UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center defines empathy as such:

The term “empathy” is used to describe a wide range of experiences.

Emotion researchers generally define empathy as the ability to sense other people’s emotions, coupled with the ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling.

Contemporary researchers often differentiate between two types of empathy:

Affective empathy” refers to the sensations and feelings we get in response to others’ emotions; this can include mirroring what that person is feeling, or just feeling stressed when we detect another’s fear or anxiety.

Cognitive empathy,” sometimes called “perspective taking,” refers to our ability to identify and understand other people’s emotions. Studies suggest that people with autism spectrum disorders have a hard time empathizing.

Empathy seems to have deep roots in our brains and bodies, and in our evolutionary history. Elementary forms of empathy have been observed in our primate relatives, in dogs, and even in rats. Empathy has been associated with two different pathways in the brain, and scientists have speculated that some aspects of empathy can be traced to mirror neurons, cells in the brain that fire when we observe someone else perform an action in much the same way that they would fire if we performed that action ourselves. Research has also uncovered evidence of a genetic basis to empathy, though studies suggest that people can enhance (or restrict) their natural empathic abilities.

Having empathy doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll want to help someone in need, though it’s often a vital first step toward compassionate action.

UCLA researchers conducted a study and identified that women’s brains reacted more when observing others in pain.

Christov-Moore, a UCLA postdoctoral fellow in psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences, and Dr. Marco Iacoboni, director of the Neuromodulation Lab at the UCLA Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, who studied the brain activity of people as they reacted to images of pain in others.

Ultimately my experiences and observations have led me to believe that women seem to experience more “Affective Empathy.”

Even in the recent OP about women giving women other women compliments many men seemed to believe women do this for “competitiveness” or for “virtue signalling.” It didn’t occur to them that perhaps we do it to give someone who doesn’t get validation some feel-good moments because it saddens us to imagine our friends being in mental and/or physical pain. AKA “affective empathy.”

That said I haven’t noticed more women better at “Cognitive Empathy” than men and vice versa. People with “Cognitive Empathy” tend to be naturally holistic critical thinkers and/or were raised by a community/guardian that instilled a “POV shifting” approach and/or has a bevy of experiences that led to developing it. A lack of Cognitive Empathy from both genders is even evidenced on this sub by the amount of men who refuse to understand the female POV and the amount of women who refuse to understand the male POV.

I’m sure there are different opinions, observations, and experiences on this subject. Interested in hearing them!