Yves here. This article, perhaps unintentionally, focuses on the value of emotional intelligence in conflict management and behavior regulation, and does not mention other possible uses, such as in negotiating, selling, and (bluntly) manipulation. But irrespective of the potential applications, it shows that women on average have an advantage and that women’s higher skill level does not appear to have a genetic foundation.
When I read articles like this, I am mystified as to how most people seem blind to the extent and intensity of gender role conditioning. I may be more aware than mast because I got very little female programming at home, which then created frictions in school and with peers when I didn’t behave properly.
My guess is that the root is that the average woman is smaller and weaker than the average man. Therefore women need to take care not to provoke male wrath and to be able to talk them down when it occurs. The media reinforces the idea of female weakness and need for protection and rescue. I saw a lot of crime shows while caring for my mother. Every one of the many cases I saw of a man cornering a women with intent to do violence, the woman cowered, even in cases where she could have defended herself by gouging his eyes out and either kneeing his nuts or stomping hard on his foot when he recoiled. Women hurting men to the point of debilitating them enough to enable escape seems to be verboten. And this vantage is not unreasonable. I took a course taught by the former Navy Seal who developed their hand to hand combat program. Its premise was that the students were smaller, slower and weaker than their assailants, yet could shut down their central nervous systems by hitting two vulnerable points in succession.
By Mary M. Hausfeld, Assistant Professor in Management, University of Limerick and Jochen Menges, Director of the Center for Leadership in the Future of Work, University of Zurich. Originally published at The Conversation
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, co-led by Dr Vera Hampel and co-authored with Leon Bach, 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 recognise, 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 recognising 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. Organisations 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.