What is it about?

Are women more emotionally intelligent than men? We brought together nearly three decades of research to put this common assumption to the test. Our meta-analysis examined 1,279 articles, comprising 1,428 samples and more than 609,000 participants across 76 countries. On average, women scored higher than men in overall emotional intelligence. But that simple conclusion hides a much more interesting story. Gender differences varied depending on the specific emotional ability being assessed, whether the ability involved one's own emotions or other people's emotions, how emotional intelligence was measured, and the context in which it was studied. In particular, women's advantage was stronger for abilities focused on other people's emotions than for abilities focused on their own. Differences were also substantially larger on performance-based tests than on self- or other-report measures. Overall, our findings suggest that asking simply whether women or men are “more emotionally intelligent” misses important differences in what emotional intelligence means and how it is measured.

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Why is it important?

Our findings suggest that gender differences in emotional intelligence are not simply fixed differences between women and men. Instead, they are consistent with the idea that emotional abilities develop, in part, through socialization and the different expectations and opportunities people encounter. For example, gender differences in general emotional intelligence and emotion recognition were smaller among children and adolescents compared to adults. Gender differences also became smaller in more recent studies, with some of these changes occurring more quickly among children than adults. Together with our finding that women’s advantages are larger for abilities involving other people’s emotions, these patterns are consistent with socialization accounts in which girls and women receive more encouragement and practice in attending to, understanding, and responding to others’ emotions. This matters because it shifts the conversation away from assuming that women and men are simply born with different emotional capabilities. Instead, our findings point toward the importance of understanding how social expectations and contexts may help shape the emotional skills people have opportunities to develop and practice.

Perspectives

Emotional intelligence and abilities are skills that can be trained. So instead of thse findings indicating that women are 'better' at certain emotion abilities, instead, I think this work highlights opportunities for all of us to develop emotional skills we may have had less practice using. Women’s largest advantages tended to involve recognizing, understanding, and managing other people’s emotions. When it came to our own emotions, the differences were much smaller. To me, that suggests we could all benefit from putting a little more attention toward recognizing what we’re feeling, understanding where those feelings are coming from, and getting better at managing them. I was also struck by what we found for emotion regulation. There’s a persistent stereotype that women are more emotional and therefore less able to control their emotions. But when emotion regulation was actually tested through performance measures, women performed better than men on average. When people rated their own abilities, that difference disappeared. This distinction is so important, as it shows that confidence about your own abilities (like emotion regulation) doesn't necessarily translate into competence.

Mary Hausfeld
University of Limerick

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This page is a summary of: Putting assumptions to the test: A meta-analytic review of gender differences in emotional intelligence and specific emotion abilities., Emotion, September 2026, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/emo0001733.
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