"Men and women are just different and have different skills and talents"

I studied psychology because of that need to understand people, as a protective mechanism. It had the added benefit of fitting with my role as a woman -women like understanding people, don't they? Well you know what, I actually like business, and wheeling and dealing (which is part of what I do now) and now that I've reduced my perceived threat level (by dealing with the abuse) my actual (non-feminine) traits are coming out.

Sort of at a tangent, I was in a work session this week on mentoring - it was saying that women are often mentored on thing like how to build a team, how to persuade people, how to resolve conflict, etc, etc - how to do all the people stiff. But men are more likely to get mentored on the actual business stuff, looking at the financials, and shareholder value and all that sort of stuff; when they're looking at who to promote, that's the stuff that really counts, whereas all the people stuff is added extras, nice-to-haves, but not essential in the same away that making and saving money is.

(We watched this TED talk, if anyone's interested in where I got it from. )

daisy part is the organisation just not digging into issues and a lot is the whole structure in third world countries. When the wages for people under fair trade can be two or three times higher than similar work people will accept whatever they are given. I can't emphasise because I do not have any experiences that can possible relate and I am wary of sympathy becoming nothing more than pity.

Late to the party but....

I donate time to a fair trade organisation that spends its time patting itself on the back quite a lot. But there is no recognition of the inequality we find even in fair trade. I try to ensure that the money cascades down to all workers on farm and plantations but a lot of the time the part time picking work done primarily by women is still massively underpaid even in fair trade. And we have issues with the lack of female run farms, I know third world so we are bound to run into issues but even organisations that are supposed to be about fairness has cultural blinkers.

In terms of the differences as we grow up I like to think that all my kids have been brought up the same with the same values and freedoms. And they are all completely different in attitude and behaviour. The socialisation that they had was different through the friends they had and the different interaction with adults as my 2 oldest are by my XH and they spent time with his new family. On the up side of that though DD was exposed to astronomy at a very young age with XH so that is where her love of science comes from wanting to please daddy (I tease her on that a lot).

I think my point is, in response to the OP, that men & women are not that different and any behavioural differences are strongly socialised.

Ok I've read this entire thread, which hardly ever happens (I may have glossed over a bit when it started talking about horses)! Its very, very interesting. A lot of the female = higher empathy stuff in Psychology comes from self report data, specifically using Baron-Cohens EQ measure which I have problems with (too many to go into detail here). A good argument against comes from Cordelia Fine in the experiment mentioned above where if men where given financial reward for recognising emotion in pictures of peoples faces the differences in success between men & women disappeared. This I think comes from the behavioural expectation that men are not supposed to be able to recognise emotion (cognitive empathy), and therefore do not admit to it ... not that they are unable to.

There is some neuropsychological data to suggest differences in response within the brain as a result of observing an 'unfair' situation or one designed to provoke an empathetic response. However - I believe that the error is in assuming that a neurological difference in adult brain responses indicates an innate difference which somehow justifies the status quo and every gender stereotype out there (including the horses!). There are very few neurological differences in male & female brains at birth, these differences occur due to the external social influences (among others) i.e. how we raise our children and in fact, external social pressures may induce biological change which results in a difference in male/female neural response in empathy.

Really interesting thread.

I thought that empathy is where you can imagine what it's like to be in another person's shoes as in BE that person, rather than imagine YOURSELF in that situation. Not many people do the former, but are all too ready to do the latter (and give reasons why they would never find themselves in that situation).

See, this is all interesting because I've definitely read something which says that the more advantage a person has in society, the less empathy that they have. That richer people actually lose empathy compared to if they've come from a disadvantaged background. The people who are more empathetic have less power to actually make effective changes but the people with power lose empathy.

Shame I have no idea what it was though or where I read it.

There's also something interesting hovering at the edges of my brain to do with subordinate groups switching off empathy, and the difference between empathy and sympathy.

This kind of links to something I remember about increased rates of violence amongst minority groups. I think when you're put in a subordinate position and treated badly you either react by "blaming" upwards, downwards or inwards.

Some people place the blame upwards towards e.g. David Cameron and so switch off empathy towards him because he's had an easier, more privileged life than most people so it's hard to acknowledge his difficulties because of his clear advantages.

Many people turn the blame inwards, in fact women as a group are socialised to do so - so they look for what's wrong with themselves to cause them to be in a situation rather than looking for the true external cause. They are capable for expressing empathy with people/women in similar situations because then they can see the inequality, but they can't extend it to themselves.

Others will blame downwards - either because they know they haven't got power to blame upwards or because they see a situation as a fight for resources so they're trying to establish a subordinate hierarchy that places them at the top. There may also be a desire to distance themselves from other subordinate groups in an attempt to associate themselves with more powerful groups which then turns off empathy. Men, who are socialised to believe in their "right to rule" may also try to gain this power in the home environment when they're denied it elsewhere.

That's what I think. There are likely to be exceptions but I think this is generally the case and it gives me the rage.

So could it then be that men aren't empathetic because they aren't motivated to be so - such that when provided with (financial) motivation that suddenly changes?

This is all too deep for me. But if I remember (and understood) correctly, in that empathy-vs-analytical experiment "empathy" means "having an emotional response to the cues of others" as Buffy said. In Delusion of Gender another experiment was mentioned - and there it turned out that men (and women) are plenty empathetic when they are financially rewarded for being empathetic.

Cailin, I think we're certainly talking about two different processes - caring and understanding.

It seems obvious that there are lots of situations where people understand that someone is being hurt - people in famines, torture in the West, contemporary genocide, and they just don't care. They don't care even if it is happening to a baby.

As events have happened and do happen all the time where people don't care, I would call that ability to deeply care about outgroups empathy. Say for example, the practice of using African American babies to lure alligators. That is closing down empathy. It isn't complicated to understand that is a terrible, hurtful thing to do.

And often, people in positions of power are exceptionally good at understanding how other people think and feel, but are using it for their own purposes.

Buffy, I agree that we are just trying to make sense of a feeling, but I don't agree that women are more empathetic (if indeed they even are) because they are more used to being hurt.

In my experience, people who have been hurt a lot have more problems experiencing empathy. People seem more capable of experiencing empathy if they feel loved, have people around who they trust, people who they can be vulnerable around.

Often people feel empathy for a third party together. A is sad about C, A tells B, A and B experience empathy together and this creates a bond. You have to trust each other to expose the emotion together.

I think people turn off boys' empathy as part of this whole, 'be a man, punch that person, bully that crying weakling, what are you, a girl?' type thing.'

I would agree with that Buffy. Almond, what you say about responding to kittens and babies is not really what I'd mean about empathy. I think that presses a survival and protection button in all of us, and it doesn't take much in cognitive resources to be able to understand that a baby needs looking after or a kitten is cute and endearing. Empathy as I see it is more about engaging with people on a harder level - feeling the sense of hurt when someone's having a conversation and their partner turns away to talk to someone else, leaving them out for example. IMO women see and understand these things because we are so tuned in to how important these social cues are. This relates back to what men were saying on the ask the opposite sex thread - men are tuned into the physical capability of other men because that's their threat. They don't notice the physical capability of women because that's not a threat. Similarly we don't empathise with a cat who's annoying another cat because they're not a threat, we just find it a bit funny.

Not feeling empathy is one of the criteria for being identified as a psychopath, so I don't think it can be that most men don't feel empathy.

I think that the extent to which you do or do not feel empathy is down to a whole load of social experiences and learning.

I think somebody has to be prepared to be vulnerable to feel empathy.

If you are either a. terrified or b. deluding yourself about how bad other people have it in order to protect your own status, I think that makes it hard to feel empathy, but that is just my opinion.

I wrote a blog post a while back, can't remember if i ever actually posted it. At the time there were two popular songs in the charts. That's What Makes You Beautiful by One direction (what made her beautiful was the fact she thought she was ugly) and Sexy and I Know it by lmfao. Just contrast those two for half a second.

Why is it though that in many of these studies men are said not to feel empathy?

I've noticed with my DH that he's far more empathetic since getting into feminism - for example, he cries at films now when in the past he cried at literally nothing. Part of that I think is his sense of lost status - before he felt like his place was assured, everything was alright with the world, now he feels more threatened, less sure, more unstable. His empathy has definitely increased.

Cailin, I think what I'm saying is that there are multiple different reasons why a person may put another's feelings before their own, and some of them have nothing with empathy.

Empathy is a feeling. Being self sacrificing is an action. Self sacrifice can be caused by a lot of bad feelings and carried out for a lot of poor reasons and circumstances.

'That is very interesting about 'empathy' being the same neural response as being hurt. Again, I'd wonder whether, rather than being a 'female' thing, 'empathy' is actually because women have more experience of being hurt, being afraid and feeling week (so what's called 'empathy' is actually identification with the feeling of being hurt) and developing coping strategies (which are interpreted by researchers as 'what empathy looks like').'

I was wondering if as empathy gets switched off through 'othering' groups, if women's empathy is harder to switch off because they already feel othered anyway, so are more likely to be on the side of the underdog. If that is true, it may be that there are other things that turn empathy off in subordinate groups.