Does Measurement Bias Explain Sex Differences in Self-Reported Empathy?

Self-reports of trait empathic concern suggest that females are more empathic than males, while self-reports of state empathy yield small, inconsistent sex differences. Researchers have inferred from this pattern that sex differences in empathic concern reflect measurement biases that are elicited by personality questionnaires but not reports of emotion experience in real time. However, sex differences in trait empathy need not correspond to sex differences in empathy in any one situation because trait questionnaires measure empathy at a higher level of aggregation. Moreover, the hypothesis that trait questionnaires of empathy are more biased than state measures has never been empirically tested. We conduct measurement invariance tests on eleven studies from our laboratory (N = 6,832). The effect of non-invariance upon observed sex differences were generally small, and we found some evidence that trait measures failed measurement invariance tests more frequently than state measures. A meta-analytic summary of the latent means revealed that females on average do experience more state and trait empathy than males, although there was substantial heterogeneity in effect sizes.