Why Creative INTJ Women Are So Rare

INTJ Women and the Creative Life

If you’re like me, you may have butted heads at work a few times with others and not understood why. You’ve probably wondered why is it that you’re misunderstood and at some point have even thought something was wrong with you. I’ve shared in the past, that when the Meyer-Briggs personality test became a corporate trend, I was tasked with taking the test and discovered I was an INTJ personality type. Not only that, I was compared to my peers and realized the company had leaned toward hiring mostly INFJs and ESFPs who are unlike me.

How Rare is an INTJ Woman, Really?

For so long I was frustrated working with others and eventually dug deeper into what my INTJ personality type was about. My test itself provided a lot of information that was beneficial on improving how I work with others. But I spend most of my life outside of work and was curious as to how being an INTJ impacted me. Rather quickly I learned the INTJ personality type is rare.

According to the University of Northern Iowa, only 2.1% of the USA population has an INTJ personality type. I would expect that if we split that in half, even though it’s inaccurate, women make up close to 1% of the INTJ personality types in America. The loneliness I felt before was acknowledged when reading this, but reality hit me where I realized that for the rest of my life I’d be misunderstood by most people. The characteristics that I have such as:

• Being effective, able to break apart systems and streamline them
• Being analytical, picking apart claims and rebutting them or proving my own claims with facts or data
• Being innovative, and determined, immovable when convinced of a goal in mind
• Quiet, reflective (for the love of all humanity I can’t help but think back on all I’ve done)

These characteristics listed by UNI, I could not be more of myself. I struggled thinking there was something off about me, in addition to having ADHD I learned that my personality is just one that isn’t so common.

INTJ Female Struggles

Positive characteristics tend to be the ones that solve problems, is useful and provides answers that are thoughtful, rational, and strategic without being arrogant. At the workplace, being an INTJ is very useful. In my career I’ve been found to be the person to break apart systems that weren’t working and pinpoint the mistakes that would aggregate over time and cause business failures. Proving with data that my solution was best. In time, I was recognized as someone who was able to manage her own sites, travel to help train and open additional locations for the business internationally and domestically and had even opened my own business, Tru.Works (a personal project) where I could be completely myself.

The hardest part about being an INTJ is the loneliness. Constantly having to defend your stance and butting heads with coworkers or family members as it’s common to be considered as being too rigid, unempathetic, and unwilling to move away from the plan at hand. Other personality types are able to pivot and adjust accordingly but without proving to me that your plan is better than my own I won’t change plans without complaining about it. I also won’t withhold an “I told you so” if I’m proven to be right.

INTJ-A vs INTJ-T: Which One Are You?

Not only that, some INTJ females are assertive or turbulent and lo and behold I am assertive which makes me come off slightly arrogant. This trait works well whenever I want to hold

Why is Being an INTJ Creative Even Lonelier?

As an artist, this also brings me to even more loneliness. Being an INTJ in itself can be horrific when wanting to make friends, due to having a high independence and having ADHD and being a female on top of that makes it tougher to find others like you. I did find that INTJ artists typically land in the following jobs in the arts, design and communications field, according to UNI:

• Industrial Designer
• Editor
• Translator
• Photographer
• Technical Writer
• Writer

What Careers Fit an INTJ Female Artist?

I resonate with the list and hope that other women can see that if they’re artistic and an INTJ there are career paths you can follow that complement your personality type. The rarest gender and personality type combination is that of the INTJ female, and even so there are others out there, and in the search for others like me I strived to search up artists or other creatives and found only 2 confirmed female artists, that of Jodie Foster, an actress, Avril Lavigne, a pop star.

Where Are the Other INTJ Creative Women?

So I guess I leave this thinking, where are the other INTJ creative women, there’s no way I am the only one? I guess it’s safe to say that creative INTJ females are rare and to be a creative woman also with ADHD would be even rarer. I write this post to invite other INTJ women creatives to connect, hopefully we can find each other and share stories of adversity and artwork.