Not for me (I'm more a practical type of person and emotionally closed off -- I don't like talking about my feelings). But in my experience of befriending women, they often do prefer a sympathetic ear though I sometimes have to consciously recalibrate myself to withhold from giving straight up advice because like others in this thread have said: it's just how you're wired. Your brain jumps from the problem to the solution without necessarily considering the context or if perhaps the problem can be solved indirectly by solving how you feel about it.

For example -- imagine if someone bought a dress online, except the color was slightly off from how it was advertised and now the buyer is upset. You're their friend.

The first thing that comes to my mind to tell them is to either return the dress (which would result in them being disappointed anyway, because they were looking forward to that first dress and now are left with nothing), or to just sort of forget about it or give it to someone else. These are both pretty straight-forward practical solutions that sort of consider your feelings like static -- sort of like you don't like the dress, what's done is done -> get rid of it. And they are also quite obvious, so she might have thought of them herself.

What would actually work better in terms of cheering up the person and not having you be Captain Obvious is telling them it's not so bad a color and that it suits their tan right or something (of course as long as you're not blatantly lying), and maybe offer to go to them shopping for the right accessories for it, for example. This actually has the potential to make them feel better about the dress and generally cheer them up, since the whole point of problem solving isn't about the problem itself sometimes, but about the fact you feel it's a problem. If the dress bothers you, the clear-cut solution is to get rid of the dress, but the cleverer solution is to get the person to see the dress in a different light, and to make it stop being "that ugly dress from the internet" and instead " the dress x likes on me".

Basically, a lot of the time when people come to you to complain about a problem you don't have notable expertise about, they don't want you to solve that problem for them; they don't like the possible solutions (that they can come up with just as well as you can), so they want you to make them stop seeing it as a problem.