Recent studies (UCLA 2019, Cambridge 2022) show that empathy has a gender... The feminine gender! This readily reinforces an essentialism that attributes to women superior qualities in terms of emotional and relational intelligence. But can we so easily conclude from these studies that empathy is a female skill? We talk about it!
What are we talking about?
Empathy is a notion that has taken a considerable place in recent years in the conversation around " soft skills ". But what exactly are we talking about?
We are talking about the ability to understand the other person's point of view. In a pictorial way, we could say : looking at the world through the other person's pair of glasses. This implies getting out of one's own subjectivity to take into account the subjectivity of others. X and Y are facing the same object, but they do not see the same thing. This ability refers to relational intelligence.
Empathy also means the ability to identify the emotions of the other person. This refers to emotional intelligence.
The drivers of empathy are studied on the one hand by neuroscience from a cognitive angle and on the other hand by psychology from a behavioral angle. For the cognitive part, we measure the sensitivity of one individual to the mental states of another by observing the activity of mirror neurons in medical imaging. For the more psycho-behavioral part, we are interested in the reactions of an individual when exposed to the emotions of another individual : does he recognize the emotion ? Is he able to qualify it? Does he himself have immediate emotions that are a " mirror " of those to which he is exposed ?
As for mirror neurons, there are no differences between women and men. On the other hand, in terms of psycho-behavioral receptivity to the expression of other people's mental states, women show greater capacities than men.
The hormonal hypothesis
If it is not on the side of the neurons that the cause of the gendered gap in access to the emotions of others lies, could it come from hormones ?
The role of oxytocin, nicknamed the " attachment hormone", in empathy was highlighted by researchers at Cardiff University: they divided a panel of patients whose oxytocin levels were lowered due to diabetes treatment in two; half of them benefited from a substitution to bring oxytocin up to speed...
This half of the panel performed better on empathy tests than those whose hormone levels remained unbalanced. Not only did patients who found the right oxytocin levels be more receptive to the emotions of others, but they also showed a higher state of mental well-being than patients with oxytocin deficiency. From there to saying that empathy makes you happier, there is only one step.
But before we take it, let's take a look at the gender of oxytocin : the hormone is frequently associated with femininity because it is released in very large quantities at the time of childbirth and during breastfeeding. But don't panic if you're not directly affected by these events, because we also release oxytocin by making love, giving compliments, spending time with those we love, taking care of each other...
In contrast to oxytocin, which promotes empathy, there is a hormone that contains it, or even reduces it... And that's testosterone. Researchers at the University of Zurich have shown a decrease in the activity of the temporoparietal junction involved in the mechanisms of empathy (and more generally in interest in others) when testosterone levels increase.
To do this, they subjected volunteers coated with a testosterone-laden gel and volunteers coated with a placebo gel to empathy tests. The latter had more empathetic reflexes than the former. Some commentators have hastily concluded that it is scientifically proven that men are more selfish than women.
This is forgetting that testosterone does not only belong to men and that it is even the most present hormone in women !
What we can remember at this stage is that when we are confronted with endocrinological dysregulation (deficiency or excess of certain hormones), several of our faculties are modified, including empathy.
A matter of gendered socialization?
What if women were more empathetic than men because they would be more socially valued in this respect ? The consortium of researchers who produced the largest study (300,000 participants from 57 countries) concluding that women have a higher level of empathy than men suggests that education and the socially constructed environment may contribute to this gap.
This hypothesis of the weight of gendered socialization is induced in particular by the fact that it is during adolescence that female subjects show themselves to be particularly overperforming in terms of empathy, whereas after the age of 50, women are closer to men in the level of consideration of the mental states of others. In other words, girls and young women would receive more invitations in their education to be concerned about their environment, to spot non-verbal signals in the behavior of others, to anticipate the reactions of others in order to adapt their own. Very early on, whether in early childhood games or in the initiation of seductive relationships, they would be invested with a form of " emotional charge", as defined by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild.
His work on gendered professions highlights a whole imagery of sentimentality in professional projections: the air hostess, the nurse, the teacher are presented as attentive, gentle and generous, concerned with the well-being and needs of the individual, while the pilot, the surgeon or the teacher are represented as advanced technicians, at the service of depersonalized issues such as safety, speed, precision of execution, science, knowledge... A bit as if being a true professional meant precisely not doing sentimentality.
Empathy : above all a skill to be developed
Yes, but here's the thing, in the era of soft-skills, the definition of professionalism by the ability to depersonalize and desentimentalize action is more than challenged. Professional excellence now also involves situational intelligence (the ability to understand one's environment, identify weak signals, map the interests of various actors, identify fine levers and use skill to remove obstacles, etc.) and agility (the ability to withstand change, adapt one's postures, question one's models, etc.). to show resilience and creativity to make the existing ones evolve...). These new expectations are based on the development of an umbrella skill: empathy.
Also, the question is no longer so much " who is better endowed by nature or culture with empathy ? ", but how do we go about it so that everyone can train, train and excel in it? Maybe women will be one step ahead on this path, but as long as empathy is treated as a skill (and not a personality trait), there's no reason why men can't match them.
