Design Thinking has reshaped how companies approach problem-solving—frameworks, sprint workshops, and all. At the core of this methodology is empathy: the ability to understand users’ experiences, emotions and needs deeply before attempting to design solutions. It’s harder than it sounds… and it’s where women consistently excel.
Getting the problem right
The first phase of Design Thinking, the Empathize stage, asks designers to set aside their assumptions and immerse themselves in users’ lived experiences. Researcher Jeanne Liedtka, writing in the Journal of Product Innovation Management, describes empathy here as a cognitive and behavioral process, not just emotional sensitivity. It’s the mechanism that ensures you’re solving the right problem before you spend resources solving it. Frame the problem wrong, and everything downstream suffers.
Research in psychology and sociology has consistently shown that women, on average, exhibit higher empathic accuracy. This comes from both biology and the social expectations placed on women from early childhood to observe emotions, manage relationships and read interpersonal cues. A 2014 review published in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews found these patterns across multiple studies, noting their implications for fields requiring emotional insight and user understanding. In a Design Thinking context, these tendencies translate directly: stronger listening, sharper perspective-taking, and a resistance to the premature assumptions that derail so many innovation projects.
Design scholar Jon Kolko, writing in Harvard Business Review, argues that women’s sensitivity to context and emotional nuance makes them better at identifying the right problem, which matters enormously when you consider how often products fail not because of poor execution, but because the wrong problem got prioritized in the first place.
Better empathy, better ideas
Empathy also shapes what’s possible in the ideation phase. Research from Aalto University found that deeply understanding user emotions increases cognitive flexibility, or the ability to envision solutions that actually resonate (Hassi & Laakso, 2011). Women’s emotional intelligence in this space tends to produce ideas that are more contextually appropriate and, increasingly, more inclusive.
That inclusivity has real consequences. Caroline Criado-Perez’s research in Invisible Women documented how design processes without meaningful female input routinely produce products that simply don’t work for women, from car safety systems to medical devices to smartphone screens. When women lead or contribute substantively to Design Thinking projects, overlooked user groups get seen. And reaching more users is a business advantage, not just a social one.
The business case
A 2018 Boston Consulting Group study found that companies with more diverse leadership, including women in innovation roles, generated significantly more revenue from new products than less diverse peers. The empathic, user-centered approaches women bring make businesses more effective.
As organizations prioritize human-centered innovation, women’s empathic strengths belong at the center of the design process—not as a diversity checkbox, but as a driver of better products and stronger results.
This article by Rediet Teffera was submitted on behalf of Voice of Women in Innovation (VOWI).
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