Are women really more emotionally intelligent than men?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Claire Byrne Show on Newstalk. With Aviva Insurance.
What is emotional intelligence, and are women more emotionally intelligent than men?
Now many of us assume that women are more emotionally intelligent than men, but is that true? And does it change depending on your age? Well, University of Limerick researcher Dr. Mary Hausfeld has been looking into this and Mary is here. Good morning, Mary.
Good morning.
Maybe start by telling us what emotional intelligence is.
Yeah, it's a great question. So emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize to understand and to manage or regulate emotions both in yourself and in other people.
Okay. And tell me about this difference then between men and women. Does it exist when it comes to emotional intelligence?
Right. So the short answer is yes.
What does large-scale research reveal about gender differences in emotional intelligence?
And the longer answer is it's much more nuanced than that. Right. So how this project began was my colleague Vera Humphrey at the University of Zurich was doing her PhD studies on emotional intelligence. She was learning about it, reading about it, teaching, and she encountered this belief everywhere that women are more emotionally intelligent than men. But when she looked into the research to try to find the evidence, right? That tested this assumption it it didn't exist. So
it's a common assumption, which may or may not be true. So more work needed to be done.
Absolutely, right? And so she came to me with this fantastic idea. And um I came to her with the method, right? So what we did is we looked at the last almost 30 years of research, right? Which com was comprised of over 600,000 people. Uh and looking at their emotional intelligence to see to what extent um did women actually score higher on these scientific tests and measures of emotional intelligence than men.
Are gender differences in emotional intelligence driven by nature or nurture?
Does it not depend though on your nurture as opposed to your nature?
Yeah, absolutely. Right. So there are essentialist arguments where you could say, Oh, of course, you know, women are better suited to emotions than men, maybe because of childbearing, right? Or or things like this. But
caring roles in the family, yeah.
Exactly. But what we find points much more strongly to this role of socialization, of nort nurture, like you're talking about. So some of the evidence for this is um the difference between men and women, right? Gender differences in emotional intelligence are so much smaller in children than they are in adults. And we also found that they vary by context, right? They're different in size in Eastern cultures than in Western cultures. They're different in male-dominated industries compared to female-dominated industries. And we've also found that over the 28 years that we've been looking at emotional intelligence, these gender differences are getting smaller, which points, in my view, very strongly to the idea that this is social.
Yeah. That combined with the idea that these emotional abilities are skills like any other, they can be trained, they can be taught, really point to to um these gender differences diminishing and this argument that it's it's nurture.
Yeah, so that's really interesting.
How do parenting and childhood shape boys’ and girls’ emotional intelligence?
So when we have little boys and little girls, their emotional tel intelligence is pretty much the same.
Is it's slightly different, but the differences are smaller. And
then it starts to change as they grow up.
Absolutely. And our review points to some potential reasons why, right? So first, parents use more emotion words when they talk to the little girls, when they talk to their daughters rather than their sons. Um girls are encouraged to reflect more on their emotions than boys are. And finally, boys are typically encouraged to regulate their emotions through suppression, and girls are encouraged to regulate their emotions through um
expression.
Exactly and interpersonally especially.
Right. So this is intergenerational then.
Yeah.
So until one generation changes how they parent, it's not going to change the emotional intelligence rates in the children.
Yeah, exactly. And what I think is most promising is that when looking at the change over time The reduction in this gender gap in emotional intelligence is strongest among children in more recent samples.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–0:09
2
What is emotional intelligence, and are women more emotionally intelligent than men?
0:09–0:46
3
What does large-scale research reveal about gender differences in emotional intelligence?
0:46–1:44
4
Are gender differences in emotional intelligence driven by nature or nurture?
1:44–3:00
5
How do parenting and childhood shape boys’ and girls’ emotional intelligence?
3:00–4:20
6
How does emotional intelligence help with negotiation, leadership, and retention at work?
4:20–5:05
7
Are self-reported emotional intelligence scores reliable compared with performance tests?
5:05–6:06
8
Can emotional intelligence be trained, and how can you practice it?
6:06–7:58