About this Research Topic
Intuition, along with the unconscious intelligence on which it depends, is increasingly a topic of academic interest. Yet the possibility it has a special place in the way women perceive and comprehend the world, along with the possibility that women might favor a certain type of intuition, have been overshadowed by the important struggle for female equality. Recent findings suggest that women in leadership positions may make a unique contribution due in part to the way they process information. The time might be ripe to begin a serious academic investigation of women’s intuition. We appreciate that gender as well as gender-associated traits are bimodal rather than binary, and along multiple, sometimes more, and sometimes less, independent dimensions. However, exploring female intuition may extend our knowledge of the human mind.
Our goal is to start a multidisciplinary conversation about the potential existence of a form of intuition that tends to be favored by women. We would like to include perspectives from diverse disciplines, such as cognitive science and neuroscience, creativity, social, clinical, and evolutionary psychology, gender studies, sociology management, and entrepreneurship. We welcome empirical, theoretical, as well as historical/cultural papers that address important underlying aspects of the question, even if they do not focus on women's intuition directly. Among other things, we would like to bring to the attention of a larger audience recent as well as earlier findings about the cognitive, emotional, and body-sensing differences between women and men, as well as the potential role of unconscious processes in these activities and their interaction. Ultimately, we would like to characterize a form of intuition that women tend to use as well as its capacity to function in a complementary way to the more acknowledged male form. Working together they may be much more powerful than either alone in coping with the serious collective challenges we currently face.
The connection between intuition and gender has not been well-studied in the past. Consequently, we would like to draw a large circle around the project by including papers that focus on important background material, along with papers that focus directly on the area. Some suggested topics are:
1) What is known about differences in brain function between women and men?
2) What help can animal studies provide?
3) What is the most insightful way to characterize and differentiate various forms of intuition?
4) How might unconscious attention, unconscious working memory and/or unconscious logical analysis enhance intuition?
5) To what extent can differences in unconscious activity between the genders explain the findings that men tend to be selective information processors whereas women tend to be more complete processors and focus more on interconnections?
6) Are women more comfortable than men with acknowledging "not knowing" and how might this influence their intuition?
Our goal is to start a multidisciplinary conversation about the potential existence of a form of intuition that tends to be favored by women. We would like to include perspectives from diverse disciplines, such as cognitive science and neuroscience, creativity, social, clinical, and evolutionary psychology, gender studies, sociology management, and entrepreneurship. We welcome empirical, theoretical, as well as historical/cultural papers that address important underlying aspects of the question, even if they do not focus on women's intuition directly. Among other things, we would like to bring to the attention of a larger audience recent as well as earlier findings about the cognitive, emotional, and body-sensing differences between women and men, as well as the potential role of unconscious processes in these activities and their interaction. Ultimately, we would like to characterize a form of intuition that women tend to use as well as its capacity to function in a complementary way to the more acknowledged male form. Working together they may be much more powerful than either alone in coping with the serious collective challenges we currently face.
The connection between intuition and gender has not been well-studied in the past. Consequently, we would like to draw a large circle around the project by including papers that focus on important background material, along with papers that focus directly on the area. Some suggested topics are:
1) What is known about differences in brain function between women and men?
2) What help can animal studies provide?
3) What is the most insightful way to characterize and differentiate various forms of intuition?
4) How might unconscious attention, unconscious working memory and/or unconscious logical analysis enhance intuition?
5) To what extent can differences in unconscious activity between the genders explain the findings that men tend to be selective information processors whereas women tend to be more complete processors and focus more on interconnections?
6) Are women more comfortable than men with acknowledging "not knowing" and how might this influence their intuition?
Keywords: Intuition, Gender, Gender and cognition, Unconscious information processing, Gender and emotion, Gender and interoception, Kinds of intuition, Women in leadership positions
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