Beyond Confidence
the feminine intelligence we still struggle to recognize
Last weekend, I attended a women-in-tech partner event at the Human+Tech Week in San Francisco. And I heard something I frequently hear in my consultation room. Over and over again, women spoke of having to disproportionally carry the emotional labor not only at home but also at work. They described being the ones who track the emotional atmosphere of the groups they are in, anticipate others’ needs before their male counterparts do, and make relationships function, often invisibly and without acknowledgment.
One young female participant went so far as to share that she typically couches her observations in a kind of intellectual humility, intentionally leaving room for others to enter the conversation rather than shutting it down with certainty. Her boss told her she needs to stop doing that and try to sound more confident. What struck me was that I recently had a man say almost the exact same thing to me in a professional setting. So let’s be clear:
What many women are displaying is not a lack of confidence.
In many cases, women are already confident in what they see. What they are doing instead is something more relational. They are creating space so the other person can meet them. In other words, they are not only tracking for accuracy, but for relationship. And the truth is, this capacity may be far more important than our current culture understands.
Because the modern cultural paradigm we have inherited rewards certainty, assertion, and individual performance, it tends to interpret relational awareness as a lack of authority. However, what we are actually witnessing may be the emergence of a different kind of intelligence, one rooted in the capacity to remain connected while holding truth.
This, to me, feels like the leading edge of what is trying to emerge, which widens intelligence itself.
Perhaps this is why so many women feel exhausted right now. They are not simply doing too much, though many are, but attempting to inhabit systems still organized around a narrower model of intelligence while quietly carrying capacities those same systems depend upon yet rarely recognize.
Then the issue is no longer whether women can succeed within the existing paradigm. Clearly, many can and do. The deeper question becomes whether the paradigm itself is adequate for the future beginning to arrive, because the challenges we face are no longer merely technical; they are relational, cultural, and, most importantly, civilizational. And they seem to require something fundamentally feminine: the capacity to remain connected across difference, complexity, and uncertainty without collapsing into fragmentation and control.
I find myself wondering if what has long been dismissed as a “weakness” may, in fact, be a “strength.” This raises an even deeper question I want to explore in my next article:
What happens to a culture when the forms of intelligence most needed for its survival are the very ones it has systematically devalued?
Join me next time as we continue to explore this subtle but necessary paradigm shift unfolding around us.
Until then, wishing you well.
Beautifully articulated. It's interesting to see how this manifests in various ways in environments that are typically "feminine" (the dance departments where I worked through the 1970s and 80s) vs traditionally masculine (the world of psychology I've been in since the 90s, which has shifted from majority male to majority female). No conclusion, just some reflections.
I would say, almost overwhelmingly, that female supervisors I had were much more at ease with listening, being uncertain, and open. I'm including Haila who was the director of the dance program I worked at from 1984-1989. And it was interesting, among 24 or so mostly male lawyers I worked for, doing disability evaluations, by far the most psychologically savvy were two women lawyers - now it might have also been because one had been a religions major, and the other had worked as a nurse for years before becoming a lawyer.
But this is SUCH an important topic as it reflects profound imbalances throughout the world. Thank you.