Empathy versus systemizing

Simon Baron-Cohen's recent book The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain proposes that "The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems."

The book contains a couple of tests that calculate your "empathy quotient" and your "systemizing quotient", so I've produced web versions of them:

The tests should only take a total of around 15 minutes to complete. When you get your scores, there is a bit more explanation of typical ranges for men and women.

Don't take these tests too seriously - Baron-Cohen himself says in his book that the 'typical' results are only averages, and many men and women differ in their scores.

View the results so far. (Please be patient with this link - there are over 150,000 responses so far so it takes a few seconds to prepare the graphs of the results.)

General information