(© WavebreakMediaMicro - stock.adobe.com)
In A Nutshell
- A review of research involving more than 600,000 people across 76 countries found that women score higher in emotional intelligence on average, particularly in understanding and managing other people’s feelings.studyfinds
- The gender gap is smaller in children and has narrowed over time, suggesting that practice and social expectations may help shape these skills rather than biology alone.studyfinds
- The authors warn that women’s emotional skills can become unpaid, unrecognized obligations and argue that employers should reward this work while helping everyone develop these trainable abilities.
Who comes to mind when you think of someone emotionally intelligent? Someone who can read a room, defuse an argument, and who knows exactly what to say when a friend is struggling? For many people, that person is a woman. It’s such a widely held belief that popular psychology treats it as fact.
We decided to put that assumption to the test. Our new study reviewed nearly three decades of research, from 1995 to 2023, across 76 countries and more than 600,000 people. We wanted to answer a simple question: are women really more emotionally intelligent than men? The headline answer is yes, on average, women score higher.
But the more useful finding is the type of emotional intelligence women seem to excel at, and what it potentially costs the people who have it.
Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize, understand and regulate emotions in yourself and in others. When we looked at each element of emotional intelligence, the female advantage turned out to be concentrated in the “others’ feelings” half of the equation.
This means recognizing what someone else is feeling, understanding why, and helping them manage it. A child has a meltdown, a colleague goes quiet after their idea gets dismissed in a meeting, a negotiation gets tense. Plenty of men are excellent at this too, and plenty of women aren’t; these are averages across hundreds of thousands of people, not predictions about any one person in the room.
Is that gap simply biology? We can’t rule biological or hormonal factors out entirely. But two patterns in our data point elsewhere. The female advantage is far smaller in children than in adults, and this gap has been narrowing across the three decades our data spans. That’s not what you’d expect from something fixed at birth. Although the data in our study cannot tell us the exact reasons these differences emerge, this pattern aligns with what you’d expect from something shaped through practice.
There’s a plausible source for that practice, too. Other research has found that parents use a wider vocabulary of emotion words with daughters than sons, and more often encourage girls to reflect on and articulate their feelings.
Boys, meanwhile, are more often steered toward managing emotions by suppressing them. Their sisters are encouraged to work through it with other people – exactly the kind of social and emotional skill our data shows women excel at.
Put simply, girls appear to get more practice reading and responding to other people’s emotions, starting early in life. Like any skill built through repetition, whether it’s learning a new language or picking up a new instrument, the more you practice, the more natural it becomes.
In fact a 2019 meta-analysis of 58 studies found that emotional intelligence can be trained. Gender didn’t seem to impact the effectiveness of learning how to be more emotionally intelligent.
That’s good news. If emotional intelligence is a trainable skill rather than a fixed trait, the gap isn’t destiny. That means men can benefit from these skills too, including in negotiations and at work.
But there’s a less comfortable implication, too. If women’s advantage here goes unrecognised as a skill and gets treated instead as “how women are”, it becomes very easy to take for granted. The colleague who’s good at defusing tension becomes the one who’s always expected to do so. A capability quietly turns into an obligation: unpaid and unrewarded.
This plays out in the workplace every day. Organizations benefit when employees manage team tension, support stressed colleagues and smooth over conflict. It is work that keeps a team functioning but almost never shows up in a performance review.
Two practical shifts need to follow our study findings. First, employers should name this work and reward it, in reviews and in promotion decisions. Second, invest in developing these abilities in all staff.
The same logic holds outside the office. In families and friendships, the person who remembers a friend is having a bad week and checks in without being asked, who notices when someone stops responding in the group chat, who always asks a family member about their day is doing real work too, and that work is often taken for granted precisely because it looks effortless.
None of this means women don’t have a real strength here. Our data shows a female advantage in emotion abilities. But a strength that’s assumed rather than trained, and expected rather than shared, isn’t something to reinforce. It’s untapped potential for men. The person everyone turns to when things get hard isn’t lucky or simply built that way: they’ve probably had more practice.
What we haven’t done is give everyone else that same opportunity or incentive to practice, or made clear emotional intelligence was a skill worth building in the first place.
Mary M. Hausfeld is an Assistant Professor in Management, at the University of Limerick. Jochen Menges is Director of the Center for Leadership in the Future of Work, University of Zurich.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
