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.
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.
Research suggests parents use a broader emotional vocabulary with daughters and encourage them to articulate feelings and engage with others. In contrast, boys are often taught to suppress their emotions. Consequently, women gain more practice developing key social and emotional skills, which data shows they 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.
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.
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 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. - PTI
