Women have greater cognitive empathy or to understand the subjective perspective of another person, and significantly greater emotional empathy or to feel the emotions of another person. We know this from self-reports, brain scans as well as empathy tests. We also know this for interest in empathy related activities such as nursing, charities, and social issues which women predominate in. Women greater cognitive empathy can be noticed because they constantly gaze more at the eyes of people when they communicate with them. Understanding the perspective of another person is dependant on attention to the eyes and also monitoring a person’s eye movement patterns during communication. Women are more emotionally empathic because they feel more distress at the subjective pain in others, feel more sympathy, cry at other’s pain, and comfort other people when they are crying. They are also more likely yawn when watching another person yawn and smiling or giggle when seeing another person smile or laugh. This is called mimicry which is a core of emotional empathy. Testosterone also decreases empathy in both genders while balanced levels of estrogen + oxytocin increases empathy in women. Men also have greater inhibition of cognitive empathy which makes them able to commit great violence against people they don’t want to empathize with. There are more men than women who suffer from empathy disorders such as Autism and Psychopathy.

Women evolved greater empathic capacities because of taking care of children’s feelings and their needs, as well as communicating feelings and thoughts with other women in personal conversations. Men had group talk and less personal conversations throughout human prehistory, and emotional empathy came at a disadvantage when killing/huting animals or going to war with other men & killing them. Cognitive empathy was also not required that much in activities such as hunting or navigating.

It’s also harder for people to empathize with other men because they express less emotion, and therefore other people in society cannot understand men’s subjective perspective or mimic their subjective emotions.

Sources:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19010397 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25264229 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26004450 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/50814177_Are_Women_More_Empathetic_than_Men_A_Longitudinal_Study_in_Adolescence http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22005486 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886915300106