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.
