Last summer, six women researchers sat together in Barcelona with a deceptively simple question: what actually changes when women’s perspectives are centered in consciousness studies?

We were at the Science of Consciousness conference, one of the field’s premier annual gatherings. Around us, the program was running as it typically does — panels, plenaries, papers. What we tried to build in our workshop was something different. Not a substitute for rigorous inquiry, but a complement to it. A deliberate space to ask whether there were ways of knowing our field had been systematically leaving out.

My colleague Dr. Laurel Waterman, together with Dr. Joan Walton, Dr. Marina Weiler, Dr. Mona Sobhani, Allison Paradise, and I, designed a workshop we called Women in Consciousness Studies. Before a single presentation began, we asked participants to close their eyes and simply sit with a question: what brought you here? What is alive in you right now?

It took about three minutes. And in those three minutes, the room shifted.

Several people who had wandered in midway through mentioned it afterward. They said they could feel something different. Not louder. Not more dramatic. Just different — a quality of attention, of collective presence, that distinguished this gathering from the panels running on either side of it.

That shift is difficult to document. It does not fit neatly into a methodology section or a results table. And yet, for those of us in the room, it was among the most data-rich moments of the entire conference. It was, in a very real sense, proof of the very thing we had come to discuss.

The core argument of our workshop — and of Dr. Waterman’s subsequent article in the Paradigm Explorer, the journal of the Scientific and Medical Network — is not that women think differently from men, or that intuition outranks analysis. The argument is subtler and, I believe, more important: that consciousness research benefits from epistemological diversity. That holding personal experience, embodied knowing, and shared story alongside empirical methodology does not weaken the inquiry. It deepens it.

For decades, the science of consciousness has struggled with what philosophers call the “hard problem” — the question of how subjective experience arises from physical processes. The materialist framework has brought us remarkable tools for studying the brain. What it has not given us is a way to fully honor the reality of first-person experience. When we treat inner knowing as data, not noise, something changes in what becomes visible.

This is not a new insight. It has been present in contemplative traditions for millennia. What is newer, and still unfolding, is the attempt to integrate it into scientific practice — and to ask honestly what structures and habits within the academy have made that integration so slow.

I do not think the answer is simple. The patterns that tend to privilege certain ways of knowing are old and subtle, and they operate in research communities just as they do elsewhere. What I have come to believe, from decades of work at the intersection of neuroscience, meditation research, and consciousness studies, is that the question of who is in the room matters. Not because any perspective is inherently superior, but because the full picture requires many windows.

Our workshop was one attempt to open a different window. Dr. Waterman’s article in the Paradigm Explorer documents what we found there. I am grateful to her for putting it into words so precisely, and to Joan, Marina, Mona, and Allison for what they brought into the room.

For those who want to continue this conversation, we recently launched the Consciousness Educators’ Network, a home for researchers and educators exploring consciousness from exactly this kind of perspective. I invite you to visit them at consciousnesseducation.net.

 

Sending gratitude,
Marjorie

 

---

This post draws on “Why Women in Consciousness Studies? The Proof is in the Story,” by Dr. Laurel Waterman, published in the Paradigm Explorer, the journal of the Scientific and Medical Network.

Photo by Timothy Dykes on Unsplash