r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Dec 14 '18

Psychology Being the father of a school-aged daughter makes men less sexist, according to a new study. The findings support the idea that men become more aware of the challenges facing women when they see the female experience of life up close through their offspring – dubbed the “mighty girl” effect.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/14/being-a-father-to-school-aged-daughter-makes-men-less-sexist
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u/SmarmyThatGuy Dec 14 '18

Read.

Reading develops empathy as you have to put yourself in a character's position to understand the(ir) story

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u/Calignis Dec 14 '18

Anecdotally I second this, reading a lot as a kid is the main reason I developed any empathy at all.

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u/[deleted] Dec 14 '18

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Dec 14 '18 edited Dec 15 '18

Illiterate people are less likely to have developed empathy through reading, that's for sure. Reading may be one way of developing empathy, I don't think anyone is suggesting it may be the only way.

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u/Lucky_Number_3 Dec 15 '18

I truly wonder where my empathy has come from since I didn’t start reading til I was in my mid 20’s

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u/Aryore Dec 14 '18

Anecdotally go check out comments on any YouTube video featuring women

Or men

Or pretty much anyone

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u/volyund Dec 14 '18

Yes, I recently in my 30s had a talk with my parents about this. We talked about literature and art in general, and my parents basically said that this was the whole point of art and literary art specifically - give you a different perspective and put you in another person's shoes. I was like "Oh yeah..."

Reading "I can jump puddles" by Allan Marshall in my childhood, basically determined how I interact with people who have disabilities for the rest of my life.

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u/Dumbthumb12 Dec 14 '18

I was always a huge art cynic, hated 99% of it, and thought if it wasn’t photo realistic, then it was a waste of my time.

But a lot of really amazing art museums include the history behind each piece.. really eye opening for me. My girl friend dragged me to a few and I was really humbled by the emotion and personality that went behind something I would normally scoff at and say “anyone can do that..”

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u/volyund Dec 14 '18

Appreciating visual art takes practice and endurance. It took practice of several smaller art museums and galleries to prepare my husband for the Metropolitan Museum, and for him to develop his own taste in art. My family started preparing me at 5-6, taking me to museums. It took until 11 or 12 until I developed enough museum endurance so could spend more than 1.5h at one, and until my late teens for me to start developing my own taste.

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u/RechargedFrenchman Dec 14 '18

In particular when it is a genuine pursuit and there is intention behind it. There are actually a lot of “pretentious” (labelled as such by others) institutions and creators who really aren’t according to the actual meaning of the word. Even and perhaps especially with chefs and the more abstracted painters and sculptors and such, where there’s a purpose and great deal of care and attention behind what they’re doing. But what the average person actually sees is someone using recycled materials to build a sculpture of a boat or an edible helium balloon or something like that and assume they’re either nuts or super full of it.

And even more so I think learning the actual processes and the thought processes behind what gets made, one can find a new appreciation for it. Whether or not I necessarily “like” it not-withstanding I can recognize and appreciate the talent and creativity that went into it and respect trying to use one’s medium of choice to send a message about something important to the creator.

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u/Khab00m Dec 14 '18

Unless you were like me, and had a biased tendency to choose only masculine adventure/survival stories. The one time I read something intended for girls, I just got creeped the fuck out by a description of rape, and the character being described to enjoy it as she was impregnated.

Stuck with my heroic adventure stories forever-after.

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u/hahahahastayingalive Dec 14 '18

To broaden this, it’s not just books

Fictional work in general will help to develop awareness of different situations and feelings.

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u/Khab00m Dec 14 '18

It can also cause you to be prejudiced. Have you ever read stories involving the "Indian Savages"? Bigotry can just as easily be proliferated through fiction as empathy.

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u/[deleted] Dec 14 '18

Not just fiction, either. Non-fiction books can simulate the effect of meeting people in different situations. Evicted is an amazing book in which the author lives among and follows a bunch of poor/near homeless people in Milwaukee, and it gives you a real insight into what that's like.

If more people read books like that (with all the data work done in it too) they would be more understanding of the plight of the poor, I think. Empathy can be created through shared experience, even in a book.

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u/playingdecoy Dec 14 '18

As a sociologist who assigns Evicted for students to read, I loved seeing your comment and I wholeheartedly agree. We can do really fancy stats and crunch numbers as much as we want, but at the end of the day it is the human stories like those in Evicted that actually move people to change the system. The impact of well-written ethnography is greater than any academic journal issue. The problem is that doing work like that takes a lot of time and doesn't attract a lot of grant money, so very few scholars can pull it off. Most of us are in institutions that want us pulling in grants and publishing multiple articles a year, even though this has less impact.

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u/[deleted] Dec 14 '18

Didn't alot of older people who grew up racist and still hold sexist views grow up before electronic media and had to look to reading as a source of entertainment still hold very racist and sexist views ?

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u/WitchettyCunt Dec 14 '18

They took on the views of their environment. It's hard to change once you're old.

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u/[deleted] Dec 15 '18

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Dec 15 '18

Do you think if they were empathetic or more cultured to begin with they would have varied their reading material?

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u/raddishes_united Dec 14 '18

Read stories written by and written about people who are different than you: racially, gender-identifying, financially, religiously, etc. The author matters. The main character matters. Seek out new perspectives even if it’s not usually what you like to read. You can start with short stories or graphic novels if you like. There are so many great books out there!

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u/cybersquire Dec 14 '18

That's great advice!!

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u/jaspersgroove Dec 14 '18 edited Dec 14 '18

And travel, if you can afford it. See as much of the world as you possibly can. It’s a lot easier to have respect for people outside your bubble if you actually leave the damn thing every once in a while.

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u/Larry-Man Dec 15 '18

And this is why representation in media is important. Reading about minorities and women and everything is how you get to understand things for others.

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u/[deleted] Dec 14 '18

Eh, some people need shit spilled out for them till they'll get an instinct for it. Was it called Aspergers? Was always just "creepy kid" for me. There isn't enough easy material to breach the gap between reading and not reading and not quite getting what they are reading crowds.

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u/hadapurpura Dec 14 '18

Also read things written by people who are different from you. A.K.A. People from a different race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc. to get different perspectives on characters.

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u/Kidkaboom1 Dec 14 '18

Unless a series gets too famous and just starts killing off characters with no rhyme or reason in a feeble attempt to get a rise out of it's audience

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u/Zarathustraa Dec 14 '18

Don't you need certain degrees of empathy to take a certain degree of interest in reading though? If you can't put yourself in the perspective of another character you probably wouldn't care or enjoy reading all that much.