The Empathy Gap: Male Disadvantages and the Mechanisms of Their Neglect

The Empathy Gap proposes the thesis that men and boys are extensively disadvantaged across many areas of life, including in education, healthcare, genital integrity, criminal justice, domestic abuse, working hours, taxation, pensions, paternity, homelessness, suicide, sexual offences, and access to their own children after parental separation. The claim is justified in the book by empirical evidence, mostly but not exclusively from the UK, involving nearly 1,000 references, 179 Figures and 49 Tables.

To most people, of both sexes, this will appear to be a perverse perspective as disadvantage has become the province of women, girls and minorities, not males. Yet the empirical case supporting the disadvantages suffered by men and boys is undeniable to the objective mind. But if this is so, why is the popular perception that males are privileged whereas disadvantage is the province of the opposite sex? Why do the male disadvantages go largely unremarked, by both sexes, if they are so pervasive?

Presenting the case for widespread and substantial male disadvantage is also a challenge to the usual hegemonic paradigm of feminist theory. These issues are addressed within The Empathy Gap by presenting an entirely different orientation on the social psychology of relations between the sexes. Out goes the idea of an oppressive patriarchy. Instead, a man's participation in the human pair bond is seen to be altruistic, a phenomenon arising originally from evolution and enacted in the individual via the emotional psyche. This is the origin of an asymmetry in the perception of the sexes which normalises the preferencing of females and therefore inevitably disadvantages males as a corollary. The successful evolved strategy involves male utility and relative male disposability, the latter being facilitated by a muted empathy for males, by both sexes - the empathy gap. Rather than working to overcome this male disposability, as a true egalitarian movement would have done, feminism has fed upon it and amplified it.

The feminist project relies upon the true state of affairs remaining unacknowledged, and the empathy gap is instrumental in its own invisibility. In respect of this theory, the author makes no claim for originality. The ideas presented have been circulating within the sub-culture for decades. However, the focus of the book is to show how these ideas are manifest in practice.