Empathy or science? Empathy explains physical science enrollment for men and women

•Empathy was a stronger predictor than gender for subject major enrollment.•Low social skills and cognitive empathy predicted physical science enrollment.•High affective empathy predicted life science and social science enrollment.•Physical science and humanities students did not differ in affective empathy.•A three-factor model for the empathy quotient was confirmed.

Those in the physical sciences work to understand relationships among non-social entities and this may come at a cost to their understanding of social relationships. Alternatively, it could be that those in the physical sciences differ in how comfortable they feel in social situations. Prior research had been confined to looking at differences between particular subject majors (e.g., humanities) and physical sciences, leaving open the possibility that people choosing subjects like psychology or biology might differ on empathy. University students (N = 404) majoring in humanities, social science, life science, or physical science completed the empathy quotient (EQ). Confirmatory factor analysis showed three-factors of the EQ, and these were used in multinomial logistic regression. Empathy differences made a unique contribution to explaining subject major choice. We found that greater levels of empathy predicted membership in social and life sciences, while lower levels of empathy predicted physical sciences enrollment.