On intuition

Now and then I run across articles in the popular press (or "diversity" articles in more technically-oriented media) exhorting people to hire/pay more attention to women because their feminine qualities will be great business assets. ("Women are nurturing! And they're so great at communication!") Am too lazy to find samples of such articles right now, but this book has the sort of sentiment I've got in mind.

As a woman who isn't so great at a lot of the stereotypically "female" things (am not a graceful speaker, tend towards social cluelessness, etc), those ideas tend to grate on my nerves. Up until a couple of years ago, the worst of these irritants was the idea of intuition as a particularly female trait. In large part this was due to the concept of "feminine intuition", that ill-defined term that seems to imply that women have some magical source of wisdom that allows them to magically and effortlessly know things. That didn't jive with my experiences, and I was insulted by the implication that I hadn't worked for my knowledge. (Inquiring minds want to know: what differentiates feminine intuition from any other kind? If I have an amazing insight as to why the router is down, does that qualify as feminine intuition?) This sort of put me off of the idea of intuition in general.

It took some comments (random asides in lectures) from two computer science professors to rehabilitate the concept enough for me to start thinking about intuition in useful ways. Ran across some useful ideas in Polya's How to Solve It; he discusses it under the heading of "subconscious work". (Hadamard's The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field, which appears to discuss the subject at length, is near the top of my long [and long-neglected] personal reading list.)

So I've finally been able to make my peace with it and not cringe everytime somebody mentions the word. I now see intuition as the subconscious taking shortcuts. It only works well when you've fed your brain enough things to make shortcuts between, and that takes a substantial investment in learning and having new experiences. But I'm still not quite sure how to deal with other people's gendered views of it....

[11/21 update: ran across an interesting post by Kathy Sierra arguing that intuition is critical for math, science, and engineering, and wondering about how that ought to affect education in those areas.]