Could Men Be More in Touch With Their Feelings Than Women?

The idea that women are more attuned to emotion than men is deeply embedded in gender stereotypes. Women, it is said, care about feelings, and men don’t—instead, they care about things, systems, and status. Women focus on love, while men focus on battles. A corollary is that women are more in touch with their own feelings than men. It is time to challenge this stereotype.

Many men clam up when a woman wants to "talk about feelings," and in some situations—such as combat—the need to ignore emotions such as fear is paramount. But, in everyday life, filled with the demands of domesticity and child care, it is men who are more likely to tune into their feelings and women who are more likely to tune out.

Adolescence

Girls’ loss of access to feelings initially emerges in early adolescence. As Carol Gilligan and Lyn Mikel Brown observed in their study of girls in early adolescence,¹ teen girls confront hard lessons that what they want (and even think) doesn’t matter. Either via an authority gap—wherein male voices are given more weight than female voices—or via gender policing of the need to "think of others’ needs," the direct line from knowledge to feeling is challenged. Typical teen irritability and hostility stem from efforts to resist the trauma of losing touch with their own feelings.

Boy teens—like all teens—may not know what they feel, but they care about what they feel, whereas girl teens are often too engrossed by what they think others feel to care about what they feel. As Paul Murray notes in his depiction of teenage Cassie² musing over her relationship with her boyfriend: “Sometimes she wondered if she even liked him, but usually she was too busy figuring out whether he liked her.”

Adulthood

Teen development shapes adult psychology. In my study of women in early midlife (between the ages of 40 and 55 years), women described a phenomenon they called “gut gear” whereby they pushed aside their own preferences and needs to concentrate on ensuring the lives of people around them “ran smoothly.”³ Pushing away their own feelings became a strategy for coping with task and attention overload.

These are not little women adhering to stereotypes of caring and supportive roles. These are women embracing their ambitions and proud of their capabilities. They could be "independent" and successful, but attending to their own fatigue, stress, and comforts was not on the table. A male partner, however, could say, "Can you do bath time with the kids? I’m too tired/have too much work/had a rough day at work." A male partner was also likely to say, "I need uninterrupted time to finish my work." Are women really better at "multi-tasking" or do they simply accept that being interrupted to attend to others is unavoidable—or calculate how "bad they will feel" if they deny others their attention?

Women are more likely to be ostracized with the label "selfish" if they stand up for their own feelings, but far more pernicious is their self-policing. How many decisions, big or small, have to navigate the question, "Am I being selfish?" They worry about "feeling bad" because they "made someone else feel bad" or "let someone down" or did not show sufficient care for another’s feelings. Long term, many women concluded, it was easier to set aside their feelings and attend to the feelings of others. Long term, they would suffer more from the bad feeling that they were "selfish" (gave priority to their feelings) than they would from ignoring or defying their feelings.

The lack of attention to one’s own feelings has been identified as a cause of depression—far more common in women than in men. Dana Crowley Jack noted a pattern in which women suffering from depression were “silencing the self” breaking the link between themselves and their feelings, so they can function in a world in which others’ feelings take precedence. Crowley Jack sees depression as a loss of self, a state in which one’s own feelings, ceasing to matter, are no longer acknowledged, locked away from the urgencies of daily life.⁴

Caring about feelings is different from caring about one’s own feelings. Being tuned in to feelings does not necessarily mean tuning in to one’s own feelings. Caring about one’s own feelings and being tuned into one’s own feelings is far more straightforward for men than for women. Once we cast aside the mistaken notion that "women are in touch with their feelings and men are not," girls can regain their voice and women can turn off "gut gear" to reconnect to their own feelings.

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