent perfecting these models, every weekend sacrificed to verification, every moment invested in building expertise that apparently looks like magic to those who refuse to see the work.
My hands are still shaking when I pack up my laptop. The executive team files out, nodding approvingly. They loved the analysis. They just don’t believe it came from analysis. They believe it came from some innate feminine gift, as if technical mastery were somehow less impressive than mystic intuition.
That was last month. Each time something like this happens, I think I’ve developed immunity to how angry it makes me.
I haven’t.
How it follows me everywhere
In tech, where I’ve spent my career building complex systems and predictive models, this dismissal cuts especially deep. It’s not just about individual recognition — it’s about the systematic way women’s technical expertise gets transformed into something softer, more mystical, less worthy of professional respect.
When a male colleague presents data analysis, it’s skill. When I do it, it’s a “knack.”
The pattern stretches back decades, following me from the elementary school office to the corporate boardroom. I remember when my son was young, forgetting his math homeword at home. I rushed it to his school, walking into the front office just as his teacher greeted me.
“Moms always know, don’t they?” she said with a warm smile.
In that moment, I felt the first seeds of what would become a familiar frustration — the way people insisted on seeing magic where there was only attention to detail, intuition where there was only careful observation.
The memory still makes me bristle. That same dismissive praise — moms know, wives sense, women intuit — has followed me across every domain of my life.
Fifteen years later, my ability to forecast market trends apparently comes from the same magical, inexplicable source as remembering a forgotten project. It’s as if admitting women can master technical skills would somehow diminish the achievements of others who worked just as hard to gain their expertise.
At work, the same framing plays out in different words.
How it rewrites expertise
Last week, watching another female colleague present her technical findings, I saw the familiar scene play out again. Two weeks of rigorous analysis reduced to “feminine insight” in the post-meeting commentary.
Our eyes met briefly across the conference room — that shared recognition of expertise being rewritten as instinct. The pattern is so familiar it almost feels preordained, as if we’re actors in a play we never agreed to perform.
But that’s exactly what makes it dangerous — this quiet acceptance of our own erasure. Each time we laugh along, each time we let “women’s intuition” stand in for hard-won technical expertise, we reinforce the very barriers we’re trying to break down.
We become complicit in our own diminishment, trading momentary comfort for long-term recognition.
I’ve watched this transformation happen countless times in technical meetings. A woman presents detailed data analysis, and her male colleagues nod appreciatively — not at her technical prowess, but at her supposed innate ability to “read” the data.
It’s as if acknowledging our actual expertise would somehow diminish their own. The more technical the work, the more likely it is to be recast as something mystical, something uniquely feminine, something less than the hard-earned skill it actually represents.
This rewriting of expertise doesn’t just happen in formal presentations. It creeps into code reviews, where women’s elegant solutions are attributed to a “natural feel” for clean code rather than years of programming experience.
It shows up in architecture discussions, where our carefully researched proposals are praised for their “intuitive” approach rather than their technical merit.
Each instance reinforces the unspoken message: women’s contributions are valuable, but not in the way that counts for career advancement.
How it distorts relationships
The cost of this reframing extends beyond professional recognition.
When my friend’s relationship ended, she told me, “You always knew.”
What I had was evidence — the withdrawal, the vague future plans, the subtle shifts in language. But until he confirmed it, I was paranoid. Now I’m psychic.
Men are logical. Women are intuitive. Until the facts arrive, and then we “always knew.” The worst part isn’t just that others impose this framework — it’s how easily I slip into using it myself, finding a strange comfort in the role of the mystical feminine seer.
Sometimes it feels easier to be magical than to be methodical, to let them believe in feminine mysteries than to demand recognition for feminine minds.
I catch myself doing it too — attributing my own careful observations and analytical thinking to some nebulous “feeling.” It’s seductive, this idea that we possess some special insight that others can’t understand.
But every time I indulge in this narrative, I’m undermining the very recognition I fight for in my professional life.
How expertise becomes invisible
The numbers don’t lie. My analysis of my client’s system architecture reveals major inefficiencies. Months of modeling different designs, checking and rechecking conclusions.
The CTO nods along in the presentation, taking notes. For a moment, I feel that rare professional satisfaction — they’re listening.
Two days later, my male colleague presents his own analysis — different problem, same depth of research, same level of technical rigor.
After his meeting, I overhear our manager describing him to another executive. “He’s incredibly analytical. Really understands the data.”
Later that afternoon, the same manager stops by my desk. “You’ve got great instincts for this kind of work,” he says. “A natural intuition for systems thinking.”
I smile tightly, the contrast too obvious to ignore. His skill is logic. Mine is luck.
The pattern is so familiar it almost feels preordained. Not malicious, just automatic. A different framing for the same expertise, one leading to credibility, the other to condescension.
In technology, where precision and logic are supposedly paramount, this persistent recasting of women’s technical expertise as intuition becomes particularly jarring. It’s not just about individual recognition — it’s about who is seen technical authority.
When expertise becomes “intuition,” technical credentials become invisible, and career advancement follows suit.
How the cycle shifts
Now, when colleagues praise my intuition, I walk them through my analytical process. When my work is attributed to instinct, I detail the skills and knowledge that informed my conclusions.
“Not intuition,” I say. “Methodology.”
It doesn’t always land well. Some people nod along, unfazed. Others bristle, shifting in their seats like I’ve disrupted something unspoken. I have. I’ve broken the comfortable fiction that allows them to simultaneously value our contributions while diminishing our expertise.
The discomfort in the room is palpable when I refuse to play along, when I insist on recognition for the years of study, the countless hours of practice, the rigorous application of technical knowledge that inform my work.
Mystery carries power. Letting others believe in magic can feel like an advantage.
But that seduction comes at a cost. I think about every woman in tech whose expertise gets rewritten as instinct, about every data scientist whose models become “hunches,” about every engineer whose solutions are attributed to “feminine insight.”
The comfort of feminine mystery isn’t worth the erasure of feminine intelligence. So I keep speaking up, keep correcting the narrative, keep insisting on recognition of skill over sensing.
The magic was never in our intuition. It was in our intellect all along.
