It’s worth remembering therefore that our survival has never been about sex, but about success. In the end, evolution will reign supreme and fundamentally evolution has honed our ability to mutually connect with each other as a pro social survival mechanism. With our current health threat, economic uncertainty and societal unrest it’s going to take all of us taking concrete action together not as men or as women, but all of us aligned. 50 percent of us will not be able to make the changes our world needs, but 100 percent of us can. The impact socially is vast causing an array of social issues from loneliness, to anxiety, depression and burnout. We are seeing a 30-year decline in our empathy levels globally, and this ‘empathy gap’ is ever widening. Hypothesis aside, what we do know with certainty is that declining levels of empathy are across all of society and require urgent change. Consider the ‘repeat and rephrase’ method whereby you repeat back to people what they have said to ensure deep alignment – “What I am hearing you say is ‘this,’ am I right?” This gives people the opportunity to course-correct information but more importantly reassures them you are hearing them and encourages deeper trust and connectivity. Naturally connecting with their audiences and peers in a way that nurtures their growth, by placing themselves into the context of another, is an approach that, whilst not exclusive to women, has been seen to score more highly, more often, in female research participants.Ĭhoice of words and use of language is powerful in changing team dynamics in all workplace engagements. This means we can assume women are more prone to activating empathy as an instinctive path to driving success and results in those around them. “Oxytocin, which is found in higher levels in women, can make people more empathic, while testosterone, present in higher concentrations in men, could do the opposite.” "Given the biological differences between men and women - for example hormones and hormone levels - it could be possible that some of these hormones that are present in greater levels in women can drive some of the higher empathetic scores," said Varun Warrior, lead study author of the above 2018 research. Why might women behave differently, and how can we work together to close the empathy gap for everyone? Research in 2018 showed that although women, on average, do score, higher in EQ tests than men, there doesn’t appear to be a genetic basis for those differences. While research results vary and are still in their infancy across the board, observed gender differences are more likely to be largely due to cultural expectations of gender roles and the fact that women are more likely to have been ‘taught’ empathy by female role models as they grew up. Neurologically we are all born with a very similar ability to empathize, male and female, but our choice to use this ability varies greatly. A common misconception is that we are born with differing levels of natural empathic ‘ability’ but research has now shown that empathy is a skill that we can hone and refine.
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