Men Are Less Empathetic Than Women — But Is It Really in Their DNA?

There’s more to the gender empathy gap than meets the eye

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If you’re a woman, chances are that at some point in your life, you thought to yourself, why can’t men ever guess what I’m thinking or feeling? or why they don’t seem as concerned about another person’s distress as I am?

And if you’re a man, perhaps you can recognise you indeed struggle — or struggled — with these two skills, which we respectively define as cognitive and affective empathy, also known as sympathy.

As early as in the eighteen century, English clergyman Thomas Gisborne already observed with pleasure how nature had conveniently endowed the ‘female’ mind with the very qualities she most needed to fulfil her social duties, such as powers ‘adapted to unbend the brow of the learned, to refresh the over-laboured faculties of the wise.’

Over two hundred years and countless re-iterations of this claim later, many still believe that it’s precisely women’s biological ‘hardwiring’ that makes us such empathetic, compassionate and nurturing creatures, while men just can’t seem to find it in their DNA to, well, care for or understand others as much.

Now, it is true that the gender empathy gap still seems to be alive and well.

A recent massive research — and the largest to date on the topic — by the University of Cambridge compiled responses from 306,000 men and women from 57 countries on the ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes’ test, which measures cognitive empathy, and found that, on average, women are indeed more empathetic than men. This has also been the finding of several other studies done across different cultures and demographic groups.

But is this really definite proof that men’s empathy deficit is simply part of their biology? And are women actually better at guessing other people’s thoughts and feelings, or is this the result of a lifetime of social ‘training’ that conditioned them to be better?

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The ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes’ test, developed by clinical psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen in 1997, consists of a series of photographs of male and female eyes depicting different emotional states. For each set, participants are asked to choose the state that best describes them.

But before proceeding with the test, they have to first select the gender and sex they were assigned at birth. (Or sex in the test’s older versions.) It’s also usually made clear — particularly when it comes to self-report questionnaires commonly used to measure empathy, too — what is being measured.

Do these two things even matter, you might ask?

Well, they most likely do.

This is something psychologist Cordelia Fine discusses in her book Gender Delusions. And as Fine points out, when people are first primed with gender or are reminded of gender stereotypes — in psychology, this is known as ‘gender priming’ — they tend to perceive themselves in more stereotypic ways and perform worse on tasks measuring abilities they aren’t ‘supposed’ to be good at.

In other words, if you’re a woman raised with all the cultural expectations around your gender and empathy, when someone asks you to check the box ‘man’ or ‘woman’ and complete an exercise measuring it, you might think to yourself: Well, I am a woman. This should be easy. And, surprise, surprise, it is easy!

So what would happen if a woman were to take an empathy test that didn’t explicitly say what it was measuring?

According to a review of studies on gender differences in affective empathy conducted by psychologists Nancy Eisenberg and Randy Lennon, the female empathic advantage becomes vanishingly smaller as the purpose of the test becomes less and less obvious.

Another psychological study by Kristi Klein and Sara Hodges demonstrated that when the feminine nature of the empathic accuracy test was highlighted prior to participants taking it, women scored significantly better than men. However, something interesting happened when the second group of participants were asked to perform the same test but were offered $2 for every correct answer. As could probably be predicted, this financial incentive levelled the performance of women and men.

A similar thing was observed when Cardiff University psychologists presented male participants with a made-up statement that ‘men who are more in touch with their feminine side are more sexually desirable and interesting to women’ and then asked them to do an empathetic accuracy test. Unsurprisingly, men exposed to it performed much better than men in the control group who weren’t.

Clearly, when it pays to understand and sympathise with others, men seem to be able to use their empathy muscle as well as women.

Of course, you could argue that the whole point of empathy is feeling for others without there being any reward for it.

Still, while women scoring relatively higher on various empathy tests might be compelling evidence that women display more empathy when social cues remind them that they, as women, are expected to excel at it, it’s not terribly convincing that they are somehow biologically prone to it.

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If you were to stop doing whatever you do for work today and start driving a taxi around London, that would eventually reshape parts of your brain. (Obviously, unless you’re already a taxi driver.) Yup, your job can change your brain’s structure, which has been famously found for London taxi drivers but also acupuncturists, typists, musicians, airport security officers and quite a few other professions.

And that’s because our brains aren’t fixed in their processes or completely isolated from the external world. Instead, they are malleable thanks to neuroplasticity — the ability of neural networks in our brains to continually change and adapt due to experience. And contrary to what was once believed, this process doesn’t stop once we’re past adolescence.

Now, I’m pretty sure many — if not most — people would likely agree that the things we do, especially repeatedly, can re-wire our brains to an extent. This becomes quite apparent when you pick up a new hobby, for instance, and stick with it for a while.

But I also have a hunch that significantly fewer people would agree that gender socialisation, the process through which we learn about gender-related expectations, attitudes and behaviours that starts from the moment we enter this world (if not earlier, as some studies suggest), can have a similar impact on our brain. No, women and men are clearly just ‘wired’ this way from the get-go.

Still, despite this notion of ‘female’ and ‘male’ brains being seemingly as alive in our consciousness as they were a couple of centuries ago, researchers have long struggled to connect sex to concrete differences in the human brain. And modern research shows that rather than brains being distinctly female or male, most are a mosaic of what we think of as feminine and masculine features. (Those ‘mixed’ brains are also believed to be better for our mental health.)

Even research that investigated whether there’s any sex-specific genetic architecture associated with empathy found that not to be the case.

Neurogicially and genetically, we’re likely born with a similar ability to empathise, male and female, but whether or not we use it — and to which extent — then varies a great deal.

To my disappointment and confusion, I got my first realistic baby doll to ‘take care of’ when I was five. I got the second one a few years later (the one with a ‘nappy-wetting’ feature) despite having precisely zero interest in playing with the other one. One of my very first memories from kindergarten was being told to try to understand the feelings of a boy who was bullying me instead of getting mad at him.

As a girl, you’re made aware early on that it’s your duty to take care of others and consider everybody else’s feelings before your own and always make allowances for boys ‘because they just don’t know any better.’ (Do they really not know or aren’t taught the importance of thinking about what the other person might feel if they do or say something bad to them?)

And if we are constantly encouraged to do certain things, such as nurturing and caring for others, this is bound to affect our brain wiring and the strength of the empathy muscle. The same goes for being discouraged from behaving a certain way.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how our ideas around manhood differ from country to country, specifically between America and Denmark. And while American men define it in stark contrast to ‘femininity’, for the Danish men, it’s precisely the typically ‘feminine’ qualities — including being caring, empathetic and considerate — that are an integral part of being a man.

But if you’re unlike the Danes and consider ‘feminine’ qualities as ‘unmanly’ and, what usually follows, shameful and inferior, that can discourage you from ever working on or displaying them, can’t it?

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When you look at how many elements of our environment — and from how early on — encourage, discourage or downright pressure us into a box that says either ‘man’ or women’, or the evidence that men can be empathetic if given an incentive to do so, it becomes ridiculous to claim the gender empathy gap must be due to biological factors alone.

Women’s brains aren’t necessarily ‘hardwired’ for empathy any more than men’s brains are (superiorly) ‘hardwired’ for logic or spatial ability.

Instead, social and cultural impact seems to play a role in women’s decision to activate our empathy and then in how effectively we use it. But the latter is then, unfortunately, used to prove we are just ‘naturally’ this way, often to our detriment.

Because, yes that comes at a cost for women.

This is evident in the unequal burden of childcare and other caring duties imposed on us. And all the emotional labour we’re expected to provide in and outside our homes. And all the other constraints, barriers, unfair expectations and stereotyping that we have to ‘deal with’ simply because once upon a time, someone decided that the ‘female’ brain was explicitly wired to be great at serving others.

(Ironically, since men might not put themselves in women’s shoes as often as they should, they likely don’t notice much of that either.)

But it’s not just women who lose as a result of this. We all do.

Cognitive empathy is vital for prosocial behaviours, such as caring for our young and forming communities. Meanwhile, affective empathy can act as an important catalyst for taking action to help others. (I need to point out, though, that there’s also such a thing as too much affective empathy, known as empathic distress.)

But although we now need those two probably more than ever before, the levels of empathy seem to have been steadily declining for the past few decades. And it’s perhaps no wonder that alongside this decline, there’s been an increase in an array of social issues, from polarisation to loneliness, anxiety, depression and burnout.

Still, the good news is that empathy and any other part of our emotional repertoire, like compassion, isn’t something that is lost forever once we lose it.

As I mentioned numerous times here, empathy is essentially a muscle. And just like any other muscle in our body, the more you use it — for instance, through active listening or reading fiction (yes, really) — the stronger it gets.

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Insisting that complex traits, like empathy, are determined at birth and are exclusively ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ is a painfully narrow view of the human condition. But I do hope that one day, it will feel uncommon and strange to think this way.

Until we get there, though, we need to be careful that amidst all this isolation and uncertainty and jumping at each other’s throats, we won’t lose the ability to connect with each other.

So if you haven’t been to the empathy gym in a while, perhaps it’s time to visit it soon.

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