Three-Decade Global Analysis Finds Emotional Intelligence Gap Between Men and Women Is Far More Nuanced

One of the most persistent beliefs in popular psychology — that women are naturally more emotionally intelligent than men — has failed to survive a rigorous, decades-spanning test. A new meta-analytic review, led by Dr Mary Hausfeld of the University of Limerick together with Vera Hampel and Leon Bach of the University of Zurich and Jochen Menges, professor of leadership at Cambridge Judge Business School and the University of Zurich, synthesised 1,279 academic papers covering 609,278 people across 76 countries. Published in the journal Emotion, the analysis represents one of the most comprehensive examinations ever conducted of gender differences in emotional abilities, and its conclusions are strikingly at odds with the confident claims that fill business books and management seminars.

The central finding is not that men and women are identical in their emotional capabilities. On the contrary, the data reveals genuine, measurable differences. Women and girls do score higher, on average, at recognising and understanding emotions — the abilities involved in decoding facial expressions, vocal tones and emotional situations, and in grasping what those signals mean. But the picture changes dramatically when the researchers turned to emotion regulation, the capacity to manage feelings once they arise. On tasks involving the regulation of one’s own emotions, men and boys tended to score higher. On tasks involving the regulation of other people’s emotions — soothing, encouraging, calming or motivating others — women scored higher. Emotional intelligence, in other words, is not a single dial on which one gender simply sits higher.

This decomposition is the study’s most important technical contribution. The researchers argue that emotional intelligence should be treated as four separable skills: recognition of emotions, understanding of emotions, and regulation of emotions, each directed either at oneself or at others. When the evidence is sliced this way, the sweeping generalisations that dominate popular discourse collapse. “Common assumptions about women and men’s emotional abilities are often too broad,” said Hausfeld. “The evidence points to a picture in which differences depend on the skill being examined and the context in which it is measured.” The finding that men score slightly higher on self-regulation is particularly provocative, because it inverts the usual narrative in which women are presumed to hold every emotional advantage.

Equally significant is the study’s demonstration that measurement method matters enormously. Emotional intelligence research relies on two broad families of instruments. Performance-based tests present participants with actual tasks — identifying emotions in photographs of faces, judging the most effective response to an interpersonal scenario — and score the answers for accuracy, much as an examination would. Self-report surveys, by contrast, simply ask people how emotionally skilled they believe themselves to be. The meta-analysis found that women’s advantage is substantial on performance-based tests but shrinks almost to nothing on self-reports. “Women are emotionally intelligent. Men think they are,” said Menges. “On performance-based tests, women’s advantage is substantial. On self-reports, it almost disappears. Self-perception and demonstrated ability are not the same thing.”

The gap between confidence and competence carries real scientific weight. The researchers could not determine from the available data why men rate themselves as highly as women on questionnaires while performing worse on objective tasks. “Men may overestimate their abilities, women may underestimate theirs, or both may be happening,” Menges noted. “Either way, confidence and competence are not the same, and organisations should not confuse them.” This dissociation echoes a well-known pattern in cognitive psychology, where self-assessed ability often correlates only weakly with tested performance, and where the least skilled individuals are sometimes the most confident in their own judgments. What the new study adds is evidence that this miscalibration is patterned by gender in the specific domain of emotional skills.

Because the underlying data spans nearly thirty years, the team could also track how these differences have evolved over time. Their analysis found that gender differences in overall emotional intelligence have narrowed in recent years, and that the narrowing is most pronounced among children. “That pattern is consistent with changing socialisation and gender norms, but it doesn’t establish the cause,” Menges cautioned. “Age, generation and time period cannot be separated in this data, and biological explanations cannot be ruled out.” This is a crucial methodological honesty: cross-sectional snapshots taken across decades cannot cleanly distinguish whether the shrinking gap reflects generational change, developmental shifts within individuals, or broader cultural trends. What can be said is that whatever produces the differences, it appears less entrenched in the youngest cohorts studied.

The context in which emotional abilities are exercised also shapes the size of the observed gaps. The analysis found that gender differences in emotion recognition were larger among leaders than among non-leaders — a finding that may reflect the heightened emotional demands of leadership roles or the self-selection of people with particular profiles into such positions. Counter to the researchers’ own expectations, differences were smaller in male-dominated industries than in other sectors. Geographically, the differences were largest in North and Central America and in Europe compared with the rest of the world, suggesting that whatever mix of culture, socialisation and measurement practice drives these gaps, it is not uniform across societies. Such heterogeneity is difficult to reconcile with any simple biological account and instead points toward the interplay of context and ability.

The workplace implications are where the researchers sound their sharpest warnings. Prior studies included in the analysis link high emotional intelligence to job performance, stress management, communication and conflict management — the raw material of everyday organisational life. Against that backdrop, the assumption that women simply possess more of this quality, an assumption repeated uncritically in business publications, becomes more than a harmless stereotype. “Persistent assumptions that women naturally possess greater emotional intelligence create two risks,” Menges said. “Real differences may be dismissed as unscientific. At the same time, broad claims can reinforce stereotypes and push emotional work onto women.” If employers treat emotional labour — the often invisible work of managing colleagues’ feelings — as something women do naturally, they may allocate it by default rather than by skill, without recognition, compensation or career credit.

The researchers are careful to note that small average differences should not be dismissed as trivial, even when they are modest in magnitude. Small effects can accumulate through countless everyday decisions — who is asked to comfort a distressed client, who is expected to defuse team tension, whose composure is read as leadership — and over time these accumulations can produce measurable gaps in outcomes such as promotion and advancement. The remedy they propose is procedural rather than rhetorical. “Treat it as a set of skills,” Menges advised. “Use validated performance-based measures where they exist, rather than relying on self-reports. Develop these abilities in everyone, and don’t let emotional work aimed at others become women’s responsibility by default.” In practical terms, that means organisations should assess emotional competencies with the same psychometric rigour they apply to technical skills, and should train all employees rather than assuming some arrive pre-equipped.

Ultimately, the study’s authors argue that the question that has framed decades of popular debate — do women or men have more emotional intelligence? — is simply the wrong question. “The better questions are: which ability, measured how, directed at whom, in what context?” said Menges. “That’s the direction the science is taking, and I’d advise organisations to do the same.” The meta-analysis, titled “Putting assumptions to the test: A meta-analytic review of gender differences in emotional intelligence and specific emotion abilities,” was published on 17 September 2026. Its message is unlikely to end the cultural argument overnight, but it offers something the argument has long lacked: a data-driven map of where real differences lie, where they are shrinking, and where confident belief and demonstrated skill part ways.

Subject of Research: Gender differences in emotional intelligence abilities

Article Title: Study challenges assumption that women have more emotional intelligence than men

Article References: Study challenges assumption that women have more emotional intelligence than men. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: emotional intelligence, gender differences, meta-analysis, emotion recognition, emotion regulation, self-report, performance-based tests, workplace psychology, emotional labour, University of Cambridge, Emotion journal, socialisation