The Other Side of the Empathy Gap
Feminism's superpower?
In 2005, psychologists reported some perplexing results. They asked subjects how much they would donate to save the life of a child. When they asked other subjects for donations to save eight children, the answer, surprisingly, was about the same. But when some were told the name of the one child and shown a photo, donations shot up – exceeding even those for eight children.
There’s something not quite right about empathy.
If you’ve read about men’s issues, you’ve probably heard of the empathy gap and you will understand that society has little empathy for men which contributes to many of the issues men face.
But this essay looks at empathy from the opposite viewpoint. Drawing on recent science, I’ll focus not on the lack of empathy for men, but on the abundance of empathy for women.
But, first, let me pose a question - Why would anyone be a feminist?
People get all sorts of rewards from identifying with groups – including women as a group and feminists as a group. One of the cornerstones of social psychology, Social Identity Theory, tells us that group membership can boost our self-image and self-esteem. As one textbook explains:
Social identities give us a sense of place and position in the world. It feels good to be part of an “us.”
Beyond social identity, feminism offers something stronger still. Feminism centres on helping women and identifying with their victimhood – in other words empathy[i].
Empathy took feminism’s centre stage in the 1980s with the rise of Difference Feminism - led by feminist academics including Carol Gilligan. By this century, empathy’s power to bring feminists together and forge solidarity was well recognised. Feminists even adopted a proprietorial attitude to empathy – as one feminist academic put it: “Empathy, in short, is a feminist issue”. And its political value was recognised by others including Gloria Steinem: “Empathy is the most radical of human emotions.”
This strategy works so well because women attract far more empathy than men – a fact confirmed by study after study. (Sources 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) Of course, none of this should be a surprise – it’s simply the flip side of the lack of empathy for men.
Some argue this bias is rooted in evolutionary psychology but, if we look at how often empathy for women is discussed in a huge corpus of books, we see a marked shift coinciding with the rise of feminism. We also get a graphic indication of women’s advantages in attracting empathy.
I think all of us know from experience that empathy feels good - there’s a warm inner glow from identifying with others. Psychologists confirm this - though they tend to use opaque clinical descriptions about positive affect, dopamine and the nucleus accumbens. Thankfully, a leading scientist, Paul Bloom, has put it simply:
Empathy can be an immense source of pleasure.
Regular readers may recall my amazement that 61% of men support discrimination against men. We can now glimpse an explanation - these men empathise deeply with women. So deeply that they will support women, even if that runs against their own interest. In return, they receive a dollop of that pleasure Paul Bloom mentioned - the warm inner glow from empathy.
At this point you may be thinking - So what? Both men and women care about women. Helping women feels good. So, what’s the problem?
I’ll quote Paul Bloom again:
[I]f the world were a simple place, where the only difficulties one had to deal with involved a single person in some sort of immediate distress, and where helping that person had positive effects, the case for empathy would be solid.
But the world is not a simple place.
Recent research has changed how we think about empathy. In the last few years, respected academics have raised their concerns in books including The Dark Sides of Empathy, Against Empathy and the forthcoming Suicidal Empathy, as well as journal articles including Why Empathy is not the Best Basis for Humanitarianism, The bad things we do because of empathy and Against Empathy (again). Even a theologian has weighed in with warnings of “the sin of empathy”.
So how does empathy lead us astray?
The first problem is that, in the rush to help those we care about, reason is pushed aside by emotion. That’s particularly a problem with moral decisions, where the result is rarely morally correct. Theologian Joseph Rigney summarised the problem:
Open debate is out. Emotional reasoning is in. Ideas are out; empathy is in. What seems most compassionate and empathetic in the moment is prioritized over what is good and wise in the long run.
This problem did not just insinuate itself into feminism, feminism rushed to embrace it. Starting in the 1980s, Carol Gilligan promoted a radical new ethical foundation for feminism – the Ethics of Care. In Gilligan’s view, empathy should be central to feminist morality while moral principles and reasoning were side-lined. Later feminist thinkers only took this even further. The views of one, Nel Noddings, were summarised as:
In contrast to traditional ethical theories, which often prioritize justice and individual rights, the ethics of care champions a more nuanced view of morality. … A justice-centered approach might focus on fairness and equal treatment, while the ethics of care would encourage us to offer support and understanding, prioritizing the emotional needs of our friend over rigid principles.
In practice, this “nuance” is an invitation to rationalisation in place of reasoning.
As a real-world example, consider the recent Queensland government taskforce on women and justice - Hear Her Voice. Much of the report is a pastiche of quotes from women put forward as victims. Each group of recommendations emerges, as if by revelation, after the incantation: “Her voice is heard”. (In context, it is clear that she/her is a personification of female victimhood.) The recommendations seriously curtail civil liberties but were enacted without meaningful debate – another case of empathy pushing reason aside.
Empathy has another problematic characteristic - it draws your attention towards those with whom you empathise at the expense of all others. Like a spotlight it focusses attention narrowly but leaves the rest in darkness. The result is a moral blind-spot to the suffering of those we do not, or cannot, empathise with.
In the case of feminism, the spotlight doesn’t just create indifference, it leaves a moral void – moral values, rules, and fairness often don’t apply to males. In a previous essay I described this moral exclusion and gave examples including:
The Australian government committed to the principle “Every Australian deserves to live free from violence.” (Source 1 2) But, when that was translated to action, men were ignored.
In the last Australian budget, men’s health spending was entirely removed - cut to zero.
A feminist taskforce criticised the practice of locking up children in Brisbane’s adult watch house – saying it contravened human rights obligations and should be discontinued – for girls. No action was proposed for boys.
I hinted at another problem with empathy’s moral judgements in the introduction when I described how people care more about one child in a photograph than about eight anonymous children. Empathy isn’t governed by numbers, costs and benefits. As Stalin reputedly said: “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.”
Consequently, a tragedy befalling one woman tugs on the heartstrings more powerfully than tables of data. So new laws are regularly enacted based upon a claim that, had this law been in place previously, a woman’s life would have been saved. Recent Australian examples include:
Each of these laws weakened civil liberties yet they were all enacted with minimal debate – propelled by a woman’s name and photo in news media. After all, what sort of monster could argue against saving the life of a woman?
But empathy doesn’t just distort moral judgement, it can also license harm. Moral licencing occurs when people believe that their past empathy grants them moral credit, entitling them to do harm while still seeing themselves as fundamentally virtuous.
The ME-TOO movement was founded on the motto “Empowerment Through Empathy”. The empathy, of course, was for the accuser and the empowerment took the form of public shaming of an accused at the cost of their reputation and, often, livelihood. Belief in accusations flowed naturally from empathy for the alleged victim. And, because of moral licensing, the harm done to innocent men was swept aside. As one feminist coolly admitted:
I’m actually not at all concerned about innocent men losing their jobs over false sexual assault/harassment allegations.
So we’ve seen that empathy leads to bad moral choices. But it also worsens us vs them attitudes.
The areas of the brain that register empathy are sensitive to whether someone is in-group or out-group. That’s why empathy is associated with in-group loyalty on the one hand but, on the other, to polarisation, conflict, parochialism and racism. The combination of empathy and an Us vs Them ideology like feminism is a dangerous cocktail indeed.
Empathy’s tendency to spotlight those with whom we empathise, magnifies existing bias towards our in-group and against our out-group. Feminist policies show both effects:
Australia’s international Gender Equality strategy requires that foreign policy, aid, trade etc serve “to protect and promote the human rights of all women and girls”. Males are effectively excluded from consideration and funding.
During the 2014 African Ebola outbreak, UN Women successfully campaigned for an official policy to prioritise women for medical supplies, food, care, social protection and economic assistance at the expense of men.
Empathy-driven discrimination often has a distinctive cruelty because, unlike other causes of discrimination, it doesn’t reduce as the out-group falls further behind. This is likely the explanation of why bias against boys in school remains strong even as they fall further behind.
Harvard researcher Mina Cikara and her colleagues have spent years documenting an even darker facet of empathy – schadenfreude. By this, Cikara means that empathy can cause an in-group to take pleasure in the suffering of their out-group and pain in response to their pleasure – even when the target has done nothing wrong. (Sources 1, 2, 3, 4)
It’s not hard to find evidence of feminist glee at male suffering:
A genre known as Good for Her cinema caters to feminists wanting to revel in female violence against men. (Think Tarantino but smug.)
The meme “I bathe in male tears” is sold on T-shirts and other merchandise.
Australia’s most famous feminist, Clementine Ford, displayed evident delight in the deaths of men from Covid: “Honestly, the coronavirus isn’t killing men fast enough”.
To recap, empathy makes for bad moral decisions and fuels us vs them hostility. The result can be anger, aggression and worse.
We all have experienced anger triggered, not by anything done to us, but because we empathised with someone else. Psychologists know this as empathic anger.
Empathic anger seems to underlie much of the anger feminists feel towards males. For example, activist Soraya Chemaly in her book Rage Becomes Her says “empathy and compassion were fundamental to my anger”. Mona Eltahawy writes of the importance of anger to feminism as “the fuel that drives the engine.” And many other feminist academics have celebrated feminist fury and rage towards males.
In 2014, psychologists Anneke Buffone and Michael Poulin set out to explore something odd: people sometimes acted aggressively - even toward those known to be innocent. This didn’t fit existing theories. They suspected, and ultimately proved, that the cause was empathy. Subsequent research by Paul Bloom and others confirmed that empathy, even for strangers, is a potent cause of aggression, violence and punishment. Bloom puts it starkly:
Everyone appreciates that fear and hate can motivate ugly choices; we should be mindful that our most tender sentiments can do the same.
Carceral feminism provides a clear example in which empathy replaces justice. The result is ever-harsher punishment of men, ultimately not because of what they’ve done but for who they are. New criminal offences are created regularly that deliberately target men and carry penalties out of proportion to any harm done. For instance, in Queensland, the new offence of stealthing (removing a condom during consensual sex) can result in life imprisonment even when there is no physical harm. Compare this to grievous bodily harm which carries a maximum sentence of 14 years even if it results in the loss of a limb!
And, just as Buffone and Poulin’s experiments revealed, carceral feminism cares little about guilt or innocence. In New South Wales, most people in jail for domestic violence assault (60%) and intimidation/stalking (57%) have not been tried or found guilty.
By now you may be unsurprised that research shows that terrorists are motivated by empathy for those in whose name they kill. Psychologist Fritz Breithaupt warns:
Sometimes we commit atrocities not out of a failure of empathy but rather as a direct consequence of successful, even overly successful, empathy.
And these dangers are hard to challenge because critique is portrayed as an attack on female victims. Empathy turns emotion into a moral truth that cannot be questioned.
So where does all this leave us?
Empathy attracts people to feminism, acting as the secret sauce that blends self-interest, emotion and politics. Its emotional pull is so strong it can even draw in men, despite their self-interest.
Empathy then grants moral indulgence at the cost of reasoned principles. Psychologist Paul Bloom explains:
The problems we face as a society and as individuals are rarely due to lack of empathy. Actually, they are often due to too much of it.
Empathy explains not just why feminists can do bad things - but why they feel good about it.
Feminists who have done terrible things, things like withholding food from starving men, had a choice – a choice between doing what’s right or basking in empathy’s rewards. They weren’t driven by evil. They were just too weak to turn away from empathy.
Feminism isn’t primarily a worldview, a philosophy or a moral system. It is, above all, a social identity that offers emotional rewards. And empathy is the most potent of them all.
I’ve argued before that there is a moral void at the centre of feminism. That void, it turns out, is the size and shape of empathy.
[i] Part of the reason the dangers of empathy weren’t recognised earlier is that it wasn’t distinguished clearly from compassion. Empathy means feeling what another feels. Compassion means caring and concern for another without necessarily feeling their pain.
Excellent piece! Really important analysis of why feminism has gained so much control in our society. The real question is what on earth we do about it!
This explains so much – like why domestic violence has been weaponised so successfully, why health spending skews so badly and why even some men support feminism. (Like chickens supporting KFC right?)
But the eye opener for me was the named laws - Hannah's Law etc.
Obvious once you see it.
Thanks for seeing it.