This comes as a bit of a surprise, since we’re used to the push for gender parity going the other way. Why are those we assume are so eager to pursue public office missing from the picture? Could it be that they’re less interested in animal welfare? As stereotypical answers, certain images immediately come to mind: that of the hunter (98% men in France), the butcher (90% men), the vegetarian (67% women), or even a certain actress known for championing their cause. Not to mention primatologists, who are most often women, following in the footsteps of pioneers like Dian Fossey, Jane Goodall, or Brigitte Galdigas, and even academics who devote themselves to the study of human-animal relationships.
Beyond these selective examples, do men really feel less concerned about the welfare of animals?
Opposition to animal experimentation is one of the areas where gender disparities are most well-documented. It is a cause in which women are overrepresented, and in proportions that have changed little over the past 150 years. In the19th century, 60 percent of anti-vivisection leaders were women—a high figure at a time when women were virtually invisible in the public sphere. Furthermore, during that period, three-quarters of the participants in demonstrations on behalf of animals were women.
Even today, advocacy for animals at public demonstrations remains predominantly female: in nine studies that counted the number of women at pro-animal demonstrations in several countries, women outnumbered men three to one.
Conversely, when it comes to physical violence, men dominate, whether the victims are human or not. An adult woman is 39 times less likely than a man to seriously injure an animal, and 45 times less likely to shoot it with a firearm.
Among adolescents, a French study published in 2020 and conducted by one of us with 12,344 students showed that among the 7.3% who had already intentionally harmed an animal, more than two-thirds were boys. To the best of our knowledge, there is no culture in which women engage in gratuitous violence toward animals more frequently than men. On the other hand, there is no shortage of ethnographic examples in which women care for animals and even nurse them.
Women also stand out for a condition that can be viewed as a subverted form of care: Noah’s Syndrome, a compulsive hoarding of animals that affects three times as many women. As if to mirror this, we also observe that certain pets, such as cats, become more attached to the women who care for them than to the men who do so.
To shed light on the differences between women and men in their relationships with animals, one might hypothesize that these differences are underpinned by variations in the degree of empathy, which appear to work to the disadvantage of males across many species.
In a comprehensive review, Leonardo Christov-More of the University of California, Los Angeles, demonstrated that, when it comes to emotional contagion or automatic imitation, females consistently outperform males across various species.
Furthermore, among gorillas and chimpanzees, females exhibit more comforting behaviors. Among wild western gorillas, adolescent females display a particular reaction—somewhere between curiosity and fear—toward the lifeless body of a potamochere they encounter along their path, while a young male appeared indifferent to the situation.
This concern for the welfare of others among females does not seem to be limited to non-human primates. In mice, females are more likely to squirm when they see another mouse in pain.
Female non-human primates also appear to be more influenced by the behaviors of other group members. For example, yawning when others yawn (a well-known behavioral manifestation of emotional contagion) occurs more frequently among female bonobos.
In the jackdaw population, it is the females who share their food the most.
In spontaneous play, there is also more caregiving behavior: young female wild chimpanzees are more likely to carry sticks as if they were babies (while males tend to use them to hit each other), and in captivity, they play with dolls more often than males do when dolls are made available to them.
This is likely the result of a predisposition or preparatory behavior in young females for motherhood. Among primates (e.g., macaques, gorillas, etc.), adolescent females frequently attempt to steal newborns from adult females in order to test and learn the art of motherhood.
Of course, we would need to systematically study these behaviors across numerous species to determine whether they are present in most of them or only in certain ones, and to analyze the social and ecological conditions associated with these behaviors. This will also be essential to guard against selectively citing facts that confirm our stereotypical expectations—facts that are easily drawn from the natural world to justify those expectations.
However, based on the available research to date, it appears that empathy is much more prevalent among females, and that it is likely an ancient biological phenomenon rooted in the care of offspring during the postnatal period.
All of this is also observed in humans. For example, female newborns cry more than male newborns when they hear another child crying.
Later on, 4-year-old girls who see photos of people in distress show more empathetic reactions than boys.
Differences in empathy become significantly more pronounced during adolescence, and as adults, women are more accurate at recognizing others’ emotions—whether through facial expressions, vocalizations, or body language. They devote more time and money to others through donations or volunteer work.
It now seems widely accepted that empathic abilities distinguish men from women, as indicated by this study conducted on a sample of nearly 670,000 participants.
Behavioral differences between men and women were recently confirmed directly in a behavioral study conducted at the University of Grenoble-Alpes. During an experiment, nearly 750 participants from all social backgrounds were asked to administer doses of a toxic substance to an animal as part of a pharmaceutical research protocol (the animal was a highly realistic robot, but the participants were unaware of this). Despite the animal’s distress signals, the majority of participants administered all 12 doses, thereby believing they were condemning the animal to death.
Observation of the participants’ behavior revealed that women experienced much more intense stress than men and, most notably, that they administered fewer toxic doses on average. During the experiment, four participants shed tears—all of them women.
If political involvement in a party that presents itself as the party for animals appeals less to men, could this be due to factors rooted in their biology? Perhaps in part, but only if we do not view this as a rigid form of determinism. There are many cases in which men show more empathy toward animals than women do; moreover, this empathy stems from individual psychological dispositions but is also encouraged and channeled by the social environment, which often determines who stands to benefit from it.
Furthermore, in at least one case—that of net hunting among the Aka Pygmies, a cooperative hunting practice carried out by both men and women—it is the women who take the animals’ lives. Among this forest-dwelling hunter-gatherer people of the Central African Republic, living in the heart of the tropical rainforest, women kill duikers—the small forest antelopes that the Aka, men and women together, hunt with nets (Masi, personal observation in 2005 and 2016). If the animal is small (for example, in the case of the blue duiker), the female hunters even allow the youngest members, including children, the opportunity to gain experience by killing an animal. Men may allow women to kill these small antelopes because it is a task that does not require their physical strength, which is reserved for larger animals such as elephants, forest buffalo, potamochera, hylochera, or bongo.
In conclusion, the very rare existence of women who kill animals is not necessarily a tragedy for a candidate from an animal rights party, even if such women seem to contradict the stereotypical image of the empathetic, nonviolent woman. It suggests that the relative flexibility of cultural roles may also allow us to envision men dedicating themselves to the animal cause, and that electoral parity may one day become… natural.
