Women feel what is happening to their partners over three times as much as men do. According to new research, the difference between the empathy felt by women and men was the biggest of many factors analyzed.
“In our work, we were trying to measure how partners affect each other’s mental health through life events,” Dr Cindy Mervin, research fellow at Griffith University’s Centre for Applied Health Economics and lead author of the study, told The Speaker. “[O]ur work showed that negative and positive things that happen to individuals not only affect them but also affect their family.”
Mervin explained the research team’s findings about the levels of empathy felt by women and men, most notably, that women’s levels of empathy for their partners–at 24 percent of what they would have felt had an event happened to themselves–are over 300 percent of men’s levels.
“We can interpret the 24 percent by saying that on average women will be affected by the events happening to their partner by about 24 percent of the degree to which they are affected by their own,” Mervin told us. “In other words, women are affected about four times as much by the events happening to them than events happening to their partners.”
The research involved questionnaire data from the Australian study Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) on over 20,000 people across the country. The team looked at partners in both straight and same-sex relationships who did not separate during the observed panel, which amounted to just under 11,000 individuals and over 53,000 person-year observations.
The research led the team to conclude that while women’s empathy toward their partners was the strongest found in their study, men on average were found to not be empathetic in any significant way.
“We estimated this coefficient for different types of respondents–women vs men, parents vs their counterparts, and individual from high-income households vs. those from low-income households,” stated Mervin. “The highest value we found was for women when compared to men. For men, we found a value around seven percent and therefore found that men were not significantly affected by things happening to their partner.”
Mervin clarified that the findings do not mean that men are unemotional or uncaring, but that their care does not extend to their partner the way women’s care does.
“Although the degree measured for women and men is different, it does not mean that men are unemotional as they are quite strongly affected by what happens to themselves,” said Mervin. “They are just not very emotional when it comes to their feelings of their partner.”
The report, “Is shared misery double misery,” was authored by Drs Merehau Cindy Mervin and Paul Frigters of University of Queensland’s School of Economics, and was published in the journal Social Science and Medicine.
By James Haleavy