No, women aren't naturally more empathetic
It's often touted that women are naturally empathetic, but science begs to differ
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Hello all - I’ve been busy running - a lot, and completed a charity 10k last weekend in 44.05 - somewhat faster than I had expected. It was cold and pouring with rain throughout and I think it’s taken me about a week to warm up and re-energise.
Other than that, this week in an in-depth article on the BBC, I explored how scientific research is up-ending age-old gender stereotypes about empathy – and revealing new ways of thinking about masculinity. I explore how the consequences of expectations surrounding empathy can contribute to inequality and power imbalances in society.
Most parents in my social circles assume that girls are naturally more emotional and empathetic, and boys less so. But when I probe a little deeper, I hear anecdotes that suggest this may not actually be the case. And yet this perception still persists.
Gender stereotypes like these have clear consequences on how we raise our children, on workplace culture and on leadership. It’s worth a read because our biases play a role in how we perceive ourselves and others.
Below is a condensed version:
When women achieve great things, it was erroneously supposed that “they were not Women who did those Great Actions, but that they were Men in Petticoats!”, the philosopher Mary Astell wrote in 1705. Even Queen Elizabeth I once famously said that she’d rule the country like a king, despite having the body of a “feeble woman“ – as if ruling had to be a masculine path.
While these anecdotes are from the past, subtle gendered biases of what it means to be a successful, powerful individual still permeate.
We still typically describe traits like empathy as naturally feminine and traits like dominance and assertiveness as masculine. Even when displaying the same behaviour, men are seen as assertive and women as aggressive.
One particularly notable trait that is often gendered in this way is empathy. Women supposedly are natural empaths while men who show more empathy are typically seen as weak.
But why is that? Is it true that women are naturally more empathetic than men, or are we socialised to be?
Gender stereotypes like these have clear consequences on how we raise our children, workplace culture and leadership. But what’s less visible is how early these biases start, and the fact that stereotypes reinforce our expectations – imposing significant constraints on how we expect others to behave.
The hormones behind empathy
Empathy involves both the ability to understand others’ thoughts and feelings, allowing us to respond appropriately. It can also be thought of in terms of cognitive empathy – our ability to recognise emotions and take other perspectives – and affective or emotional empathy, where we have an emotional response to someone’s thoughts and feelings.
Scientists use a variety of methods to empirically measure empathy, including questionnaires and experiential tasks.
And it’s long been found that, on average, women tend to consistently score higher than men.
Simon Baron-Cohen, a clinical psychologist at Cambridge University, argues that it is because the female brain is “predominantly hard-wired for empathy”, which makes women especially suited for caring roles, while the male brain is “predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems”.
While social factors clearly influence empathy, says Baron-Cohen, his work suggests that hormone exposure in the womb plays a role in social development.
Is empathy in the genes?
Many other researchers, such as neuroscientist Gina Rippon, find this hormonal theory problematic. “The idea that all women are naturally more empathic is part of the persistence of the so-called ‘female brain myth‘,” she says. We also must remember, says Rippon, that young children’s brains are “hugely responsive to outside influences”.
In one seminal study that found gender differences in empathy tasks, the differences were not large: women were more empathetic in 36 of the 57 countries studied, but in 21 countries the scores were very similar, and the authors stated that they “cannot determine causation”.
And though women do score slightly higher than average on empathy studies, the range of variation within genders is much greater than between them. “If you look at the spread of the empathy scores within the male and female populations, it’s huge,” says Rippon.
Only a tenth of the variation in the degree of empathy between individuals is down to genetics
Girls and women are often said to be more attuned to the faces of others, an important skillset needed for empathy, but results are mixed, and recent research suggests this preference is not something they are born with. A meta-analysis published in 2025 examined 31 studies featuring 40 separate experiments on how one-month-old girls and boys observed others’ faces, if they cried when others cried and how alert they were to those surrounding them. In all these measures, no matter the sex, the infants did not differ in their social awareness and keenness in understanding others’ emotions.
Indeed, a 2018 large-scale genetic study of empathy involving over 46,000 participants who completed a questionnaire and submitted DNA samples, suggested that genes do play a role in how empathetic a person is. But none of these genes are associated with a person’s sex.
Varun Warrier, an assistant professor of neurodevelopmental research at Cambridge University and author of the study, explained at the time that “since only a tenth of the variation in the degree of empathy between individuals is down to genetics, it is equally important to understand the non-genetic factors”. This means that the environment in which someone grows up and lives must be playing a role.
The socialisation of empathy
Women tend to display empathetic traits more, not because they are innate, many scientists argue, but because girls and women are socialised to act on their emotions and to prioritise the needs of others from an extremely young age. Girls are also often presented with toys that emphasise softer, more nurturing skills, while boys are encouraged to play with toy tools and cars.
“Little girls are told to be nice and not to be unkind and rough, so it gradually becomes part of who they are,” says Rippon.
Many studies have similarly shown that power distorts our empathy and inhibits people from feeling it. In my book Breadwinners, I outline the argument that, as men have historically had more power than women – and continue to do so in business and politics – they are therefore more likely to experience less empathy.
On the other hand, those who are financially disempowered have been shown to be better at reading emotions.
One study found that individuals who perceived themselves as having “lower subjective rank, lower income and belonging to cultural groups associated with the lower class” were better at reading the emotions of others, for instance. That women score higher on empathy could therefore stem from a need to be highly perceptive to those in power, coupled with their own relative lack of power.
Empathy is a malleable trait
Crucially, empathy can be learned, according to Nathan Spreng, a neurologist at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. “Once we understand this idea of a range of emotional experience, we can focus on it and learn what other people’s emotions are, and improve our empathy,” Spreng said on the BBC’s The Documentary Podcast. “It’s not static, it’s a dynamic thing across the lifespan.”
A 2023 neurological study clearly shows that both women’s and men’s brain waves respond in much the same way when shown images of painful or neutral facial expressions. But in the part of the experiment where participants completed empathy questionnaires rating how empathetic they felt, men scored lower than women did on average. That is, unless they were told beforehand that they’d score well.
In the group of men who were primed with information suggesting that men are also naturally “good at sharing and caring for the feelings of others”, the gender differences in how empathetic they felt disappeared.
Read the rest of the article here.
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Super article, thank you. So interesting to see how power is related to empathy and therefore gender. It is related to safety also - for those in subordinate positions, it is a much more crucial skill to be able to read people with more power than you.