The idea that women are more emotionally intelligent than men is kind of a no-brainer, unless you’re some kind of weirdo men’s rights/manosphere influencer type guy. You don’t really need a scientific study to know this, but a team of researchers conducted one and published their results in the journal Emotion. The results were mostly unsurprising, except that the gap in emotional intelligence between men and women is a bit smaller than you’d imagine.
Analyzing data from 609,278 people across 76 countries, researchers from the University of Limerick and the University of Zurich found that while women score higher overall, the divide is relatively small. The real difference is in whose feelings they manage. Women far outpace men in reading, understanding, and regulating other people’s emotions. When it comes to managing their own emotional baggage, men scored higher, but only slightly.
Scientists Studied 600,000 People to Find Out Who Has Higher Emotional Intelligence
The study’s funniest detail is best summed up by one of the lead researchers, Jochen Menges: “Women are emotionally intelligent. Men think they are.” The team gleaned this insight from testing: on performance-based tests, women had a clear advantage, while on self-reported tests, men way overestimated their abilities and women underestimated their own.
Researchers suggest that the gap isn’t hardwired into our biology. It narrows in younger generations, suggesting it’s learned through social practice; since girls are taught to handle everyone else’s feelings, they eventually become women saddled with heaps of unpaid emotional labor at work and at home. Men, meanwhile, get to coast on a ton of unearned confidence while staying blind, and frankly probably completely indifferent, to their own emotional shortcomings.
Typical.
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