Gender and empathy

Abstract

This chapter characterizes discussions of gender differences in empathy during Prior to the late 1970s and identifies the point at which gender differences in empathy started to become an explicit focus of research. In 1974, Maccoby and Jacklin examined research that looked at gender differences in a wide variety of psychological functions including various aspects of perception, learning, verbal and quantitative abilities, personality, and social behavior. The chapter surveys research on gender differences in empathy up to the mid-1980s. The major characteristics of this research were: a tendency to focus on affective, rather than cognitive empathy; a tendency to discuss observed differences in social terms, rather than offering biological explanations. More generally, over time new experimental methods and theoretical approaches have been incorporated into research on gender differences in empathy. In summary, as with the earlier research on gender differences in affective empathy, support for Baron-Cohen's theory is both equivocal and open to various interpretations.