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The Book of Job, a prototypical "wisdom" text from the fifth or sixth century B.C.E., powerfully articulates a good man's struggle to understand unexpected misfortune. In coming to terms with his suffering and gaining understanding of his place in the universe, Job demonstrates the complex, dynamic yet integrative nature of growing wise. Drawing on our synthetic model of wisdom, we claim wisdom occurs in personality, cognition, and conation that transforms intrapersonal, interpersonal, and transpersonal experience. We discuss gender-specific obstacles that Job overcomes in attaining wisdom by analyzing modern interpretations of the text, which underscore its perdurance in a post-modern age.

Recent psychological research into the realms and processes of growing wiser can be linked to gender theory and research documenting variation in human development. Drawing on an integrative model of wisdom including components in three domains (personality, cognition, and conation) and across three levels (intrapersonal, interpersonal, and transpersonal), we highlight potential differences in the ways that women and men attain and express wisdom, and we initiate a search for interactive patterns across the components of wisdom. Although it would be premature to claim that men and women differ globally in wisdom, there is sufficient evidence of divergences across the sexes to warrant more systematic inquiry.

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Traditional rationalistic theories of mind and self are based on a duality of modes of processing or ways of speaking. These complementary processes are also narratively undergirded and personified by gender imagery in which parts of the mind are symbolized as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’. Development is associated with the heroic journey of a male protagonist – rise, victory, and ascent to height, mind, and spirit. Feminine development, in contrast, implies defeat, passivity, surrender, and descent to organismic depths. This narrative structure has influenced accounts of mind, gender, and development, as well as shaped core experiences of self over the life course, especially early in life. As cultural discourse changes to accept bipolar tension and dialectical balance between the mind’s polarities, however, a reevaluation of the gendered narratives underlying conceptions of mind and self has ensued. This reevaluation is evident at the level of both cultural discourse and individual development, since later life may bring the opportunity to form a more coherent self, integrating polar opposites. Efforts to reformulate theories of the mind and self thus inevitably involve a reevaluation of the meaning of gender and its relation to mind.