So far, the two-ton elephant in the room is “Maybe men and women really do have different brains – or a combination of brains and early experiences that produce different results from the same input.” Note this applies either in or outside a patriarchal context, though the action items diverge depending on which. Note also that if their neurological givens are not divergent, then the variable of the biooegicay given falls out of the equation, though that does not eliminate the variables of experiences of exploitation and privilege. In short, the evidence of gender research is a compelling masterpiece of studied ambiguity.
One researcher who has proposed that men’s and women’s brains are different – nurturing versus systematicity – is Simon Baron-Cohen (2003). As relating to empathy, a fine debunking of Baron-Cohen is provided by Robyn Blum (2017) in her article “Gender and Empathy” (2017).[1]
Common sense suggests that woman is the more nurturing gender, given her role in giving birth and keeping the home fires burning in agricultural, hunting, and traditional indigenous cultures as the men are out hunting food and systematically doing battle with saber-toothed tigers and hostile neighbors. [2] As noted, Simone de Beauvoir asserted, biology is not destiny. Woman is not a mere womb; man is not mere testosterone. Robyn Bluhm’s article probes the research on the evidential basis of this nurturing role and inquires: does it extend to empathy and how far?
Early gender-empathy studies were vulnerable to self-report biases and gender stereotyping that pervasively depicted females in a biased way as the more empathic gender, according to Bluhm. These early studies simply do not stand up to critical scrutiny. Enter Simon Baron-Cohen (2003) and his innovative research, renewing the debate about empathy as a mindedness module subtending empathy and shifting the debate in the direction of neural science as opposed to social roles and their self-fulfilling stereotypes.
Bluhm points out in detail that, as Baron-Cohen’s work gained exposure and traction in the academic market place of ideas, the presentation of his ideas, and the results reported shifted in small but significant ways. At first, Baron-Cohen highlighted measures that were supposed to assess both cognitive and affective empathy, but later the affective dimension fell out of the equation (and the research) and only cognitive empathy was engaged as the target of the research (Bluhm 2017: 381).
Though Baron-Cohen’s initial research described the “male brain” as having “spatial skills,” his later publications, once he became a celebrity academic (once again, my term, not Bluhm’s), redescribe the male brain as “hardwired for systematizing”; likewise, the “female-type” brain, initially credited with being better at “linguistic skills,” was redescribed as “hardwired for empathy.” The language shifts from being about “social skills,” and Baron-Cohen speaks of “empathy” rather than “social skills,” so that the two distinctions are virtually synonymous (Bluhm 2017: 384).
As the honest broker, Bluhm notes that, as with the early research in gender differences, Baron-Cohen’s research has been influential but controversial. Men and women have different routes to accessing and activating their empathy; they respond to different pressures to conform to (or push back against) what the community defines as conforming to gender-appropriate behavior; and men and women even have different incentives for empathic performance.
For example, “…[M]en’s scores on an empathy task equaled women’s when a monetary reward for good performance was offered” (Bluhm 2017: 384). Monetary rewards up; empathy up? Though Bluhm does not say so, the author came away with the distinct impression of a much needed debunking of the neurohype—what we would now call “alternative facts”—a job well done.
Bluhm’s work is especially pertinent in constraining celebrity, executive consultants (once again, my term), running with the neuro-spin, and publishing in the Harvard Business Review, who assert that brain science shows one needs more women executives on corporate boards to expand empathy.
I hasten to add that we do indeed need more women executives, but that is not something demonstrated by brain science, at least as of this date (Q1 2023). We need more women executives because it is demonstrated by statistics (just one of many sources of reasons other than brain science) that to devalue the contributions to innovation, service, and productivity of slightly more than half the population is a highly problematic business practice—foolish, inefficient, and wasteful. The challenge is that the practices that make one good at business—beating the competition, engaging technology problems, solving legal disputes—do not necessarily expand one’s empathy, regardless of gender.
In an expression of insightful and thunderous understatement, Bluhm concludes: “With the exception of studies that rely on participants’ self-reports or on other’s reports of their behavior [which are invalid for other reasons], no consistent gender difference in empathy have been observed. This raises the possibility that gender differences in empathy are in the eye of the beholder, and that the beholder is influenced by gender stereotypes…” (Bluhm 2017: 386). Just so.
Still, Blum does not address the feminist case from the perspective of radical empathy. Though the evidence is anecdotal, not systematic, one can easily imagine women, especially care-takers, laying down the challenge: “We have empathy. We practice empathy everyday in distinguishing the wet cry of an unchanged diaper from the hungry cry of growing infant. Let men bring their empathy game up a couple of levels to match our commitment.” Ultimately, standard empathic receptivity and understanding may be good enough, but where the gendered empathy breaks down is at the point of taking that walk in the Other’s shoes. Men don’t get pregnant, endure morning sickness, months of gestation, significant physical transformations, and give birth to new human beings. That is perhaps the defining paradigm of radical empathy or its breakdown between the sexes, and, as with any experience that one is unable ever to have, one is thrown back on the fictional resources of the imagination.
This is an important point about the call for radical empathy in any context. Radical empathy renews the commitment of standard empathy to be empathic with extreme situations, in the face of empathic distress, in the face of making decisions that no one should have to make, that no one has the right to make but that one makes anyway. Physical trauma, moral trauma, and soul murder are on the list of challenges to the imagination of the witness and the victim, the violator and the one violated, the perpetrator and the survivor, especially when they are the same person. This is not for the faint of heart. When the privileged and powerful call for radical empathy, they must lead by their example, be the change they want to see, not call for the powerless to be even more empathically vulnerable. The powerful must expand their empathy for the less powerful and advantaged, not the other way around. There is precedent for it, for example, as President Obama powerfully articulated the value of empathy for the marginalized and under-privileged, calling on the powerful and privileged to be more inclusive. Wouldn’t it be nice? This is easier said than done, but it must be both said and done! (See Blankenship 2019.)
Meanwhile, with a certain grim, black humor, Isadora Duncan compared childbirth to the “interrogation” of the Spanish Inquisition, and asserted that the latter was not as bad (cited in de Beauvoir 1949: 477). Hence, the “joke,” since Duncan had not been interrogated by the Inquisition whereas she was a mother. Karen Horney argued that men suffer from “womb envy” (Horney 1967). To envy something, one has to have a sense of what it is and what it could be and do for one, even though one does not have direct and original experience of it firsthand. That does not mean that one’s empathy is a failure, yet one’s empathy is definitely challenged.
The ultimate test of the applicability of radical empathy is as follows: one takes off one’s own shoes and tries on the Other’s. Of course, the Other’s do not fit exactly and they almost never will; but, working within the metaphor, one at least “gets” that it is a human foot and one can learn something about where it pinches or chafes the Other. In radical empathy, the shoe pinches so badly that one has to take it off, or, alternatively, one gets the sense that it is not even a human shoe. One has fins or webbed feet. Perhaps not a very radical example, yet one goes to shake hands, and the other person is an amputee. The radical and empathic “hand shake” consists in acknowledging the Other’s courage in the face of adversity. This is perhaps where one’s tongue gets even more teeth marks in it, yet this is the power of being with the other person – really being with the individual without anything else added – comes into its own.
The lesson that radical empathy is trying to teach one here is that part of the definition of being human is that humans have experiences that other humans never have exactly as the other humans have them, but that privileged access is not exclusive access and a vicarious experience is quite good enough to satisfy the requirements of getting started with empathy. To continue the practice of empathy then requires creating a space of acceptance and tolerance within which the speaker and listener can exchange experiences and attempt to translate experiences into terms comprehensible by the Other, even if imperfectly so.
In the case of childbirth, when men try to “take a walk in the Other’s shoes,” using the imaginative tools of empathic interpretation and fiction, the result is botched, if not butchered, as in the so-called “savage tradition” illustrated by Emil Zola’s La Terre (1887), discussed in detail two paragraphs below. One reaches for incomparable and incommensurable experiences. It is impossible for most people to walk on the moon, trek to the South Pole, or summit Mount Everest. Still, it seems problematic to put childbirth in the same sentence as having endured or survived the Holocaust, a totalitarian state torture chamber, diverse crimes and boundary violations involving the human body, living in a war zone, or apartheid in South Africa or Israel, and so on. Yet once pain reaches a certain threshold, the body in pain unmakes the person, and the person is overwhelmed and isolated, dehumanized (Scarry 1985). One could argue back the comparison mixes a generally common experience, giving birth, which determines significant aspects of the life of half the population, with rare and exceptional ones, extreme exploration or extreme violence. There is a hierarchy of “otherizing” experiences, with presumably the most extreme being the least normal and with childbirth being the most extreme common experience. Might the same thing might be said of an Other’s tooth ache, whose pain is isolating and de-normalizing? Well, no, not quite. The vicarious experience of pain is a basic feature of empathic receptivity, though the generalization of pain to childbirth is a limited part of the process of giving birth, albeit a salient one. Arguably childbirth is a remote, hard-to-describe experience, for which qualitatively adequate words and in the right quantity are hard to find, even for women who directly experience it by giving birth, though, to be sure, mothers have more data to work with as embodied enactors of the process.
Empathy is challenged by radical translation out of remote, hard-to-grasp experience to become radical empathy. Radical empathy is called forth by extreme situations in which radical translation is the bridge between self and Other. Radical empathy deploys the same four minimal essential aspects of standard empathy – receptivity, understanding, interpretation, and responsiveness. The differences from standard empathy map to these dimensions. The listener is aware that this trauma or tragedy is indeed a trauma or tragedy, but, for example, the listener is not on the Titanic, but watching the movie. (Key term: vicarious experience.) The empathic understanding of possibility is radicalized in the sense that possibilities of the experience of pain, suffering, or high spirits exist that the listener’s imagination cannot necessarily grasp in advance.
The debate continues. Notwithstanding the mixed evidence of biology, cultural studies, politics, consider the possibility: men of good will are open to and want to expand their empathy, standard or extreme, for women and their concerns and issues. Suppose men of good will come to their senses. They see the continuation of patriarchy as disgraceful, disadvantaging everyone, its various forms as a function of their own lack of leadership, and like F. W. de Klerk in South Africa in 1992, propose to do their best to “step down,” relinquishing power and privilege in its diverse forms, and in areas where they actually have such, starting, for example, with implementing the US Equal Rights Amendment and related initiatives?
How would one even know if empathy was expanded? The suggestion is that features such as dignity and respect would be expanded, boundaries would be acknowledged and respected. It is not that conflicts would not occur. Of course, conflicts, disagreements, and competition for limited resources would occur; but the disputes would be engaged and compromises reached using such empathic skills as committed active listening, critical thinking, putting oneself in the other’s shoes (after taking off one’s own), and acknowledging differences when they seem un-overcomeable.
Empathy research and reflections are constantly challenged by the protest: “You can’t possibly know what I am going through!” The repetition with which this protest is asserted leaves one suspicious that an intense skeptical demon and resistance to empathy lies behind such an assertion. Yet skepticism is an intellectually healthy skill that belongs in the tool chest of critical thinking. One method of both respecting a healthy skepticism and undercutting it (since infinitely iterated skepticism is a trap that is nearly impossible to refute) is to radicalize the skepticism. In effect, give the skeptic logical rope with which to hang himself. If one can, at the same time, put in its place, steps to expand the practice of a rigorous and critical empathy to dissolves honest misunderstandings, related fallacies, and idols of the academic marketplace, so much the better.
References
Lou Agosta. (2018). A Critical Review of a Philosophy of Empathy. Chicago: Two Pears Press.
Simon Baron-Cohen. (1995). Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books (MIT Press), 1997.
______________________. (2003). The Essential Difference: Males, Females, and the Truth about Autism. New York: Basic Books.
______________________. (2014). Zero degrees of empathy. RSA [Renaissance Society of America] Video Presentation: https://youtu.be/Aq_nCTGSfWE [checked on 2023-02-26]
Simone de Beauvoir. (1949). The Second Sex, H. M. Parshley (tr.). New York: Bantam Books, 1961.
Lisa Blankenship. (2019). Changing the Subject: A Theory of Rhetorical Empathy. Logan UT: Utah State University Press.
Robyn Blum. (2017). Gender and empathy. In (2017). The Routledge Handbook of the philosophy of Empathy. Heidi Maibom (ed.). London/New York: Routledge (Taylor and Francis).
[1] In addition to Blum’s article this Routledge Handbook on the Philosophy of Empathy (Blum (ed.) 2017) contains several excellent articles by Zahavi, Ickes, Robinson, Shoemaker, and Gallagher (some six out of twenty-seven). However, in other respects, the Handbook is so limited, constrained, and inadequate in its treatment of empathy that in order charitably to review it, I decided to write an entire book (Agosta, (2018), A Critical Review of a Philosophy of Empathy).
[2] In a separate, informal email conversation (dated July 2, 2018), Bluhm calls out Cordelia Fine’s “takedown of The Myth of the Lehman Sisters” in the last chapter of Fine’s book (not otherwise a part of Bluhm’s review): Cordelia Fine, (2017), Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science and Society.New York: W. W. Norton.
IMAGE CREDIT: Picasso, Woman with green hat (1947), photo is cropped, Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Categories: empathic understanding, empathy and gender, empathy trends, patriarchy and empathy, talk therapy
Empathy Lessons 