Why women feel more empathy than men

We have generally come to believe that women are better carers, empathizers and people who can feel and share love amongst their community than men. This is more of a cultural rather than a biological difference.

A survey conducted by the Pew Research Centre found that women are more emotionally sensitive than men. It asked participants questions around how they generally thought about or perceived human suffering post-pandemic. 66% of women, compared to 55% of men, reported having thought about larger questions such as the meaning of life and the sorrow faced due to human suffering. 71% more women than men reported having felt sad when they heard about someone else’s pain. 76% of women felt thankful for the blessings in their own lives.

What is empathy?

Empathy is an important quality that influences how we interact socially and develop long-term relationships, being able to understand and feel another person’s feelings: whether happiness or sorrow, helps build stronger relationships.

Two main kinds of empathy have been studied by researchers: cognitive and emotional. Cognitive empathy is when a person is able to understand what another feels and even why, being able to rationally predict their behavior. Emotional empathy is when the person is able to feel, not just understand, what another person might be feeling.

A global study conducted by researchers at Cambridge University measured people’s ability to identify emotions on people’s faces accurately by looking at photographs, particularly their expressions around the eyes. Across 35 countries, it was found that women showed higher cognitive empathy than men.

They also found that there is a gradual decline in rates of empathy as people get older. Though the reasons are not conclusive, this decline has been attributed to the changes in hormone levels with age.

Social conditioning and gender roles

The belief that women feel more compassion than men across the globe stems from the fact that they are taught to be more caring and feeling than men. The predetermined gender roles assigned to women across several global cultures dictate that they feel more. Since women are expected to perform roles of nurturing, this learned behavior seems to us like it is inherent rather than something that they have developed over decades of conditioning.

Biologically, there is no specific reason women have to be more empathetic. However, some research does indicate that higher levels of oxytocin present in women can make them more empathetic while testosterone levels (present more in men) make people more rational-minded.

Belief in the concept of an afterlife, the supernatural

More women than men believe in concepts such as fate – that everything happens for a reason, that everything that happens in life is already meant to happen. 8 out of ten women among them also believed in heaven and the idea of reincarnation as well. Many of these factors, the study found, contributed to the general sense of being more sensitive to people's feelings and emotions, to experience others’ suffering as their own and thus offering comfort to them.

As early as 1995, a study indicated that women are more inclined to tune into and imitate people’s emotions: something that is supposed to indicate the activity of “mirror neurons” that get activated when someone performs an action or repeats an action. Elsewhere, a study of women’s brain activity showed that they actually felt the emotions they were witnessing while men’s brains showed activity in the rational parts that indicated that they recognized the emotion, but did not necessarily feel it.

More studies around gender differences in empathy in men and women need to be conducted. This will help in better understanding and treatment of mental health issues faced by men and women. More refined studies of this kind can help find out and treat illnesses that more men are affected by than women and vice versa.

What can we do to bridge the gap?

What is clear from the limited but consistent results in all these studies is that empathy is a quality that is developed over time, and not inherent. The reason many of us mistake the greater levels of empathy in women for a biological condition is because of decades-long histories that locate women as carers and nurturers, while men become the breadwinners who work in the “rational” professional fields more than women.

Understanding empathy as a quality we all must develop irrespective of our gender helps us become better human beings who can nurture and build stronger relationships too. This is particularly beneficial in the case of men as they also understand that it is completely natural to feel and express vulnerability (whether their own or others), in general helping build a kinder, more cohesive and close-knit community. As parents, too, for instance, raising boys and men to be kinder could go a long way in building a more gender-sensitive world, defeating the (hetero)patriarchal bonds that we have grown up with for ages.