Women’s Intuition

I really hate the concept of women’s intuition. It’s wrong and offensive on so many levels (and in such obvious ways too!) that I can’t see how anyone can still trot the idea out without being shouted down from a thousand directions.

The first relevant thing is that any form of intuition is a terrible way to find out about the world and make decisions. Our intuitions say that heavy things fall faster than light things, that species have some magical Platonic essences, that living things have some magical essence which makes them move about, that the earth is flat and a new sun is born, that time is the same for everyone, that solids are solid all the way through — I could go on. All of these are really, really wrong. Science and rational enquiry in general are largely about doing violence to our intuitions, in order to beat them into the shape actually provided by reality.

In terms of decision-making and social situations, intuition is also far from perfect. Our intuitions say that we can tell when someone’s lying — not really. When we are in social situations we’re subject to the same host of cognitive biases that plague us daily. With respect to intuition, confirmation bias is especially damaging. It is because we remember the hits (of when our intuition worked) and forget the misses (of when it failed) that we probably get the idea that intuition is a useful tool in the first place.

There is one small way in which women’s intuition might at least have some plausibility and that’s in terms of social intuitions. While intuition is terrible at finding out the kinds of truths that are best left to science, it does perform fairly well for reading social situations, figuring out what someone is thinking and so on. At least for neurotypical people. Also, by “fairly well” I probably mean “better than chance”. It might be possible that women on average have better social reasoning. But even that is something I’m pretty skeptical of: a lot of those social tropes are just myths. For instance, there’s a trope that women speak many more words per day than men — and the supposed difference can be huge, eg. 7K for men and 20K for women. But some actual studies throw doubt on a significant difference.

But usually someone who speaks of “women’s intuition” means more — the specific implied claim is that they are privy to some “other ways of knowing” that aren’t as accessible to men. The reason usually given is that men are too focussed on linear thinking or logic or science and so forth. But there’s a trilemma here. If the suggestion is that “women’s intuition” is better than “male knowledge”, this is just science denial which is false and wrong in trying to create a barrier between women and reality. If the suggestion is that it’s worse then this is just the “wymmen aren’t logical” trope which is also false and wrong. Lastly, even if there’s a superficial attempt to argue that the two views are complementary this usually has the same problems as the first suggestion.

It is this suggestion that there’s something intrinsic to science and logic that is anathema to some “essense of woman” that’s most offensive. On this, here’s PZ Myers:

One of the most cunning tools of the patriarchy is the assignment of woo as a feminine virtue. Women are supposed to be intuitive, nurturing, accepting, and trusting, unlike those harsh and suspicious men. It’s a double-trap; women are brought up indoctrinated into believing that being smart and skeptical is unladylike and unattractive, and at the same time, anyone who dares to suggest that intuition and soothing, supportive words are often unproductive can be slammed for being anti-woman, because, obviously, to suggest that a human being might want to do more with their life than changing diapers and baking cookies is a direct assault on womanhood.

This naive imposition of unscientific modes of thought on women specifically leads to the state we have now. Assume a fundamental difference in attitude: women feel, while men think. Now declare an obvious truth: science requires rigorous thought. The conclusion follows that women will not be taking advantage of their strengths (that woo stuff) if they are trying to do science, therefore they will not be as good at science as men, and they will also be harming their femininity if they try to shoehorn their tender and passionate minds into the restrictive constraints of manly critical thinking.

Jen McCreight builds on this:

Every time a feminist treats science like some great big boogeyman, she makes all feminists and women look foolish and ignorant. Science isn’t a bunch of horny dudes in plush chairs sitting around a grandiose table commiserating about how they can best oppress women and get to poke a vagina in the process. To treat it that way by disregarding all scientific studies is simply ignorant. If someone shows me a bunch of scientific studies and I disagree, my response is not going to be a lot of hand waiving, speculation, opinion, and anecdotes. It’ll be scientific studies that contradict their findings, or critiques of the methods and analyses of those studies. One of the comments really illustrates how pervasive this woo-thinking is:

“Alas, this is why I prefer to hold up women’s intuition, which is actually a rational scientific tool of reasoning, over dude science any day. That doesn’t mean science is bad, it means that woman’s intuition is often far superior.”

No. Woman’s intuition is not far superior because it does not exist.

Indeedy.