GeniesLoki

So is conversation. A conversation partner is a much more opinionated aid to thinking than writing is, but that has strengths and weaknesses - having a conversation with someone allows you to think things together than neither of you could have thought on your own.

In fact, almost all thinking is a form of conversation with the world: You build on things you have learned from others, and you put it back out into the world where you get feedback on it. The difference between "conversation" and "real thinking" is mostly latency.

Someone who is doing "real thinking" has deliberately separated themselves a bit from the conversation to give them time to reflect. This is neither better nor worse than the more immediate conversation, they just have different strengths.

But importantly both are thinking and both are good at the same things in a broader sense - they're just variants of the same basic tool. Despite this we've decided that one is thinking and one is communicating, but this is a completely fake distinction.

Anyway, this is where the gender thing comes in I think: Heavily collaborative work is female coded, and heavily solitary work is male coded. As a result, the more feminine coded something is the more likely it is to be branded "not thinking".

(Of course men can collaborate and women can be solitary thinkers, this is about gender norms rather than actual gendered behaviour, though of course on average people tend to follow the norms)

As is often the way, this sucks for both binary genders, because both sides are being denied a super useful tool. Both more collaborative and more solitary thinking are super useful and it's good to be able to do whichever of these is better suited to the task.

This also sucks for everyone independently of where they are on the spectrum of styles, because it elides the fundamental similarities between communication and thinking in ways that make us worse at both.