Are women really more emotionally intelligent than men?

The research finds that women and girls score higher on average in emotion recognition and emotion understanding. The overall gender difference in emotion regulation is smaller: when emotion regulation is self-focused, men and boys score modestly higher. The findings also show that conclusions about gender and emotional intelligence depend strongly on how it is measured: women’s average advantage is substantially larger on performance-based tests than on subjective assessments, most of which are self-reports.

The research in the journal Emotion, published by the American Psychological Association, was led by Dr Mary Hausfeld from University of Limerick, and co-authored by Vera Hampel and Leon Bach of the University of Zurich and by Professor of Leadership Jochen Menges of Cambridge Judge Business School and the University of Zurich.

“Women are emotionally intelligent. Men think they are,” says Jochen. “On performance-based tests, women’s advantage in general emotional intelligence is substantially larger. On self-reports, it almost disappears. Self-perception and demonstrated ability are not interchangeable. 

“The gap between performance and perception is fascinating. Men may overestimate their emotional abilities, women may underestimate theirs, or both may be happening at once. Our data cannot tell which explanation is correct. Either way, confidence and competence are not the same thing – and organisations should not confuse them.” 

Dividing emotional intelligence into recognition, understanding and regulation

One of the most striking conclusions of the study is that emotional intelligence should not be treated as a single, general quality. Broadly defined as “recognition and use of one’s own and others’ emotional states to solve problems and regulate behaviour,” emotional intelligence can be divided into distinct abilities relating to recognition, understanding and regulation of EI in one’s self and others.

Dr Mary Hausfeld of University of Limerick explains: “Our findings suggest that common assumptions about women and men’s emotional abilities are often too broad. Rather than reinforcing stereotypes, the evidence points to a more nuanced picture in which gender differences vary depending on the emotional skill being examined and the context in which it is measured.”

Adds Jochen: “Women show an advantage in recognising and understanding emotions and in regulating other people’s emotions. But for self-focused emotion regulation, the pattern reverses slightly: men and boys score higher. That distinction matters, because being expected to carry other people emotionally is not the same as being better equipped to manage your own emotions.”

Gender gap narrowing over the years – especially in children

Because the meta-study spanned research over nearly 3 decades, the researchers were able to look at how some of the findings have changed over the years – and they found that gender differences in general emotional intelligence were smaller in more recent data collections. 

“Gender differences in general emotional intelligence are smaller in more recent data, and the decline is especially steep in child samples,” says Jochen. “That pattern is consistent with changing socialisation and gender norms, but it does not definitively establish the cause. Age, generation and historical period cannot be separated in these data, and biological explanations cannot be ruled out.”

How emotional intelligence influences workplace performance and gender perceptions

So why do we care about the intricacies and nuances of emotional intelligence? As Jochen’s research outlines, by extending the concept of EI to the sphere of work and organisations, it has been shown in some of the studies comprising the meta-study that high EI is “associated with many advantages at work, such as increased job performance, or improved coping with stress, and appears particularly relevant for interpersonal relationships through improved communication, negotiation outcomes or constructive conflict management.”

And why do we care how gender interacts with EI theory and practice? The meta-study says it is important to reach such an understanding due to persistent stereotyping that women have higher EI (reflected, among other places, in some of the most prestigious business publications) – and therefore “leaving the assumption of women’s greater EI unexamined has potential pitfalls”.

The study is entitled “Putting assumptions to the test: A meta-analytic review of gender differences in emotional intelligence and specific emotion abilities”.

“Persistent assumptions that women naturally possess greater emotional intelligence can create 2 opposing risks. Genuine differences may be dismissed as unscientific, obscuring potential strengths. At the same time, simplified claims can reinforce stereotypes and lead women to be assigned a disproportionate share of emotional and social responsibilities at work,” says Jochen.

The researchers warn that avoiding the question of gender differences can obscure real patterns, while exaggerating those differences can turn them into self-reinforcing workplace expectations.

The role of leadership, age and geography in gender and emotional intelligence

Another element of the study involved an examination of whether gender differences in EI are larger among leaders, by comparing adults in leadership positions with those in non-leadership positions. The results here were particularly nuanced. For emotion recognition, gender differences were larger in samples of leaders compared to non-leaders, but for other emotion abilities, there was not a stable difference.

Contrary to the authors’ expectations, the gender differences in emotion recognition and emotion regulation were smaller in male-dominated industries compared to other industries, so the authors say that “the expression of gender difference in EI and specific emotion abilities, at least for emotion recognition and emotion regulation, may depend upon context, with gender differences being least pronounced in masculine industries, and more pronounced in other industries.”

As for age, the meta-study found some evidence of socialisation as a potential mechanism for gender differences in EI, but these were not consistent across the various emotion abilities. “Specifically, increases in age were associated with increases in gender differences in general EI and emotion recognition, but age was not a significant moderator for gender differences in specific emotion abilities.” Regarding geography, the research found that North and Central America and Europe had “substantially larger gender differences favouring women and girls” compared to the rest of the world. 

Small emotional intelligence differences are not trivial: implications for managers

The implications of the findings for organisations and managers are broad. While the gender differences observed were by and large small, such small differences are nonetheless “not trivial” because “even minor disparities can accumulate over time through everyday organisational decisions and social interactions, producing substantial gaps in outcomes such as promotions or leadership representation”, say the authors.

“Disregarding the target of emotion abilities could lead women to find themselves in yet another conundrum: Even though women may have similar needs as men to train and expand their self-focused emotion abilities, they may be confronted with the idea that they should possess higher emotion abilities compared to their male colleagues, due to consistently higher scores in other-focused abilities obscuring the lack of difference between men and women for many self-focused abilities. Consequently, the belief that women generally possess higher emotion abilities may evolve to become another emotional minefield in which women must navigate incongruent expectations and outperform their male counterparts to be seen as equivalent,” says the study. 

Adds Jochen: “Organisations should stop treating emotional intelligence as a feminine trait and start treating it as a set of skills. Where validated performance-based measures exist, use them rather than relying on self-reports alone. Develop these abilities in everyone, and do not let other-focused emotional work quietly become women’s responsibility.”

The research concludes with a call for differentiation of emotion abilities

The authors conclude in the study that “most fundamentally, our findings critically question the reliance on general scores in EI research, as general scores of EI – amongst other problems – may disguise nuanced differences between men and women’s emotion abilities. Our findings show that the presence, magnitude, and direction of gender differences in EI vary between different emotion abilities.

“We thus echo the call for differentiation of emotion abilities because separating the dimensions of EI is important for more nuanced and accurate representations of gender differences in EI.”

“The question of whether women or men are more emotionally intelligent is too simple,” says Jochen. “The better questions are: which emotional ability, measured how, directed towards whom and observed in what context? That is the direction science has been taking, and I advise organisations to do the same to make better decisions.”