When my colleagues and I began doing research on empathic accuracy (everyday mind reading) about 20 years ago, we expected to find that women would be more accurate than men at inferring the specific content of other people's thoughts and feelings. This expectation was based on the cultural stereotype of "women's intuition."

Surprisingly, however, when we tested for evidence of this expected gender difference, we kept failing to find any support for it. In seven straight studies, the average empathic accuracy score of our female participants was not significantly different from the average score of our male participants.

So where was the evidence for the presumed superiority of "women's intuition"? We didn't find it in a study of the initial interactions of opposite-sex strangers. We didn't find it in a study of the initial interactions of same-sex (female-female versus male-male) strangers. We didn't find it in a study of all-male groups versus all-female groups. And it failed to appear regardless of whether the study had been conducted in Texas, in North Carolina, or in New Zealand.