Here is a photo of Brant Burleson and Amanda Holmstrom. If you needed comforting which one would you go to. Probably Amanda since she's a woman and we expect that women will be good at comforting others. In this case you would probably pretty safe with either of them since "comforting" is their specialty, they are researching it at Purdue University.

They have confirmed that the expectation is that women will be good at comforting but the way of things are that some women have good comforting skills and some do not. Further, those who do not are thought of quite poorly by the sisterhood and the irony is that the less a woman conforms to the traditional notion of "feminine" the more critical she is of other woman who lack comforting skills.

Women who see themselves as highly feminine are far less critical of the comforting shortcomings of other women. Brant and Amanda hypothesise that this is because they are projecting their expectation of good comforting skills onto the other woman rather realistically evaluating how good the woman actually is.

Of course if the comforter is a man he is thought of quite favourably regardless of whether he is any good at the comforting or not.

Read more here.