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
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.
