When I was asked to write a book on empathy back in 2012, I dove into the research and found a great deal of confusion and a great many things that concerned me.

First, there was very little agreement about how empathy worked, what empathy was, or whether compassion was better overall. You want to see this kind of confusion in a young science, but it was very hard to organize my thinking, so I entered grad school to be able to access the research directly. For better or worse.

My intentions in developing my book were to create a model of empathy that would work for everyone. For people whose empathy was painfully high, I wanted to provide a clear understanding of what that meant and how to address it.

For people who struggled to empathize, I wanted an overview of empathy that could help them approach empathy systematically and find their own way to access it at will.

But what I found as I dove deeper into the research was a continual push to exile people and create a hierarchy of humanness. Gender essentialism and sexism were everywhere: Boys and men were usually exiled from empathy and treated as emotionally backward, while women and girls who struggled with empathy were not even mentioned. Empathy was expected from women and girls and........

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