How Women Decide

Therese Huston

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781780749075
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

When a man faces a difficult decision, he needs to make a judgement. When a woman faces the same decision, she must also deal with being judged. It's hardly surprising then that even the smartest women mislabel their rational decisions as a product of their 'female intuition' – a long-running myth that still prevails today. The reality is women are often the best decision-makers, but for all the wise words out there about how we decide, very few have been written with women in mind. In this path-breaking book, Therese Huston provides a much-needed corrective. Drawing on personal interviews with business leaders and expert data analysis, she demonstrates the unique psychological differences between the sexes that affect how women work, lead and make big life choices. Passionate, persuasive and superbly researched, How Women Decide offers a wealth of practical and enlightening insights, enabling women to make stronger, smarter decisions in a world that still whispers they can't.

1

Making Sense of Women’s Intuition

WHEN ISABELLE WALKED IN, she struck me as stylish and slightly shy. I expected her to be wearing a starched chef’s jacket and have the constantly moving energy of a cooking-show personality. Instead, she was dressed in a smooth, tan silk suit and stood with clasped hands as she quietly asked me if I had any trouble finding the place. We stepped into a conference room at the oldest and most famous culinary-arts school in the world, Le Cordon Bleu Paris, and she offered me a pot of perfectly brewed tea. I privately hoped that there might be a plate of profiteroles somewhere, but I wasn’t there to eat cake. I was there because Isabelle was one of the most powerful women in the French culinary world.

As one of the Cordon Bleu’s top administrators, Isabelle decides who will be hired to instruct the next generation of chefs. She chooses which recipes students will have to master before they’re certified to cook for the world with the stamp of approval from the Cordon Bleu, and she selects the chefs who will participate in Europe’s star-studded food competitions. She’s called a resource centre manager, but she’s really a decision manager.

I asked Isabelle to tell me how she decided to come to the Cordon Bleu. She had been the head chef at an embassy in Europe for a decade, and over the course of her career, she’d prepared meals for everyone from Julia Child to France’s prime minister. Not a bad job by any measure. She explained: “I got a call from the president of the Cordon Bleu at the time, and he said, ‘Isabelle, I want you to come work for me. I want you to manage the Cordon Bleu.’” She shrugged and smiled at me. “Everyone loves hearing that.” Then she sighed and stared at a spot on the floor. “But it still wasn’t an easy decision. I knew I’d be gaining a lot, true, and I wouldn’t have to be on my feet until two thirty in the morning preparing a cocktail party for five hundred. I was getting too old for that kind of physical labour. A desk job was looking pretty good,” she said. “But I’d also be losing some friends, all of my connections, some real perks. I wouldn’t be cooking every day and I’d miss that. I talked with several people who had worked here at Le Cordon Bleu Paris to get a real sense of the place. I spent two, no, really three, months thinking about it, and I finally decided yes, I can do that job.”

I was surprised and impressed. Three months is longer than most of us can sit with a job offer, no matter how much we’re wanted. But what really shocked me was what Isabelle said next. She looked up from the floor, nodded, and said proudly and without a hint of irony: “You could say I just went with my instincts.”

Just went with her instincts? Months of deliberation, of weighing all the advantages and disadvantages of a job, of researching the reality of it, is hardly a gut, instinctive reaction. I heard this pattern again and again in my interviews with women. In relationship decisions, in job decisions, in medical decisions, women think long and hard about their choices, but once they’ve made those choices, even well-educated, powerful, strong women put them in a box labelled Going with My Gut; Following My Heart, Not My Head; or Trusting My Intuition. Are all of these women just being humble? What I found most revealing is that these were the decisions the women were most pleased with. When they looked back on their lives, those decisions that they had analysed so carefully, that they had turned over in their minds again and again and yet ultimately attributed to instincts or intuition, ranked as some of the best choices they’d ever made.

Have you ever heard the term men’s intuition? Even once? Probably not. Intuition has been branded a woman’s thing, as though it’s something worn under a bra. Popular news blogs such as the Huffington Post routinely run articles about the strength of women’s intuition, as do publications that target women, such as O, the Oprah Magazine. In 2015, a columnist for Psychology Today advised, “Women, practise this mantra: trust your inner knowledge, your intuition, that gut feeling . . . If you don’t trust someone when making a deal, go with that feeling.” But admit it? No. The article warns that women shouldn’t reveal that they’re making decisions based on their “intuitive radar.” Remember, it counselled, “feelings are not credible in a man’s world.”¹

One reaction I have when I read columns like this is that there’s a striking disconnect — women are told to be proud of going with their gut, but they should keep it under wraps. Own it, but own it hushhush. Is this supposed to be a secret superpower? But that brings me to other questions. Do women actually rely on intuition more often than men? And should they? Is women’s intuition a legitimate phenomenon? And when should anyone — man or woman — rely on gut feelings alone to make a decision?

We’re going to inspect a notion that many people hold dear, an ability that some women believe sets them apart in a good way. A few of them might read this chapter and think, Can’t you leave the upsides of being female alone and let us win one? But as you’ll see, the concept of women’s intuition isn’t as empowering as it first appears.

Do You Go with Your Gut or Your Head?

Before we dig any further, it’s helpful for you to assess your own cognitive style and see where you fall on the intuitive-analytical spectrum. When you face choices in your everyday life, are you more inclined to be intuitive and go with your gut or do you prefer to be analytical and go with your head? I’ve developed an informal questionnaire to help you identify which approach you favour. First, make a numbered list from 1 to 14. (It’s okay; you can write in the margins.) Answer each question True or False. You’ll answer True if the sentence describes an approach that comes naturally to you or the approach you prefer when it’s available. You’ll answer False if the sentence sounds like a poor fit for you, if it describes something that doesn’t come naturally to you, or if it’s the approach you’d take less often if you could. Think back to decisions you’ve made in the past three months, everything from whether to buy a fitness tracker to whether to take on a particular client. Rest assured, there are no right or wrong answers. You’ll probably have stronger responses to some questions than others; for those you feel lukewarm about, do your best to give it a True or a False.

1. I am more at home with detailed facts and figures than with broad descriptions and ideas.

2. My gut feeling is just as good a basis for decision-making as careful analysis.

3. I find that adopting a multistep, analytical approach to making a decision often takes too long.

4. I am inclined to scan through reports rather than read them in detail.

5. I work best with people who are spontaneous.

6. I rarely make off-the-top-of-my-head decisions.

7. Projects that require a logical, step-by-step approach feel constraining to me.

8. I prefer to solve problems by gathering data.

9. I often wait to make a suggestion until I have some evidence to back it up.

10. I find that it’s possible to be too organized when performing certain kinds of tasks.

11. People have sometimes told me, “You might be overthinking this.”

12. I am most effective when there’s a clear sequence of tasks to be performed.

13. My philosophy is that it is better to be safe than risk being sorry.

14. I think the best problem-solving happens by bouncing between different ideas and possibilities.

Now take a moment to calculate your score. Use the following key: For items 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10, and 14, give yourself one point for every question that you answered True. For items 1, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, and 13, give yourself one point for every question that you answered False.* Now add up your points.²

Your score might be as low as 0 or as high as 14, but don’t worry if you scored a 0 or a 1. A low score here is not a bad thing. A low score means you are probably more analytic in your approach to problem-solving and decision-making, and a high score means that you’re probably more intuitive in your cognitive style. If you scored right in the middle, 6, 7, or 8, researchers would call you adaptive, which means you blend analytic and intuitive styles and use elements of each depending on the circumstances.

But whether you take a highly intuitive approach or you’re happiest being analytical, when you do find yourself trusting intuition, what exactly are you depending on?

An Inner Compass or a Firefighter’s Well-Trained Senses?

How do most of us think about intuition? An intuition feels like something you receive, something that appears immediately and perhaps unbidden, not something you worked all day to generate. Brilliant minds have credited intuition for their great discoveries. Jonas Salk, who discovered the first successful polio vaccine, said, “It is always with excitement that I wake up in the morning wondering what my intuition will toss up to me, like gifts from the sea. I work with it and rely on it. It’s my partner.”³ Oprah Winfrey, one of America’s favourite talk-show hosts, has referred to intuition as the “inner GPS guiding you to the true North” and the “small voice” that you’ll hear only if you sit still and just listen.⁴ For many of us, an intuition is a sudden feeling that you know something that goes beyond the data in front of you, a tugging conviction that, in the middle of a decision, you should just ignore the outside world for a while and tune in to that voice.

I keep calling intuition a feeling, but that word doesn’t do it justice. Intuition isn’t like envy or excitement or some other run-of-the-mill human emotion. Intuition feels like knowing. Best of all, it feels like knowing without any effort. Robert Graves, the English poet and novelist, described intuition as “the supra-logic that cuts out all the routine processes of thought and leaps straight from the problem to the answer.”⁵ If we break it down, the word intuition means “being taught or guided from the inside,” and because it comes from inside, not out there, it feels more accurate, more deserving of your deepest trust.⁶ We feel drawn to listen to it, to follow it, and if we experience a gut instinct but choose to ignore it and turn the other way, we wonder if we’ve gone against our better nature. If somewhere down the road it’s clear that, yes, we did choose poorly, we confide to our closest friends that we “knew” the right choice from the beginning. We just didn’t listen.

This is how most of us think about intuition, and the scientists who poke and prod intuitions on a daily basis find that our guesses are right about four key things. First, they agree intuitions are fast. Designers can look at a handbag and judge if it’s the real deal or a knockoff Prada in less than two seconds.⁷ Expert firefighters can walk into a burning building and, within minutes, intuit the part of the building that’s about to collapse.⁸ Scientists also agree that intuitions are usually accompanied by strong emotions, a feeling of being drawn to one thing or repulsed by something else. One fire-team commander in Cleveland, Ohio, was hosing down a kitchen fire with his crew when a bad feeling suddenly came over him. He didn’t know why, but he found himself shouting, “Let’s get out of here.” The kitchen floor caved in seconds later. Investigators learned it wasn’t just the kitchen that was on fire but the entire basement below.⁹ Most of us aren’t firefighters, but we all know what an inexplicable repulsion or attraction feels like.

Researchers also agree on a third defining quality of intuitions: they involve making holistic connections, surprisingly large leaps between something small that’s in front of you right now and something you already know well.

In the case of the fire-team commander, the fact that he was covered head to toe in safety gear but had raised the earflaps on his helmet helped him make that leap. The researcher Gary Klein interviewed him multiple times after the fire, and with some careful sleuthing, they pinpointed two things the commander probably reacted to: first, the firefighter noticed his ears were very hot, which he wouldn’t have expected for such a moderately sized fire, and second, the fire was quiet given the amount of heat it was generating. Most of us wouldn’t notice those two small cues — who knows how loud a kitchen fire should be? — but the commander’s years of experience told him something was very wrong.

Learning to squeeze the most from scraps of information is something that Amanda, a surgeon at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, Washington, trains her medical residents to do. Amanda works in a level-one trauma centre, the only one of its kind across several states. A level-one trauma centre receives the sickest and most severely wounded patients. Ambulances rush one-year-olds with third-degree burns to Harborview, and helicopters bring construction workers with crushed pelvic bones to Amanda’s care. Patients are flown in from Montana and Alaska, over a thousand miles away. Several times a week, she and her team need to make rapid decisions about whether there’s time to get a CT scan or whether the patient needs to be rushed to surgery without any further information. Skilled observations and expert intuitions are crucial. Amanda trains her residents to make these fast, accurate judgements with minimal information in various ways. She tells them that every time they walk into an ICU patient’s room, they need to stand for a moment in the doorway and, without looking at the chart, take in all they can and guess whether the person lying in the bed is doing better than he or she was yesterday. “It’s just a guess,” she explained, “and in a moment, they’ll get to look at the patient’s chart and learn whether their guess was right or wrong.” Amanda wants them to tune in to the signs, to notice the subtle cues they can connect with the vast textbook knowledge they already have. She needs her fellow physicians to recognize when they can see a little but know a lot.¹⁰ That’s the definition of a good intuition.

What Amanda is doing is innovative because most medical training involves learning to articulate exactly what you see, what you don’t see, and what that pattern of symptoms suggests. But Amanda isn’t trying to train physicians’ conscious thinking — those doctors wouldn’t be at her hospital if they didn’t have a great deal of intellectual ability. She’s training their unconscious, helping them practise snap judgements. And most experts agree that intuition doesn’t arise from conscious, deliberate, or rational thought. We don’t plan the steps of an intuition, nor can we typically retrace them, so we often don’t know where an intuition or gut reaction comes from.

Sometimes it’s hard to accept that we can’t consciously explain our gut reactions. We can always generate a reason. Let’s say you don’t like the woman who lives two houses down. If you walk out the door and notice her, you’ll step back inside. You see her only once a week and you can’t quite put your finger on why you don’t trust her. If someone gave you a minute, you could probably come up with a socially acceptable reason, even if it wasn’t what actually triggered your dislike. She never says hello, you’ll say, even though you can’t think of a time when you said hello either. Or she let...