Doubting women's perception

The intelligence we don't trust - and what it costs all of us.

A few weeks ago, a male friend shared a popular reel of the poet David Whyte talking about the act of weeping being the closest thing to the state of enlightenment. It struck me how different it would be if a woman were to talk about this. When a well-spoken and educated, middle-aged white man professes the spirituality of weeping… it suddenly is. There is a collective receptivity and trust in his voice that is unparalleled.

I sat in the echo of watching this reel for some weeks, feeling it grating on me and yet reluctant to write about it. Feeling into my resistance, I came into contact with my fear of being seen as resentful or man-hating or overly critical. And then feeling more into this, realised that this is the internalised version of the exact dynamic I actually want to write about: our collective mistrust in female perception.

Instead of trusting my own perception and acknowledging my accurate social reading, I reframe it as some kind of personal failing or character flaw of mine… evidence that I am too small and bitter to see clearly.

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So, instead of me judging my irritation, allow me to trust and follow it for a moment, and name a few other connected examples (and I’m sure you have plenty of your own).

A recent one: a body-oriented coaching accreditation program I participated in, where a group of 95% female participants were guided by a male teacher, through a company that is run by a man.

My Linkedin feed, where I see men on a daily basis market themselves as experts and consultants to companies and organisations around regenerative leadership and business practices, meanwhile so many of the women I know who practice menstrual cycle awareness religiously - who are the very embodiment of regeneration - are struggling to find their way in the world.

A large, international organisation that teaches relational skills and practices through expensive trainings and festivals - run by two men.

We live in a world in which women's ways of knowing, relating, and leading are treated as unreliable, soft and insufficiently rigorous. And on the other side: these same capacities - relational intelligence, embodied knowing, cyclical wisdom, attunement* - get extracted, systematised, and sold, often by men, often at considerable profit, often back to women themselves.

Somatic Psychologist Ailey Jolie writes in her Substack :

Around 75% of practising therapists in the US and UK are women. About 70% of psychologists. The proportion is rising every year.

Now name a famous one. Bessel van der Kolk. Peter Levine. Gabor Maté. Irvin Yalom. Stephen Porges. Jon Kabat-Zinn. Dick Schwartz. Dan Siegel. The household names of contemporary trauma and somatic therapy are all men, in a profession that is three-quarters women.

She continues to write about how we all participate in this dynamic on a subtle somatic level, beyond the conscious mind: the small contractions in the body of hearing a woman’s voice speaking as an authority, compared to the downward settling sensation of hearing a man’s voice.

These tendencies live in all of us in some shape or form; including in the nervous systems of women, who have been most harmed by the dynamic. Which is kind of devastating - to have absorbed the terms of our own diminishment so deeply that we enact it before our conscious mind even notices.

There is a kind of impossibility of being received in our leadership as women: when we speak with the same authority as a man, without the softening of an apologetic laugh, we are judged as too sure of ourselves, too much. And yet if we are too insecure or uncertain in our speaking, we are registered as unconvincing.

So what is actually being mistrusted? If we follow the contraction to its root:

At the deepest level, what gets mistrusted is women’s perception itself.

Not just our emotions, not just our bodies, but our capacity to accurately read reality. The message, absorbed so early it feels like the air we breathe is: our inner registrations are unreliable.

We are too close to things.

Too feeling.

Too partial.

And this is devastatingly precise as a form of control, because perception is the root of everything.

If you can get someone to doubt what they notice, you don’t need to argue with any single conclusion they draw - you’ve undermined the instrument itself.

There is one more turn of the knife: While the perception and wisdom of women gets deemed unreliable - and yet commodified and sold, all the while, there is an insistence that gender is a social construct and there is nothing particular about being a woman at all, nothing distinctively female to reclaim.

We have nowhere to stand.

Nothing to claim.

And yet somehow, still, are being extracted from.

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I spoke to a man earlier this year who - much to my envy - told me he doesn’t second guess himself. His words echoed in me weeks after this conversation, illuminating how second-guessing myself has been such an integral part of me, I could barely imagine how life might feel without this.

This isn't an argument against discernment or humility. It's about recovering the ability to distinguish healthy reflection from reflexive self-erasure.

I think of a life-time of countless ways I have mistrusted my reading of reality. How easy it is to feel like something is off or out of integrity or doesn’t feel quite right and to quickly assume this reflects something wrong with me.

I should feel differently. I should be stronger. I shouldn’t be having this kind of experience.

It’s always “What's wrong with me”? rather than “What am I accurately perceiving?”

I think of all the times I have endured something, stayed longer than I should have. Made choices that my body knew weren’t right for me. The times I have outsourced my own authority to experts, projected on to others who know more. I think of the exhaustion over time through constant inner negotiating and self-doubt. How much anger I must have denied and swallowed, how much I have edited myself around others and made myself smaller than I am.

And if you know me, you will know that I can also be confident, creative, eloquent and powerful and unashamedly me… and yet this undertow has always been there beneath the surface.

I’m not ashamed to talk about it because I know that this kind of self-doubt also impacts you, or someone you love. And my heart is longing for a world in which our perception and wisdom as women is given its rightful place.

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This is clearly so much bigger than just you or I doing our inner work. And yet each of us plays a role in what comes next.

As women, it’s continuing to notice the moment before self-doubt arrives - the split second of clear perception before the override.

It’s having the courage to trust our perception publicly, naming what needs to be named, staying with the irritation or anger long enough to receive its guidance, each time knowing that we make it fractionally more possible for another woman to do the same.

As men, it’s becoming genuinely curious about where your knowing comes from, holding this question without defensiveness. It’s listening to women. Not to respond, not to improve upon, not to systematise, just letting what a woman perceives land as though it might be true.

It’s all of us noticing the bias buried in what we call intelligence - the assumption that certainty is more rigorous than intuition, that the linear is more trustworthy than the cyclical, that what can be systematised is worth more than what is simply, deeply felt and known.

While these capacities belong to no one exclusively, women - through the lived reality of bodies that cycle, descend, bleed, carry life and that know so viscerally what it means to tend life - have a more direct inheritance of this intelligence.

The integration of feminine perception - into leadership, into institutions, into how we make decisions and measure value and determine what counts as real - doesn’t just benefit women. It makes the whole system more capable of meeting and responding to what is.

This isn’t a claim of superiority. It’s a plea for wholeness. A world that only trusts one mode of knowing is a world operating with half its intelligence - and we are living in the consequences of that narrowing.

We are all needed. All of us. But we cannot afford to keep building the future while one of its most essential instruments goes untrusted.

It’s time we trusted what we know, as women.

It’s time the world did too.

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I'm aware that I write this from a position of relative privilege. For many women, trusting their perception publicly carries consequences I don't face: their livelihood, their relationships and their safety. This asymmetry is part of what makes this all the more urgent.

Image by Danie Franco