The agony and the empathy: The ambivalence of empathy in feminist psychology

Defining ‘empathism’

The persistent sex stereotyping of empathy – what I am here calling ‘empathism’ – stands in relation to empathy much as ‘biologism’ does to biology or ‘scientism’ to science. In other words, it leans upon apparently objective truth claims to bolster distinctly non-objective prejudices about the way the world is, or ‘should be’. Empathism works by overseeing a conceptual slide between a general ontological claim that ‘empathy is an essential part of our species or human being’ to a specific ontological claim about women and femininity: namely that women ‘do empathy’ better, should do it better, and just have a special knack for it, in ways that men do not.

In thus reinvigorating and naturalizing sex stereotypes around the trope of empathy, empathism wipes out political questions about what kind of subjects end up with empathic dispositions and why; who performs its emotional labour and under what conditions of freedom or duress; and who ultimately benefits from it. In other words, empathism works to block our ability to perceive the complex structures of affect and power in social space, and clouds our awareness that the uneven distribution of empathy’s performance may be less a matter of human nature or biology than an issue of distributive justice.

One of the most egregious examples of empathism circulating in current psychological research can be found in the work of Simon Baron-Cohen, Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at Cambridge University and past President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In an earlier work – The Essential Difference – Baron-Cohen (2003: 28) asserts that ‘the female brain is, (in general) an empathizing brain’, attuned to meeting the needs of others. This female brain, he tells us with confidence, ‘is hard-wired for this kind of natural, effortless empathizing’ (2003: 28). The male brain, by contrast, is (in general) a ‘systematizing brain’ whose forté lies in organizing information, and mastering all the mechanical and instrumental stuff of life: a brain at ease in the application of ‘rules specifying input-operation-output relationships’ (2003: 61). Thus neurologically endowed, the male brain ‘just gets a buzz in discovering the causes of things’ (2003: 67). Sadly, however, he notes this same systematizing tendency makes male brains nowhere near as good as female brains at putting aside selfish preoccupations with social status, ambition and dominance, nor so adept at useful things like putting others at their ease at parties (see Baron-Cohen, 2003: 42–43). ⁴

However, it is in his latest contribution, Zero Degrees of Empathy (2011), that Baron-Cohen demonstrates empathism in all its glory, and inadvertently shows why a certain type of rhetorical advocacy of empathy generates a moral and political double-bind for women. Reiterating the assertions of The Essential Difference that women are the empathizers par excellence of our species, and men are, well, just not quite so good at it, Baron-Cohen now attaches to this a version of the heady moral and reparative trope of empathy referred to earlier – in this case, empathy claimed as ‘a universal solvent’ (2011: 127) for the problems of human evil and cruelty, and a guarantor of ethical practices on the grounds that ‘unlike religion, empathy cannot, by definition, oppress anyone’ (Baron-Cohen, 2011: 127). It is the conflation of these two aspects associated with empathy – (a) the sex stereotype and (b) the moral promise – that lays a trap for those designated as empathy’s practitioners in late modernity, and which produces its ‘agonistic’ connotations for a feminist psychology. ⁵

What is of most concern here, I want to suggest, is the way the contemporary ‘empathy craze’ may be bringing in its wake an unwelcome re-legitimation and re-calcification of the ‘feeling rules’ of gender (Hochschild, 1979: 567) that assign the skills and tasks of empathy unevenly to women. In the (legitimate) desire to draw upon the reparative trope of empathy, there is the risk of an implicit affirmation of the (illegitimate, but very ‘sticky’) association of the sex stereotype that has traditionally accompanied empathy within the patriarchal gender regimes of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ and ‘emphasized femininity’ (see Connell, 1987).

Of course, trying to determine whether gender roles and the kinds of affective dispositions that accompany them are undergoing a regressive calcification, or whether they are actually becoming more fluid, plastic and de-differentiated, is a highly complex question and one that generates no uniform answer. Feminist psychologist Lynne Layton, for example, has described a retreat from traditional ‘feminine’ identifications with the ideal of the ‘relational woman’ among her young middle-class female college students, who show signs of favouring a tougher, independent ‘masculine’ model of ‘defensive autonomy’ (see Layton, 2004a, 2004b). Does such a shift entail a concomitant decline in the cultivation of empathic dispositions by these highly educated young women? If so, it would confirm that the traditionally presumed links between women and empathy are at best contingent and malleable (not ‘natural’ or ‘hardwired’), quite independently of how one then assesses the socio-historical waxing and waning of female empathy. We would then need to ask: what are the potential costs of this ‘decline’; and should we mourn the potential waning of empathy in the psychic structure of young women? At the same time, however, we also need to ask just as rigorously: what costs are entailed, if, in our anxiety at this potential shift, we respond by reaching back to the stereotyped account of empathy as ‘feminine’, and thereby reinforce empathy’s unjust distribution by gender? This is clearly a delicate tightrope for feminists to tread.

Philosopher and leading ethicist of care Nel Noddings (2010) has recently re-asserted a claim for women’s superior empathy derived from the findings of evolutionary biology. In her view, the females of our species have, over millennia, evolved higher degrees of empathy because this was selected for by reproductive pressure. The capacity of a mother to read the cues, needs and affects of her offspring, and to respond appropriately, she asserts, mediates reproductive fitness on account of the fact that it increased the chances of offspring survival. The genetic predisposition for empathy hence becomes a trait selected for cumulatively and transmitted down the female line generation after generation (Noddings, 2010). Yet Noddings also signals a more troubling accompaniment to this matrilineal legacy of empathy, identifying a second ‘evolutionary pressure’ accountable for the heightened empathic sensitivity ascribed to female (human and non-human) primates. In addition to the empathy generated in response to infant needs, the same female of our pre-history also had to foster some high-powered hermeneutic skills for the purposes of reading the intentions, affects, and states of mind of the dominant male upon whom she herself was dependent for protection, support and supplies. Once reconstructed from this alternative vantage point, superior female empathy is interpretable not only as a benevolent responsiveness to vulnerable offspring, but also as a survival strategy evolved to placate, anticipate and survive the unpredictable moods and moves of a powerful, dominant (male) other. If, in Noddings’ first scenario, female empathy is brewed in the crucible of the maternal/infant dyad and features as an exercise of maternal power, in the second scenario it emerges as the product of relative powerlessness and subjection.

This troubling ambiguity – empathy as female strength and virtue, on the one hand, and as by-product of female subordination, on the other – might alone be enough to warrant feminist ambivalence. It suggests the double valence of what empathy might actually be good for, and why some feminists (though by no means all) have been uneasy with the assumption that being an empathetic subject is always such an unalloyed good for the woman in question. If walking around in the shoes of another evolves as a self-protective ‘theory of mind’ whose purpose is to survive and adapt to a relation of domination, what part does this empathic sensitivity play in the reproduction of oppression or inequality? On this reading, relations of (sexual) domination and empathic sensitivity are not at all incompatible bedfellows. Does this make female empathy an ambivalent virtue upon which to base a project of women’s emancipation? Noddings (2010: 99) acknowledges this to be the case in so far as ‘the bargain made by the earliest human females has handed down a legacy [of subordination] that still bedevils us’.

But was this, in fact, the bargain that our earliest female ancestors struck? Evolutionary anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (2009) does not think so. While a ‘sexual contract’ (according to which a female accepts male domination to keep herself and her babies safe) might have been all too necessary in the agricultural and patriarchal societies that emerged at later points in human history, Hrdy believes it unlikely that such a ‘bargain’ was in operation for the nomadic hominids of the early Pleistocene. In her book Mothers and Others, Hrdy (2009) puts forward a fascinating hypothesis about the origins of empathy that also has some intriguing implications for how we assess our contemporary configurations of gender and empathy in the post-industrial West. In her view, the real secret to the evolutionary origins of the ‘peculiar combination of empathy and mind reading’ (Hrdy, 2009: 28) in human beings lies in what she has termed allomothering – that is, ‘mothering’ provided by others than mothers; in essence, the collectivization of the tasks of breeding and care-giving. According to Hrdy’s thesis, allomothering amounted to an evolutionary game-changer for the clever primates that were our forebears, and she goes so far as to make the striking assertion that ‘without alloparents there would never have been a human species’ (Hrdy, 2009: 109). In her reconstruction of our evolutionary past, the nomadic early hominid families living under the harsh conditions of the Pleistocene adapted to the costliness of raising slow-maturing, highly dependent young by dispersing and distributing the work of nurturance beyond the mother-infant dyad. In doing so, they also hit upon the special conditions that would secure empathy’s preferential evolutionary selection.

For Hrdy (2009: 121), ‘novel nervous systems’ (that propelled our species to become ‘emotionally modern’ long before they mastered sophisticated use of symbols or language) came into being under the stimulus of these ‘novel care-giving situations of collective breeding’. She also hypothesises that the conditions of collective allomothering placed an empathy-enhancing (selection) pressure on infants: the growing mind of the allomothered infant was exposed to multiple other minds and centres of consciousness. Infants who flourished under such allomothering were those most adept at reading this diversified range of pre-verbal affective cues, and most motivated to deploy this empathic ingress to capture the good will and ministrations of a spray of allo-parents (Hrdy, 2009). For the newly emergent human creature, we might say, to empathize was to survive.

Drawing on her profound knowledge of primatology and evolutionary anthropology, Hrdy (2009) in effect radicalizes the assumptions of first generation attachment theory formulated by John Bowlby in the 1950s and 1960s (Bowlby, 1969). Her theory of allomothering happily confirms the central tenets of attachment theory, but corrects Bowlby’s ‘fixation with mother-only care’ (Hrdy, 2009: 82). Allomothers can be fathers, grandmothers, uncles, aunts, older siblings, juveniles and other members of the extended care-giving circle.

From a feminist point of view, this suggestive reconstruction has great appeal in its view of human empathy as androgynous (i.e. open to males, not just females); epigenetically plastic (i.e. ‘soft’-, rather than ‘hard-wired’); and amenable to various patterns of social distribution. As Hrdy (2009: 290) observes ‘both males and females start out with an innate capacity for empathy with others and for nurturance, but past experiences along with proximate cues are critically important for the development and expression of nurturing responses’. If, as she asserts, ‘male nurturing potentials are there, encoded in the DNA of our species’ (Hrdy, 2009: 161–162), it is also true that expression of that potential is highly context dependent and variable, so that in practice ‘human males may nurture young a little, a lot, or not at all’ (2009: 162). For a species as self-reflexive and culturally – and hence neurologically – as plastic as our own, this implies that the (sexual) distribution of empathy becomes a question for politics and ethics to determine, rather than something automatically allocated (to women rather than men) by the ‘invisible hand’ of nature or evolution. While it is justifiably viewed as a genetic endowment of our evolutionary biology, empathy is also just as indisputably a matter of politics. Empathy, in short, is a feminist issue.

Empathy and inequality

The prospect that there might be a ‘darker side’ to empathy’s relation to power and hierarchy – even an alternative conceptualization of empathy as born under duress – has been explored by researchers, not only with reference to gender, but also to social class. Kraus et al. (2010) illustrate how subjects with less social power and economic clout often manifest heightened levels of empathic accuracy and speculate that this may have to do with the fact that ‘lacking resources and control, lower class individuals tend to focus on the external, social context to understand their lives. As a result, they orient to other people to navigate their social environment’ (2010: 1720). Empathic ‘other-orientation’, when conducted from a position of persistent powerlessness, rather than one of empowered agency, may be a long way from the vision of empathy as the harbinger of social and ethical reparation or justice. The authors add that it ‘is also interesting to speculate about the costs of heightened empathic accuracy for overall health and wellbeing, particularly because lower class individuals tend to experience chronically elevated levels of negative emotion’ (2010: 1722).

For the moment, I want merely to note that it is perfectly possible to envisage situations in which female empathy is cultivated (as a moral virtue), yet in circumstances we would not want to automatically endorse as themselves virtuous, from the point of view of gender or distributive justice. If Noddings (2010) is right regarding a ‘second scene’ of the birth of female empathy out of the spirit of subordination (to men) – a view accurate, perhaps, with regard to what occurs in patriarchal social orders, but not in Hrdy’s (2009) early human families of the Pleistocene – then we have the curious prospect of a female empathy that is itself a by-product and a strategy of adaptation to oppression. This complicates the view of empathy as a morally untrammeled good. If empathy is also detected sitting right at the heart of inequality, even, paradoxically enough, springing up as one of its side-effects (Kraus et al., 2010), this should give us reason to pause before Baron-Cohen’s (2011:127) breezy assertion that ‘empathy cannot […] oppress anyone’.

The detection of this shadow side of the relation of empathy with power need not, of course, trigger a wholesale feminist rejection of empathy. Few feminists, perhaps none, would want to discard empathy either as a feminist or a human value. But how are we to handle this more ambivalent empathy? Noddings (2010) suggests the real problem (and the cause of injustice to women) lies in the lack of recognition afforded to women for their empathic skills, not in the lack of symmetry between men and women’s empathy per se. In her view, therefore, the ambivalence will resolve once the appropriate recognition of women’s contribution as empathizers is forthcoming. According to this line of thinking, if we can manage to shift our cultural norms in the direction of a full and appropriate recognition of women for what they are good at – the empathy she believes intrinsic to female and maternal psychology (Noddings, 2010) – this will do away with the subordination of women that traditionally accompanies women’s empathic practice.

But in my view this strategy will not work, or at least will not work across the board in the various realms in which contemporary women live out their lives. And Noddings (2010) herself may give us a good reason why the gender injustice associated with empathy won’t yield to the provision of recognition alone. She observes that ‘when one is engaged in receptive attention the result is often motivational displacement, that is, the motive energy of the carer flows towards the needs of the cared-for. Temporarily, the carer’s own projects are set aside’ (Noddings, 2010: 48). The reason that recognition of female empathy, while important in itself, can only be an incomplete solution to the problem posed is that it leaves untouched and un-remedied the systematic and structural propensity for the needs of the one sex to be constantly and regularly set aside, in a way that is not expected or demanded of the other. It is not hard to see how this gender disparity in patterns of ‘motivational displacement’ entails a disproportionate channeling of women’s affective energies and flows of attention towards others, in ways and degrees simply not expected of men. This bias of empathic attention must have detrimental effects on women’s ‘own projects’ and must therefore be in breach of the feminist values of justice and sexual equality.

If we do not move to designate empathy as a human task and not a female one, and if we cannot countenance a dissolving of the ‘feminization’ of empathy in favour of its ‘androgynization’, then we cannot lift the shadow of subordination and inequality that plagues women’s worthy commitment to being empathic subjects. In the absence of a redistribution of affective flows of attention and empathy, it is hard to see how a woman who is constantly (even if not permanently) primed for this kind of ‘motivational displacement’ will not be penalized for this in ways that men are not, especially in the professional realm. Let us now turn to examine in more detail the forms such a penalty often takes.

Women and the ‘empathy tax’

In many, perhaps most, professional fields in the post-industrialized West, women are associated with being more ‘communal’ (Madera et al., 2009), more caring and co-operative, and with displaying more ‘humanitarian attributes’ (Quadrio, 1991) than men. These kinds of descriptors are various ways of identifying the fact that women are regarded, in general, as the more empathic sex, and indeed do display more attentive behaviour towards the needs of others. Recent Australian research on General Practitioners, for example, shows that female GPs spend more time with their patients, write longer, more detailed referral letters to specialists, and are perceived by their patients as being more non-interrupting, better listeners, and more caring, than their male colleagues (Parker and Hyett, 2009). Similarly, it has been noted that female academics on average spend more time teaching and attending to the pastoral needs of their students, relative to the more single-minded focus on research output and career-enhancing productivity characteristic of their male colleagues (Caplan, 1993). ⁶ One might think this is all to the good – what better than to have our women academics and educators in possession of a strong communal streak, or that female physicians should be humanitarian and attentive to patient needs? Yet, the same research shows that there is a decidedly dark cloud at the centre of this empathic silver lining.

Firstly, there are significant costs as measured by disparities in the time and energy that women spend as compared to men on being good empathizers in the professional sphere. Alongside the raw quantitative question of hours spent (and therefore hours not spent in more concretely measurable and ‘productive’, or at least status-enhancing, ways), there is also the question of the qualitative categorization of such empathy. When it occurs in the professional realm, there is the perennial risk that such empathy will register not as work done by women, so much as the affective and behavioural manifestation of simply being female; the expectable performance of a nice woman. Empathic care fits the general expectations of good womanhood in ways that do not feature in the expectations of hegemonic masculinity. Which is not to say, of course, that men are not or cannot be empathic; rather that instances of male empathy stand in a supplemental relation to (dominant) definitions of masculinity (and paternity), whereas female empathy figures more as an essential component of definitions of femininity (and, a fortiori, of maternity).

This has the result that when female empathy is performed, it tends to merge into the background as natural, invisible and unremarkable – it stands out more notably, in fact, by its absence. The reverse seems to be true for men. The absence of empathy in men is more likely to be judged as perhaps unfortunate, but nevertheless syntonic with (hegemonic) definitions of masculinity. Conversely, a high capacity for empathy when shown by a man is likely to be afforded much greater visibility and notability than the same degree would register if practiced by a woman. One effect of this disparity in the assumptions about sex differences in empathy is that it immediately distorts the recognition paid to women for the empathy they are also expected to perform.

That there can be unhappy, even perverse, side effects for women who function as good empathizers in their public roles in working life has also emerged from a recent study examining gender differences in letters of recommendation for academic jobs (Madera et al., 2009). This startling research found that when subjects are described in these letters as being more ‘communal’, more caring teachers, etc., (all other variables like CV, merit and publication output, etc., being held equal) – and the subjects so described usually tend to be women – this alone minimizes their prospects of being taken as sufficiently ‘agentic’ and ambitious by their assessors, and consequently damages their chances of getting hired and/or achieving promotion. Not enough, it seems, for the virtue of empathy to be its own reward; it can even, as this example shows, bring down its own hefty and alarming punishment in professional contexts. So if your letters of recommendation say what an empathic, communal, supportive, nice kind of gal you are in the groves of academe, then watch out! And, while we might be glad of those female GPs who persist in being warmly empathic, we might also wonder how this statistic bears on another regarding that cohort: namely that women doctors manifest higher levels (three to four times higher) of depression and suicide than women of their age group in the general population (see Quadrio, 1991).

In Lifting a Ton of Feathers, psychologist Paula Caplan (1993) describes the nature of the double bind that affects women working in academic institutions as they attempt to compete as equals in the professional world, but where the feeling rules of asymmetrical empathy between the sexes are also still running hot beneath the discourse of formal gender equality. In this environment, according to Caplan (1993: 66):

if you do any nurturing or caretaking – of colleagues, other staff, or students – that work may be invisible or unappreciated or it can even be used as proof of your lack of professionalism, but if you don’t nurture, your lack of nurturing behavior becomes highly visible.

Conclusion: Towards the redistribution of empathy

To make the conceptual leap towards a genuinely androgynous ⁷ account of empathy, then, does not mean abandoning the feminist ethic of care. It seems perfectly possible to recognize the value of care and empathy on the one hand, while refusing the codification of empathy as specifically feminine, on the other. A recent elaboration of a non-gendered concept of empathy is offered by philosopher Michael Slote (2007: 3), who makes the case for a ‘truly human morality’ grounded in empathy, and points out that there is, in fact, a venerable male lineage for the ethics of care too, one ‘historically rooted in the moral sentimentalism of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume and Adam Smith, all of whom were men’ (2007: 3). Yet this reassuring philosophical precedent notwithstanding, it is not at all obvious what practical mechanisms might bring about a genuine redistribution of the performance of empathy between men and women in our contemporary homes and workplaces.

What interventions could serve as correctives to the stubborn structural problems of ‘empathism’ and the ‘female empathy tax’? The classic form of the struggle for redistribution in the context of work is, of course, the collective withdrawal of labour power: the strike. And yet it hardly bears thinking what could happen to our world should women collectively abandon their accustomed posts of care and dependency work; or what traumatic consequences would follow, swift and brutal, upon any ‘empathy strike’ deployed as a form of political action – we might think here perhaps, for comparison, of the ‘sex strike’ of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (Aristophanes, 2002) or the ‘smile boycott’ proposed by second wave feminists (see Firestone, 1977; Henley, 1977).

But let us allow ourselves for a moment, nevertheless, the fleeting fantasy of this outrageous scenario: What would happen if women right across society and en masse suddenly took a huge collective ‘step back’ to test the response of men when faced with the powerful centripetal pull of the non-negotiable need and vulnerability of children, the elderly, the disabled, the ill? Would men then step into the roles and demands of this ‘breach’ or ‘empathy vacuum’? ⁸ Even a tentative play with this thought experiment reveals something of the peculiar nature of what Diemut Bubeck (1995) has called the ‘exploitation dilemma’ of women’s care work. Bubeck, in fact, ran her own variation of the thought-experiment of an empathy strike as she contemplated what a woman overburdened with the demands of unassisted caregiving might do when confronted by the injustice of her situation:

Now if she took [the] considerations of justice seriously, she would have to conclude that she must either try to reduce her burden of care or try to obtain remuneration. Assuming, furthermore, but realistically, that the latter is not forthcoming, nor that she can successfully appeal to other people’s help, the only way to change her situation is to care less herself. As a carer who endorses the ethic of care, however, she will not be in a position to do so because this move motivated by considerations of justice is in plain contradiction to the considerations of care deriving from the ongoing demands for care that she encounters. This dilemma, which I shall call the exploitation dilemma, is lived day by day by many carers more or less consciously and is one of the main ways in which carers are trapped into an exploitative, unjust burden of care (Bubeck, 1995: 246).

An additional catch is that most men seem unconsciously to know, assume and expect this disparity in empathic reaction time and degree of empathic investment. Indeed we might wonder if the relative retardation in the responsiveness of male empathy is at least in part enabled and reproduced by the knowledge that there will reliably be women on the scene who will invariably feel compelled not to allow or tolerate any ‘empathy vacuum’ to open up in the face of real or urgent need (or, at least, not to tolerate it for long). If we believe that this highly gendered relative swiftness and slowness of empathic response (to children, to the needy, etc.) is systematically reproduced between the sexes, then a female ‘empathy strike’ would certainly do the trick of revealing the distributive problem, but at a perilously high price. And women are all too empathically aware of the potential social disaster and damage to the needy and the vulnerable, should such a strategy be put into effect. It would, as Nel Noddings (2010: 29) warns, amount to ‘stamping our collective foot’, where no one does the work of care. But what, then, is a woman to do? Is the only alternative to throw up our hands and simply accept that women will do it all (or nearly all), out of apprehension at the prospect of the severity of the gender quake which such ‘foot stamping’ might produce, or out of empathic concern as to who might fall beneath its rubble?

In truth there seems to be no immediate or easy answer to the painful double bind associated with female empathy for a feminist psychology – hence the ‘agony and the empathy’ of this paper’s title. However, what seems most important, at a moment at which the project of the enhancement of empathy is proffered as a generic solution to social, psychological and political woes, is to highlight empathy’s potential dark side: the unintended and unjust consequences that can ensue, especially for women, if we do not find a way to combine the celebration of empathy with some version of its post-patriarchal re-conceptualization. As I have argued here, the problem cannot be fully addressed only by working to achieve recognition of how vital female empathy is to the psychic and social health of our communities. Alongside any bid to upgrade our culture’s assessment of the importance and worth of empathy (and of the people who practice it), we also need a push towards empathy’s fair re-distribution between the sexes. A dual strategy of recognition and redistribution would, in my view, better honour the duality of feminist commitments: to care and to justice, to empathy and equality both.