I mean biology as a determinant? Absurd! Sexist - the very study should be disavowed and disappeared and the researchers fired... (Triaster suggested that Summers should've been fired for his remarks - and the fact that he kept his job - even with groveling not seen too often outside of S&M porno, was a distinct FAILURE for feminists!).

Oh my GOD! Every time someone points out that there are differences between men and women are DIFFERENT these 'feminists' go BALLISTIC. Look in the mirror you silly, silly women. Are you blind? Men and women are different! That does not mean unequal.

Every time they hear "different" they hear "less than." I am a womanly feminist. An ex-tomboy that has been dis-empowered, re-empowered and radicalized by pregnacy and motherhood. There are some things that most men are better at and some things that most women are better at. And there are exceptions to the rules. Female Concentration Camp guards and Lyndie English come to mind. This is a great example of "A woman who wants to be the equal of a man is aiming too low."

Are you upset that most women aren't as sadistic as most men? I would call that a plus. Are you afraid of being pigenholed as "nurturing" and "soft"? Why are these such horrible things to be? Do feminists think that we shoud all become androgynes and then we would all be equal? Stop letting the patriarchy define what characteristics are desireable for human beings. For some reason the whole thing reminds me of the Sneeches.

Both of the oppositional posts above assume the science in this study - despite the incredibly small sample - is sound. A lot of the point of Broadsheet stories about scientific studies is to ask, "Why do they keep spending money on this stuff?" Why are we so obsessed with whether men are "objectively" more empathetic than women? Why do we even TRY to measure something like empathy? There is so much we don't know about brains. Maybe men's brains register empathy in a place where scientists don't know to look. Maybe women really are more empathetic, on average. Who cares?

The worst thing about most of these men vs. women studies (as pointed out during the flap over that men vs. women in Internet usage study) is that the results always ignore the huge overlap between men's and women's responses, focus very heavily on statistically significant but practically insignificant differences, and then grossly generalize with statements like "Women use the Internet to communicate with friends," which implies that men don't use it for that, when a more accurate statment would be, "Women are slightly more likely to use the Internet to communicate with friends."

For the most part, humans have a huge capacity for empathy. As a mother, I can tell you that a person's natural capacity for empathy needs to be developed: we also have a huge natural capacity to hit or bite anything that pisses us off. And empathy is not even necessarily a NICE thing. You use "empathy" to stalk prey.

And I will ask just one more time. If you hate feminism, why do you read Broadsheet? I think celebrity gossip is a lot of crap, so I have never even looked at The Fix, even though I like most of the rest of Salon. Why would I bother going there to read a lot of what I consider crap? Just so I can write hateful letters to rile people up? What a pathetic waste of energy.

The numbers in this study are probably misleading - 16 participants of each sex is too few. I'm a woman, and can just about guarantee that my brain would react like the male's did.

I feel an immediate visceral satisfaction and sense of justice served when, for instance, someone who has been physically intimidating and/or harassing someone gets clocked on the jaw or slapped for it. I call it the 'served them right' factor. It's not because I was reared in a certain way - I felt the same instinctive reaction when I was little. However, the 'punishment' must not be out of line for the 'crime' - for instance, the same guy that I applauded being clocked on the jaw for his behavior - if he were beaten to a pulp for it, out of all proportion to what he did, that would be quite different.

Studies indicate that 20% of women think more like men, and vice versa. I'm guessing that using larger numbers of participants in this sort of study would show a similar crossover in numbers.

Gee, do you suppose this might explain some of the bizarre things turn up on popular television? America's Funniest Home Videos, Jackass, and the innate cruelty of so much "reality" television spring immediately to mind. But with a statistical sampling like that, purest hooey, and really not even worth mentioning.

If it's not true then fuck you. If it's true then fuck you anyway. There, are you happy now? Or should we listen to you lecture us why you think we're fed up with you?

I find usually that interesting questions lead to interesting dicussions. Nature vs nurture? THAT question leads to... well, you've read the letters on this page.

I do find the results of the study interesting in themselves; they're what I'd have guessed in advance. But of course they can't say anything about nature vs nurture because you can't actually perform any experiments that factor out one of those variables! So basically any debate on that subject is going to be a bunch of hot air and indignation and downright idiocy; there's no good data available. All we can definitively say is that most of the perceived gender differences that were attributed to "nature" in the past have turned out to be cultural; and that in any case the variations between individuals are so much wider than the variations between groups of individuals that the argument of "hard wired" gender differences can never be used prescriptively to define desirable behaviour.

I would also add that they are insulting to those of us who don't fit the stereotypes; and that frequently there is a very obvious self-serving prescriptive aspect to the "hard-wired" argument; and that the consequence of belief in hard wired differences has tended to be that they are self fulfilling prophecies-- so why not stop believing in something there's no good evidence for, purely to see what happens?

Also that I particularly enjoy the purple foaming-at-the-mouth MRA types making a standard scare quoted, strawman-bashing, manifestly dumbassed argument that women are more emotional and less coolly logical, detached and rational than they themselves with their spittle-bedecked keyboards.