The INTJ Woman: Joys and Challenges

So You’re an INTJ Female. Do you ever feel like you don’t fit the mold of what a typical “female” is supposed to be like? Is it difficult for you to break into female-led groups? Does small-talk and obligatory chit-chat make your stomach churn? Congratulations, welcome to the (very) small world of the INTJ female.

If you’re one of us you probably have felt a bit like an outsider most of your life. And if you haven’t, please tell us your secrets in the comments. Of course, things like upbringing, family, community, and good old social skills helps a lot in that respect.

What Is An INTJ?

But let’s begin with explaining what an INTJ really is, in case you’re new to type (no shame here).

INTJs are one of the 16 Myers-Briggs ® personality types. The four letters stand for specific preferences you have as an individual.

I means you’re an introvert. The world inside your head is what energizes you and fills you up with inspiration. Ideas, reflections, analysis, and the world in your mind feels more impactful than the world outside your mind.

N means you’re an iNtuitive. You’re interested in concepts, theories, meanings, patterns, and what’s going on behind-the-scenes. Literal details and what’s going on around you tend to be less satisfying. For example, during a backyard barbecue you might be looking at the stars and imagining the end of the world, analyzing scientific theories about severe volcanism, supernovas, or environmental change. Meanwhile, a sensing type might be savoring the taste of his baked beans, talking about the latest football game, or noticing that his friend spilled barbecue sauce down his shirt.

T means you’re a Thinking type. When you’ve got a decision to make, logic usually wins out over your feelings and the feelings of other people. Stepping out of a situation to see it objectively and without emotional bias is key.

J means you’re a Judging type. No, this doesn’t mean you’re gossiping about your neighbor’s poor life choices (definitely not your style). It just means you like to approach life with a plan, structure, and a specific direction. You like plotting your course and mapping it out and following it to the tee. Being spontaneous and flexible is more difficult for you.

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What’s It Like Being an INTJ Female?

Being an INTJ female is both gratifying and confusing. Partially because nobody tells you when you’re a little kid, “Hey girl, you’re an INTJ. Let me tell you how your mind works so that you can understand why you’re different than 97.4% of the people you meet!”

Wouldn’t that be nice?

INTJs are rare. They make up only 2.6% of the population based on the latest research in the MBTI ® Manual. So your odds of meeting someone who thinks like you are fairly slim. This is especially true in the world of females. According to CareerPlanner.com, 75.5% of females are Feeling types.

Why does that matter?

The Hard Things About Being an INTJ Woman

Most females grow up with this preconceived idea of how they’re “supposed” to be. Typical characteristics ascribed to females include empathy, collaboration, gracefulness, humility, sensitivity, emotionality, vulnerability, caring, and sensuality. I really just looked this up on Google and these are the traits that came up. And this also lines up with the stories of most females I’ve met. They grew up and were expected to be these things (empathetic, sensitive, emotional, vulnerable, nurturing).

Now I’m not saying INTJs can’t be these things. They certainly can. It just doesn’t look the same way as it does when a Feeling type does it.

An INTJ being nurturing and caring might give you a logical way to troubleshoot a problem. Because, hey, that’s what they’d want if they were you!

But most Feeling women want affirmation, validation, the sense of being heard. Feeling types, in general, look for emotional consolation when they’re struggling, not a bunch of advice or ‘how-to’s.

Enter one of the biggest struggles for INTJ women…annoying their friends because they can’t validate feelings when there’s a logical solution sitting right there.

And this struggle doesn’t just extend to female friendships. Many men want their partners to be the nurturing, caring, “Feelery” females that they grew up with or heard about in stories or watched in movies. They have this idea that the woman will do the bulk of the emotional labor in the relationship, and an INTJ woman is just not going to go for that. Sorry. In their mind, everyone’s responsible for their own emotions. Nobody should have to caretake anyone’s feelings unless they directly caused the other person pain.

This doesn’t mean an INTJ won’t care about their friends or partner’s feelings. They will. Will they do all the emotional work and caretaking in the situation? Probably not. At least, that won’t be their first thought. Instead, they’ll look for solutions, strategies, and logic.

What caused the problem?

How can it be avoided in the future?

What objectively are you not seeing?

What will fix this situation so that it NEVER happens again?

Bam. Problem solved. Easy, right?

Wrong.

Yes, we INTJs would like to believe that our friends and partners will respond to our advice with grateful looks of appreciation and a newfound sense of hope and joy. We’d like to imagine that they’ll implement our advice right away and live a fruitful and happy life, never revisiting that same old mistake again. They’ll admire us. They’ll appreciate our efforts. “Wow! What a great friend I have!” they’ll think.

I can feel you smirking from over there.

Chances are, they rolled their eyes and gave you a speech about how they just wanted to be validated or heard or empathized with. They might have called you a ‘know it all’ or ‘arrogant.’

But Why Is Empathy So Hard?

INTJs can be wildly sympathetic, so let me just say, mirroring someone’s experience against your own isn’t necessarily difficult for many INTJs. In fact, they have a gift for perspective-shifting and being able to see another person’s point of view (thanks in part to Introverted Intuition).

The hard part is tuning into someone else’s emotional wavelengths. That’s more of an INFJ quality. Getting into a “vibe” with someone and really feeling what they’re feeling in real time is something that INTJs struggle with. It can be difficult for them to know how they’re coming across in social situations.

Case in point, I went to a Personality Hacker conference back in May of last year. I thought I was being friendly and personable and easy to approach. But apparently everyone who spoke to me afterwards said I looked like I was “dying inside” or “completely miserable” (their quotes, not mine). Yes, conferences can be a bit overwhelming for me because there are so many people. But I legitimately wanted to make a good impression. I don’t think it worked.

It’s hard as an INTJ to just think about the emotions in a situation. You can perspective-shift and imagine other people’s worldviews and take a meta perspective, but it’s harder for you to blend in, make banter, generate rapport, or create a feeling of positivity and warmth.

Just ask the INTJs who took my ‘Friendship Survey’. Here are a few quotes:

“People sometimes see me as aloof, but I’m just deep in thought most of the time.”

“People misunderstand the fact that by being distant and quiet I am not interested in interacting with others, that I am boring or sad/angry and that in general nothing matters to me. Although in reality I do seek those experiences but I am very cautious about interacting with others. Trust is everything.”

“I get the impression people feel I’m judging them, I’m not, I’m genuinely curious. I want to know what their processes were in choosing something. I think they’d prefer it if I validated rather than questioned.”

Your Story Might Be Different…

Of course, you may not have had these experiences. Perhaps you grew up in a really supportive family and made friends and formed relationships with people who gave you 100% acceptance for who you are. Or maybe you worked hard from a young age to cultivate interpersonal awareness and emotional intuition, so that you could deal with these challenges more competently than someone like me or many of the other INTJs I’ve met.

This can happen. If you’re an INTJ you’re definitely not doomed to a life of being misunderstood by everyone around you. And you can learn to develop different preferences and abilities that aren’t necessarily inherent to your personality.

I am not boxing you in here. What I am describing is a struggle that the majority of INTJ women I’ve spoken to deal with on a regular basis. But there are always outliers, and you may be one of them.

Now Let’s Talk About Being an Intuitive Female

Being an introverted intuitive is like having this whole other world inside your head that, if you were to describe to most people, would leave them scratching their heads and looking wildly confused.

Yeah, you didn’t notice that your friend spilled baked beans down their shirt at the barbecue. And hey, you might not have even tasted the pulled pork you were eating because you were thinking about how the earth will eventually be absorbed by the Sun in 7.5 billion years. Or maybe you were making a business strategy for that clean-water initiative you’re heading and were just putting together the final calculations in your mind.

You see, it doesn’t really matter where you are or what’s happening around you. You’ve got an entire universe in your head, and it’s thrilling, inspiring, life-giving.

But the world has a Sensing bias.

And listen, I’m not an elitist. The typology world is full of jerks who think that if they have an ‘N’ in their type code they’re somehow more evolved and intelligent than everyone else. Screw that. That’s not what we’re here for.

But back to the main point: The world is mostly made for Sensors. In fact, according to the latest research, 67.50% of the national population has a Sensing preference. A mere 8.9% of the population has a preference for introverted intuition. As a result, many introverted intuitives (particularly INTJs and INFJs) look a little bit odd to everyone else.

“I don’t care about what you’re wearing. Tell me what you think about death.”

I mean, I don’t know why this line doesn’t fly at a birthday party! People are strange.

And yeah, I know. You’ve probably worked hard at overcoming this blunt, probing side of yourself if you’re an INTJ woman. The world demanded it of you. You could only get strange looks from the other little kids in the schoolyard so long before your pattern-recognition kicked into gear and you realized you were never gonna make it through 12 years of recess if you didn’t change.

And yes, people, INTJs do want friends. We’re not hermit crabs. There’s all kinds of science about why friendships are so important, and if nothing else, INTJs do like science.

But having introverted intuition can be kind of a blessing and a curse. The world in our heads is filled with untold mysteries we can’t wait to explore and solve. Toying with patterns and looking for themes and predictions provides us with a huge sense of meaning and fulfillment and joy.

We really wouldn’t want to be anyone else. At least, I wouldn’t (I know it’s not fair for me to speak for all INTJs).

But at the same time, many INTJ women struggle to find a place where their ideas and insights are taken seriously. I’ve seen the life drain from the faces of enough would-be friends when I brought up my latest scientific musings to know this fact. The truth is, many times we’re going to have to bite the bullet and talk about the weather, or clothes, or (if you’re an INTJ mom) whatever brand of diaper cream seems to be the most effective at the moment.

I’m 39-years-old and I have no one to talk with about science or the depths of psychology at the moment. I’m just being real. You’d think since I’ve written over 1200 articles about personality type I’d have a bunch of people to talk to about type. And yeah, there’s a lot of really cool online people who want to talk about themselves to me so that I can figure them out. But I have five kids. My capacity for that is limited.

But enough about me. The point is, friendship is often an uphill battle for INTJs.

In my latest ‘Friendship Survey’ (with over 5000 respondents now), we found that 36.07% of INTJs said they don’t have a solid support group,  74.34% said they feel misunderstood when trying to make new friends, 22.95% of INTJs have no friends, and 85.95% say it’s not easy for them to make new friends.

But hey, I’m not trying to make you hate being an INTJ, so let’s get to the good part…

What’s So Good About Being an INTJ Woman?

Now that you’re feeling thoroughly depressed, let’s shift gears and get into the good stuff.

Being an INTJ woman means you don’t limit yourself to the stereotypical female traits that the world has decided to give you. You kind of like being a rebel (you can thank your introverted feeling side for that). Yes, you know it’s hard for people to “get” you, and sometimes that makes you feel crappy, but you still wouldn’t trade it (at least many of us wouldn’t).

You like having autonomy.

You like marching to the beat of your own drum.

It brings you real joy to explore meanings, patterns, science, the universe, the reasons we’re here, or the future you can’t wait to build from the ground up.

As an INTJ you get to share your personality with such great minds as Nikola Tesla, Isaac Newton, Friedrich Nietzsche, Stephen Hawking, and wait….where are the women? Other than Jodie Foster and Octavia Butler (who I wrote an article about earlier this year), there’s not a lot of info on famous INTJ women out there.

But still. I personally don’t care that much if my list is mostly male. I’m not going to get political about this at the moment, call it irresponsible if you want to.

The thing is, it makes us thrilled to trailblaze new paths, make new discoveries, to not have to seek external stimulation to be satisfied. We can be entertained and thrilled just by the patterns and strategies we can concoct in our own minds.

I remember being a kid and feeling so gratified with just thinking. I remember people asking me what I liked to do for fun and answering with, “Thinking.” Entertainment was always available. A console, television, or playground wasn’t necessary (not that we didn’t enjoy those things as well).

Here are some other benefits of being an INTJ woman:

• You’re ambitious. You’ve got big dreams and discoveries and you want to see constant methodical progress towards your goals.
• You’re more okay being alone than most. Yes, you can get lonely sometimes, but you also deeply enjoy your alone time.
• Your imagination is dazzling. There’s nothing you can’t dream up, but you will rein in your imagination to zoom in on the one big idea you want to focus on.
• The path forward is clear. You can easily come up with a strategy or roadmap for your life and stay the course without getting distracted.
• You don’t mind being different. In fact, you prefer it.
• Your intuition feels bottomless. There’s no end to what you can discover or explore.
• Your logic helps you troubleshoot. When a problem arises, you know how to step back and look at the situation objectively in order to find solutions or strategies.

I’m sure if you’re reading this you probably have some other things you love about being an INTJ, and I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments, so please do jot them down below.

But the point is, it’s not all bad. In fact, a lot of it is good.

The struggles? It will probably be (or has been) hard for people to understand you. At times you might have felt like you weren’t emotionally “aware” enough or couldn’t play the part people expected of you as a woman. Sometimes you feel like a social pariah or a weirdo.

But the joys? Endless depth of insight, clear ideas and strategies, an independent mind. That’s not something to shrug about. It’s pretty darn cool if you ask me.

What Do You Think?

Did you enjoy this article? Do you have any thoughts, insights, or wisdom to share? Let us know in the comments!

Discover even more about your personality type in our eBooks, Discovering You: Unlocking the Power of Personality Type,  The INFJ – Understanding the Mystic, The INTJ – Understanding the Strategist, and The INFP – Understanding the Dreamer. You can also connect with me via Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter!