The name "Extreme Male Brain Theory" is based on a true story, but it's been an albatross. What female wants to be told that she not only has a tendency to maleness, but to extreme maleness? Heck, even the boys are likely to look askance and the title and wonder "What do you mean by that? Bullying? High-risk hobbies? Peeing off the porch?" Those who research brain differences between males and females have found a few things, most of them pretty small effects. Systematizing versus Empathizing is one of the few medium-size ones. It's the only medium sized one I can think of at the moment, actually. Male brains lean toward systematising. Most librarians are female but Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal were both created by males. It is men who think to themselves "Well Babe Ruth is obvious in right field. Do I want Mays or Mantle in center? I might even take Griffey..." There are females who say, "First I set up a spreadsheet..." but I think that was after lots of males had become obsessive about it. Women often let men run the experiment a few times to see if it works before committing resources themselves.
So when autistic children stack cans out of the bottom cabinet, then stack them back into the cabinet just so, then stack them outside again for hours at a time, becoming very upset at being interrupted, it clicked in many people's head that this is something boys do more than girls already. This is a male brain thing. For review, I will put up the standard distribution graph with two overlapping peaks, this one about height.
There are a few women who are taller than most men. There are a few men who are shorter than most women. But on average, men are taller than women. Similarly, there are women who love systematising more than most men. Can't get enough of it.
Tendency doesn't mean "women are incapable of systematising." Don't say that, or bsking will systematically dismantle you, and she's not the only one here. They might tag-team it.
Aspergery people/mildly autistic people/ HFAs/ and geeks who don't quite qualify for an ASD diagnosis can be particularly good systematisers because they also give some thought for usefulness to others, when enough is enough, and activities of daily living. ("Children. I have children. Three of them. They should eat pretty soon. I'd better make something.") Engineers are the archetype for good reason. They are Useful. They don't think they are aspies, for two reasons: everyone they work with is like this, so it must be typical; and they have friends and especially relatives who are more autistic than they are. We make fun of them, but they have created just about everything that makes your life easier, since time immemorial. Fire. Bridges. Washing machines. Tampons. (A woman bought the patent and popularised it.)
The female brain is more empathic. Fortunately, no one has been stupid enough to officially call bleeding heart syndrome or reflexive knee-jerk overidentification Extreme Female Brain, though there are lots of mutterings by laypersons to that effect. We have discussed the misdirections and limitations of empathy here a dozen times at least. Autists especially have less empathy, but there is a catch. At least once I have tried to draw the distinction that it doesn't mean they aren't nice and don't care about others, but they don't always think about others or do it as well. Once they have thought "how will the people I supervise feel about this change?" they can do well at it, but it doesn't come naturally. It is called Theory of Mind (internal link below) and is a big part of how we navigate in the world, projecting likely responses of others. I had not known that observant researchers had also noticed this, defined it much more clearly, and divided empathy into two distinct parts. Autists are about as good as anyone else at the second part, it's the first part that is impaired. They do very well with rules-based empathy, like sending everyone a thank-you note or following the agenda item of remembering to seek out everyone's opinion during the discussion phase. It may sound less warm, but when Empathy A is driven by the obsessive nature of Asperger's they become much nicer than the rest of us, with occasional slips. *
As with engineers and systems, overempathisers do not see themselves as pathological. They see themselves as Nice People, and the reasons are similar. They work in fields where everyone is like that, and they have friends and family who really are pathological in their overidentification. I suggest that this comes from reversing the arrow of Empathy A and Empathy B. People think that kindness results from identifying and understanding, and kindness is the goal. Therefore, if they feel kindly toward some one or some group, it is because they have accurately understood them. You can see this in the complete intellectual disconnect of leftists supporting Palestinian causes rather than just feeling sorry for the people. The correctly surmise that it must feel real bad to be losing a war, especially for the women and children who have less control over the situation. So the empaths feel bad about them. Except... they misread the Palestinians. Leftists project how they would feel if they were in a war zone and their side was losing. They miss the part that there are other feelings at play among the Palestinians: cruelty, anger, revenge. These go unnoticed. Empathy is always projection and must be tempered by follow-up questions, usefulness, and boundaries.
How would Empathising and Systematising be opposite ends of a spectrum? I don't think they are. I think two separate things are being measured that both sexes have in different proportions. To take the hormonal stereotype, I don't think that testosterone and estrogen are "opposite" chemicals. I think they are different chemicals. I don't think the data shows that one extra bit of empathy means a complementary drop in systematising. If they are related, I would take a wild guess that when autists put things in categories, they resist changing the system and this makes them less flexibly empathic. You can't possibly feel the way you do because you are wrong. It's not teal, it's green, and they see you as just being obstinate about it. Anyone who has gotten into one of these arguments knows how dug in aspies can get about a rule they have made for everyone else, even if you can definitively show it's not a good rule and they are the worst breaker of it. It's a rule, and you are breaking the rule. But I am probably reaching here. They are more likely unrelated.
The primary opposition to Extreme Male Brain Theory I don't think I can do justice to, because...well, my explanation might be insulting. One aspect is that the original theory (Simon Baron-Cohen) thought that autism was caused or at least mediated by exposure to testosterone, especially in utero. That part isn't holding up. Secondly, there is a belief in the ASD community that they empathise just fine with each other, so it is a different Empathy A, an Empathy A1 that's just as good. That isn't bearing out in the data. It is more likely that this results from cueing autists past step A, telling them they have to look at something from another's POV. (Trust me, autists are not the only people who need this cueing. It is all of us at times.) Thirdly, there is a strong pushback from women both in and out of the autism community that this does not match their internal experience and sounds derogatory to women anyway.
You can do an AI request or a quick search yourself to get expanded versions of the POVs, but this short article is pretty good. -and no, it doesn't mean autistic people lack empathy or are more 'male.' If you really want to go down the rabbit hole, you can ask Claude about the criticisms as well.
*Did I get that right, darling?
