This is a guest post by Dr. Caitlin McDonald, author and data analyst.  Caitlin blogs at https://inamerryhour.com/ and can be found on twitter @caitiewrites

Can I tell you a secret?  I sometimes feel like a fraud.  I work in data analytics, with an increasing role not only in crunching the numbers to get out what we want to know but also deciding on the methods about how we arrive at that knowledge.  This includes a component of considering how we should store all the stuff we use to help us know how we’re doing.  But my academic background is something completely different; most of what I do now I learned on the job.

That feeling of fraudulence isn’t unique to me; there’s even a fancy term for it: imposter syndrome.  Many people, lots of them women, look around at other qualified people and conclude that there is probably someone…