NOTE: Inspired by the short Prager-U documentary film, MIA: Masculinity in America
Of the two biological genders which are scientifically known to exist, male and female, there are some statistical differences. On average, women score higher on empathy and on reading emotions and men score higher on “systemizing” (abstracting data to a rules-based system or model).
When half a million men and women were looked at, women scored 0.53 standard deviations higher on empathy than men. Here is a rough depiction of what that means:
The black curve (men) is centered on “0” and the dashed vertical line shows the top 2.5% of empathy scores for men. But the red curve for women is shifted to the right and, overall, it doesn’s seem like much difference.
If you had a job opening and you needed someone with empathy, it seems like you can hire a man or a woman and still have good chances either way. But what about extreme situations?
In the case of extreme empathy, assuming that it will be required, you are over 3 times as likely to find a woman with the needed characteristics as you are to find a man. This over three-fold difference is represented by the area under the curves to the right of the dashed line.
While it doesn’t help to stigmatize or stereotype people, it can help to both know and understand the statistical differences which do exist among known genders. There are certain benefits that each gender brings to the table.
Reference
[evidence from 500,000 people proves that the two genders are different] — Greenberg DM, Warrier V, Allison C, Baron-Cohen S. Testing the Empathizing-Systemizing theory of sex differences and the Extreme Male Brain theory of autism in half a million people. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2018 Nov 27;115(48):12152-12157. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1811032115. Epub 2018 Nov 12. PMID: 30420503; PMCID: PMC6275492. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6275492/