Some say that this is a myth – akin to “female logic”. Others respond with life stories. Who is right? And if women really have such good intuition, what is the reason for this?
Where does this inner feeling “I just know” come from, when a thought comes as if from nowhere and it is impossible to explain it rationally? Intuitive guesses and insights visit each of us from time to time. But public opinion tends to attribute to women a particularly fine intuitive “tuning”.
Businesswoman Margaret Heffernan, author of The Naked Truth. Confessions of modern businesswomen”, states that women have a unique ability to connect disparate data into a single picture and, thus, better capture the “zeitgeist”. It is this “gut feeling,” according to Heffernan, that is the advantage of women in the business world.
Research on non-verbal communication proves that women are generally better at recognizing facial emotions than men. As a result, they are more likely to pick up on the subtle emotional messages that other people send (including unconsciously).1. Thus, women prefer to trust their intuition because their pattern recognition system is faster than rational analysis.
Women also show emotions better through facial expressions, tone of voice, body. Men, on the other hand, are better at controlling their emotions and hiding them well. Women, in turn, have a reputation for being more empathetic.
“Eye contact in everyday life has very different meanings for women and men,” writes neuroscientist Dick Swaab. – In Western cultures, women use eye contact to better understand other women, and they enjoy it. For Western men, eye contact has the value of ascertaining their place in the hierarchy and can therefore be perceived as threatening. Again, pure biology here.”2.
In other words, women tend to be more “open” to the emotional messages of others. Probably, it was these features that contributed to the fact that female intuition became something well-known.
So where does this ability to read the emotions of others come from? Anthropologists believe that it developed historically as a reaction to the distribution of “social power” in the collective.3. Women who wielded less social power (i.e., had less influence in society) spent more time observing and studying those who held that power (i.e., mostly men, but also some powerful women), and eventually learn to pick up non-verbal cues.
It is also believed that evolutionary selection favored those women who were better able to guess what a child wants, who is not yet able to express his needs in words.
1 David Myers, «Intuition: Its powers and perils» (Yale University Press, 2002).
2 D. Swaab “We are our brain: From the uterus to Alzheimer’s” (Ivan Limbach Publishing House, 2014).
3 Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2008, vol. 44.