What is the significance of the women being able to find the evidence and not the men?

Glaspell makes a case for the primacy of empathy when it comes to deciding what is just. The men do not see empathy as relevant in the case at hand—or most cases, for that matter—and prefer to look at simple, black-and-white evidence. The women, however, begin to empathize with Minnie, helping the reader to do so as well. They find the clues they need to piece together what Minnie's cold, cheerless, lonely life actually looks like and why she might have been compelled kill her husband in a veritable form of "self-defense" after he brutally murdered the one thing that brought her any joy. And as Glaspell changes the murder weapon from an axe, the weapon that Margaret Hossack used, to a rope, she changes the interpretation of Minnie from a murderer to an executioner. Only the development of the women and readers' empathy could support such a conclusion.