Feminine for 50

original cover art by
Barclay Shaw and Abhi Thati

Back in 2010 I wrote a blog post about Isaac Asimov's character Golan Trevize and his "perfect intuition", his seemingly magical ability to intuitively "know" what is best for Humanity. In 2017, I quoted Asimov from one of his non-fiction works in which he noted that it would be hard to give a computer "intuition" because we do not understand the basis of human intuition. In that blog post, I also mentioned a story that Asimov published in 1969 called "Feminine Intuition". You can download the October 1969 Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction here.

50 Years of Intuition
In "Feminine Intuition", the Robopsychologist Susan Calvin has retired and her former position at US Robotics is now held by Clinton Madarian. Madarian wants to push ahead with creating robots that are less highly constrained by their programming and more creative.

source

The idea of the story is that such a robot will (for the first time) have a capacity for human-like intuition. Unlike all previously manufactured positronic robots who were given male names, it is decided to refer to this new experimental robot series as the Jane robots: JN-1, JN-2, etc. Madarian then spends several years hard at work developing his "intuitive" robot.

Madarian is rather brash and he states: "One thing the general public believes is that women are not as intelligent as men." He suggests that by calling the "intuitive" robots "Jane", people will be put at ease, not suspecting that they will be more human-like than other types of robot.

Jane 5

Previously, Asimov had written a robot story about the discovery of "hyper-drive" technology (called "Paradoxical Escape"). However, as told in "Feminine Intuition", interstellar space travel is still very expen$ive (20 billion per trip). US Robotics Research Director Peter Bogert hopes that the JN robots can help identify which nearby star system to search for a habitable exoplanet.

In public, Bogert and Madarian say their goal is an intuitive robot. In their private work, they hope that they will create a "genius" robot, able to recognize important new astronomical discoveries by "intuition". JN-5 is given all of the available astronomical data and soon reports that there are three nearby stars that are likely to have Earth-like planets. Then, suddenly, Madarian and JN-5 are destroyed by a freak accident. The top brass of US Robotics go into a tizzy, having been so close to success and then having lost the critical data that are worth billion$.

Dr. Susan Calvin recalled from retirement;
shown here with the JN-3 and JN-4 prototypes.

Susan Calvin is called back from retirement to try to salvage something from the fiasco. She is disgusted to hear that Madarian was basing his hopes for success on "feminine intuition". She tells Bogert:

"It is a difficult choice sometimes whether to feel revolted at the male sex or merely to dismiss them as contemptible." -Dr. Calvin

Tracy Dyson

After a few minutes of thought, Susan figures out the identities of the three star systems that are likely to have a habitable exoplanet. You'll have to read the story to discover her solution to the mystery. At the very end of the story, Dr. Calvin does not want to explain the perfectly logical method by which she solved the mystery, so she tells the all-male brass at US Robotics that she used "feminine intuition".

Carl Sagan's science fiction story
about the female astronomer who
makes First Contact with aliens.

1970 to 2060
When writing "Feminine Intuition", Asimov did not explicitly state during what year the events of the story are taking place, but let's say it is about the year 2060. Currently, about 40% of the PhDs in astronomy are earned by women. It is not unreasonable to imagine that by 2060 the male-female balance in astronomy could be close to 50-50. Sadly, writing in 1969, Asimov depicted all of the astronomers who interacted with the JN-5 robot as being males.

1969 NASA. JoAnn Morgan,
the only woman engineer among
scores of male counterparts (source)

Of course, Asimov was not writing "Feminine Intuition" for an audience in the next millennium. In 1969, his audience was experiencing the male-dominated NASA during the race to land a man on the Moon. Here in 2019 there is discussion of the idea that the first person on Mars might be a woman... things have changed since 1969.

Could Asimov have depicted some of the Board members for US Robotics as being women? Of course, but his goal was to depict a bunch of hard-headed floundering males who had to turn to a woman for help in solving a problem. When Asimov was writing "Feminine Intuition" he was in the process of separating from his first wife and soon he would be living happily with Janet, an M.D. specializing in psychiatry.

Dr. Calvin in
Hollywood

In 1968, the National Organization for Women had just forced the US government to begin enforcing laws that theoretically mandated equal employment opportunities for women. It was no coincidence that in 1969, Asimov wrote "Feminine Intuition" as a story that made fun of the male-dominated US Robotics, showing that the mega-corporation had to rely on Dr. Susan Calvin, apparently the single high-profile female employee that they had ever had.
1968: another historical snapshot
Related Reading: more science fiction from 1969
Next: recovery of lost memories from 1977

visit the Gallery of Book and Magazine Covers