Executive Summary

This white paper reviews the research literature on sex differences in emotional perception, expression, regulation, aggression, tolerance, and social evaluation. It also reviews research on how men’s and women’s emotional conduct is perceived and judged. It is intended as an evidentiary foundation for a reassessment of the emotional intelligence construct and of the cultural assumption that women possess greater emotional maturity than men by nature.

The review reaches seven principal findings.

1. Emotional perception. Women show a small to moderate average advantage on performance-based tests of emotional perception and emotional intelligence. The advantage is consistent across studies but the distributions of men and women overlap heavily.
2. Empathy. Sex differences in empathy are large on self-report questionnaires and small or absent on physiological and unobtrusive measures. Differences in empathic accuracy shrink or disappear when men are given incentives to be accurate, which points to motivation and self-presentation as major contributors.
3. Expression. Women are more outwardly expressive of most emotions, especially sadness, fear, and warmth. Expressive differences do not reliably correspond to differences in felt experience.
4. Regulation. The evidence on regulation is mixed and depends on the facet measured. Girls show a large advantage in effortful control during childhood. Among adults, differences in general self-control are small and inconsistent. Women score higher on negative emotionality and volatility; men report more expressive suppression; some trait emotional intelligence instruments show men scoring as high or higher on stress tolerance and impulse control.
5. Aggression and tolerance. Men commit more physical aggression in general populations. In heterosexual partner conflict, women use physical aggression at similar or slightly higher rates, while men inflict more injury. Several studies report that men maintain cooperative relationships with same-sex peers through conflict more readily than women do.
6. Evaluation and blame. Both sexes evaluate women more favorably than men on average. People more readily perceive women as victims and men as perpetrators, show less concern for harm to men, and assign men longer criminal sentences for comparable offenses.
7. Display rules. Penalties for emotional display run in both directions. Women’s anger is penalized more than men’s in professional and deliberative settings. Men’s distress, sadness, and vulnerability are received less sympathetically than women’s, and men face greater barriers to seeking help.

The evidence supports a specific and defensible conclusion. The popular belief that women are simply more emotionally intelligent rests on a narrow selection of facets, chiefly perception and expression, and neglects regulation, tolerance, and the social context in which emotional disclosure occurs. The evidence also documents real asymmetries in how men’s and women’s emotional conduct is evaluated and how blame is assigned. The evidence does not support the claim that either sex is emotionally superior overall, nor that women as a group are less accountable or less self-reflective than men. The findings call for reform of the emotional intelligence construct and of the evaluative standards applied to emotional conduct, with a single standard for both sexes.

1. Purpose and Scope

1.1 Purpose

Emotional intelligence has become a widely used framework in education, human resources, leadership development, counseling, and popular discussion of relationships. In popular usage the construct often carries an assumption that women are more emotionally intelligent than men and that men require remedial development to reach comparable maturity. This review examines whether the research literature supports that assumption, and what it does and does not show about sex differences in emotional competence and about the social evaluation of emotional conduct.

1.2 Scope

The review covers seven domains:

• performance and self-report measures of emotional intelligence;
• empathy and empathic accuracy;
• emotional expression;
• emotional regulation and self-control;
• aggression, conflict, and post-conflict relations;
• evaluative attitudes toward men and women, including perceptions of victimhood and blame;
• display rules and the social consequences of emotional expression, including help-seeking.

The review does not address the causes of sex differences beyond noting where research identifies situational, motivational, or self-presentational factors. Debates about developmental origins fall outside the scope of this paper.

1.3 Standards of Evidence

Priority is given to meta-analyses and large-scale reviews, followed by well-designed experimental studies published in peer-reviewed journals. Where findings are mixed, the review reports the mixture. Where findings run against the hypothesis that motivated the review, they are reported with equal weight. The aim is to establish a floor of claims that can be defended against informed criticism, not to assemble support for a predetermined position.

1.4 A Note on Effect Sizes

Most findings reported here are averages across large samples. A statistically reliable average difference between men and women is compatible with substantial overlap, such that many men score above many women and vice versa. Hyde’s (2005) review of psychological meta-analyses found that most sex differences fall in the small or near-zero range. Findings in this paper should be read accordingly. No average difference licenses a conclusion about any individual man or woman.

2. Emotional Intelligence Measures

2.1 Performance-Based Measures

The principal performance-based measure is the Mayer–Salovey–Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT), which assesses four branches: perceiving emotions, using emotions to facilitate thought, understanding emotions, and managing emotions (Mayer et al., 2003). In a meta-analysis of the emotional intelligence literature, Joseph and Newman (2010) found that women outscore men on performance-based measures by a moderate margin.

Two qualifications apply. First, the management branch assesses respondents’ judgments of the effectiveness of strategies in hypothetical situations. It measures knowledge about regulation, not regulation performed under real emotional demand (Mayer et al., 2008).[1] Second, the MSCEIT has relied on consensus and expert scoring keys. Roberts et al. (2001) raised concerns that consensus keys can embed prevailing social norms in the definition of correct answers. A sex difference on a consensus-scored item may therefore reflect, in part, conformity to normative expectations rather than ability alone.

2.2 Self-Report Measures

Self-report or trait measures ask respondents to describe their own emotional tendencies. Joseph and Newman (2010) found that sex differences on these measures are small. Petrides and Furnham (2000) found that differences on trait emotional intelligence were modest and facet-specific, with women scoring higher on emotional perception and social skills. In the same study, men estimated their own emotional intelligence more highly than women estimated theirs.

The normative data for the Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-i) reported a split pattern: women scored higher on interpersonal scales such as empathy and social responsibility, while men scored as high or higher on intrapersonal and stress-management scales, including stress tolerance and impulse control (Bar-On, 1997).[2]

2.3 Emotional Perception

Performance on nonverbal emotion recognition tasks has been studied for decades. Hall’s (1978) review found a reliable female advantage in decoding nonverbal cues. A later meta-analysis by Thompson and Voyer (2014) confirmed a female advantage in recognizing nonverbal displays of emotion, and found it to be small in magnitude.

2.4 Summary

Women hold a reliable but small-to-moderate average advantage on performance measures, concentrated in emotional perception and understanding. On self-report measures, differences are small and divide by facet: women report higher interpersonal sensitivity, while men report equal or higher stress tolerance and impulse control on at least one major instrument. Performance measures assess regulation knowledge, not regulation behavior.

3. Empathy and Empathic Accuracy

3.1 Self-Report Versus Physiological Measures

In their review of sex differences in empathy, Eisenberg and Lennon (1983) found that differences favoring women were large on self-report questionnaires, where the purpose of measurement was evident, and small or absent on physiological and unobtrusive measures. They concluded that self-presentation and conformity to sex-role expectations likely contributed to the questionnaire differences.

3.2 Empathic Accuracy and Motivation

Empathic accuracy refers to correctly inferring the thoughts and feelings of another person. Ickes et al. (2000) reviewed research in which a female advantage appeared mainly when the task made gender-role expectations salient, and argued that the difference reflected motivation more than ability. Klein and Hodges (2001) tested this account by paying participants for accurate inferences. Under payment, the sex difference disappeared.

3.3 Summary

The evidence indicates that a portion of the commonly reported female advantage in empathy reflects self-description and motivation rather than underlying capacity. When men are motivated to be accurate by incentives unrelated to gender identity, their empathic accuracy matches women’s. This does not mean there are no differences in empathic disposition, but it does mean that questionnaire-based claims of large differences overstate the case.

4. Emotional Expression

4.1 Adults

Kring and Gordon (1998) found that women were more facially expressive than men in response to emotional films, but did not differ from men in self-reported emotional experience. Physiological responses did not simply mirror the expressive differences. Brody and Hall (2008) reviewed evidence that women express most emotions more often and more intensely, with the exception of anger and contempt in some contexts, and emphasized that differences depend strongly on social context.

4.2 Children

A meta-analysis by Chaplin and Aldao (2013) found small sex differences in children’s emotional expression: girls expressed more positive emotions and more internalizing emotions such as sadness and anxiety, while boys expressed more externalizing emotions such as anger. The differences were small overall and varied with age and context.

4.3 Stereotypes of Emotion

Plant et al. (2000) found that people stereotype most emotions as more characteristic of women, with the exceptions of anger and pride, which are stereotyped as more characteristic of men. Shields (2002) argued that emotion is closely tied to cultural ideas of gender, and that the meaning attached to an emotional display depends heavily on the sex of the person displaying it.

4.4 Summary

Women are more outwardly expressive of most emotions. Expressive differences do not establish differences in depth or intensity of felt emotion. Expression is stereotyped by sex, which shapes how displays by men and women are interpreted.

5. Emotional Regulation and Self-Control

5.1 Childhood

The strongest regulation finding favors girls. In a meta-analysis of temperament research, Else-Quest et al. (2006) found that girls scored substantially higher than boys on effortful control, including inhibitory control and attention focusing. This is one of the larger sex differences in the temperament literature and must be weighed in any claim about men’s superior regulation.

5.2 Adulthood

Among adults, the picture is less clear. In a meta-analysis of impulsivity, Cross et al. (2011) found that men scored higher on sensation seeking and women scored higher on punishment sensitivity, but sex differences on measures of effortful control and general self-control were small or inconsistent. Tangney et al. (2004) found that high trait self-control predicted good adjustment and interpersonal success across individuals; that research establishes the value of self-control but does not establish a large sex difference in it.

5.3 Negative Emotionality

Large cross-cultural personality studies have found that women score higher than men on neuroticism (Costa et al., 2001). Weisberg et al. (2011) examined narrower aspects of personality and found that women scored higher on both volatility and withdrawal, the two aspects of neuroticism, as well as on compassion and politeness. Higher volatility refers to a greater tendency toward emotional lability and irritability. This finding is relevant to regulation, since it describes the intensity of the emotional load to be regulated as well as the tendency to show it.

5.4 Regulation Strategies

Gross and John (2003) found that men reported greater habitual use of expressive suppression than women did. Habitual suppression was associated with lower positive emotion, poorer interpersonal functioning, and lower well-being; habitual reappraisal was associated with the reverse. Butler et al. (2003) found that suppression during conversation disrupted communication and raised partners’ blood pressure.

Nolen-Hoeksema (2012) reviewed evidence that women engage in rumination more than men, a strategy associated with depression and anxiety, while men more often use strategies such as alcohol and substance use, associated with other forms of distress. Tamres et al. (2002) found in a meta-analysis that women reported using most coping strategies more than men, especially seeking emotional support and rumination.

5.5 Summary

The evidence does not support a general claim that men regulate emotion better than women. Girls show a clear advantage in childhood effortful control. Adult differences in general self-control are small. Women report higher negative emotionality and volatility, which means a greater regulatory load in some respects, and also more emotional support-seeking. Men report more suppression, a strategy with documented costs in close relationships. Each sex shows characteristic regulatory strengths and vulnerabilities. A construct that credits only expression would miss men’s strengths, and a construct that credits only restraint would miss women’s.

6. Aggression, Conflict, and Tolerance

6.1 General Aggression

Archer’s (2004) meta-analysis of real-world aggression found that men engage in more physical aggression than women across ages and cultures, with smaller differences for verbal aggression. Card et al. (2008) found that boys engaged in more direct aggression than girls in childhood and adolescence, while sex differences in indirect or relational aggression were trivial.

6.2 Partner Conflict

Archer’s (2000) meta-analysis of aggression between heterosexual partners found that women were slightly more likely than men to use physical aggression and to use it more frequently, while men were more likely to inflict injury. The finding indicates that in intimate conflict, aggressive acts are not confined to one sex, though harmful consequences are more often caused by men.[3]

6.3 Post-Conflict Relations and Tolerance

Benenson et al. (2009) reported evidence that men show greater tolerance of same-sex peers than women do, maintaining relationships with same-sex individuals across conflict and difference more readily. Benenson and Wrangham (2016) examined behavior after competitive sports matches across several sports and countries and found that male athletes engaged in more friendly post-match contact with opponents than female athletes did.

On the other hand, women score higher on the agreeableness aspects of compassion and politeness (Weisberg et al., 2011), indicating that women on average describe themselves as kinder and more courteous toward others.

6.4 Summary

Men commit more physical aggression in general and more injurious partner violence. Women initiate partner aggression at similar or slightly higher rates. Men appear to maintain cooperative relations with same-sex rivals across conflict more readily, while women describe themselves as more compassionate and polite. The evidence supports the claim that men’s tolerance and post-conflict reconciliation are real social competencies that emotional intelligence measures do not capture. It does not support a general claim that men are more tolerant than women in all respects.

7. Evaluative Attitudes Toward Men and Women

7.1 The “Women Are Wonderful” Effect

Eagly and Mladinic (1989, 1994) found that both men and women evaluated women more favorably than men on average, ascribing more positive traits to women. The pattern has been described as the “women are wonderful” effect.

7.2 Automatic In-Group Preference

Rudman and Goodwin (2004) found that women showed strong automatic preference for women, while men did not show a corresponding automatic preference for men. The authors noted that women’s in-group bias was considerably stronger than men’s.

7.3 Summary

The evidence supports the claim that the average evaluative climate is more favorable toward women than toward men, and that men lack the automatic in-group sympathy that women show toward women. These findings concern average attitudes, not universal contempt, and they coexist with documented disadvantages women face in other domains, such as status conferral for anger (Section 9).

8. Moral Typecasting, Harm Sensitivity, and Blame

8.1 Moral Typecasting

Gray and Wegner (2009) proposed that people perceive others in moral situations either as agents, who perform good or harmful acts, or as patients, who receive them, and that the two perceptions resist combination. Reynolds et al. (2020) found that this typecasting is gendered. Across multiple studies, people more readily perceived women as victims and men as perpetrators, expressed more concern for female than male victims, and judged harmful acts more harshly when the victim was a woman.

8.2 Harm Sensitivity

FeldmanHall et al. (2016) found that people were more willing to sacrifice men than women in moral dilemmas involving harm, and more reluctant to inflict harm on women, a pattern they called “moral chivalry.”

8.3 Criminal Sentencing

In an analysis of federal criminal cases in the United States, Starr (2015) found that men received substantially longer sentences than women after controlling for offense conduct, criminal history, and other relevant variables, with the gap much larger than comparable racial disparities.

8.4 Summary

The evidence supports the claim that men’s harm is judged as less concerning than women’s, that men are more readily perceived as perpetrators, and that in at least one major system of formal accountability men receive harsher sanctions than women for comparable conduct. These findings bear directly on the willingness of men to disclose distress or report harm, since such disclosures meet a less sympathetic reception.

9. Display Rules and Their Consequences

9.1 Penalties for Women’s Anger

Brescoll and Uhlmann (2008) found that women who expressed anger in professional settings were accorded lower status and competence than men expressing the same anger, and their anger was more often attributed to internal character. Salerno and Peter-Hagene (2015) found in a group-deliberation study that anger expression increased men’s influence but decreased women’s. Hess et al. (2005) found that anger displays are associated with perceptions of dominance and that expectations about who may show anger differ by sex.

9.2 Penalties for Men’s Vulnerability

Men’s displays of sadness, fear, and need run against stereotyped expectations (Plant et al., 2000). Addis and Mahalik (2003) reviewed evidence that men seek professional help less often than women for a wide range of problems, and argued that help-seeking depends heavily on context, including whether a problem is seen as normative, whether seeking help threatens a man’s standing, and whether reciprocity is possible. Vogel et al. (2007) identified stigma, fear of emotional expression, and anticipated risks of disclosure as factors inhibiting counseling use.

9.3 Summary

Display-rule penalties apply to both sexes but target different emotions. Women are penalized more for anger in status-relevant settings. Men are penalized more for vulnerability and help-seeking. The second pattern is relevant to claims that men’s emotional guardedness reflects a deficit, since guardedness may also reflect accurate anticipation of how disclosure will be received.

10. Synthesis

10.1 What the Evidence Supports

Claim	Status	Principal sources
Women score higher on performance measures of emotional perception and EI	Supported; small to moderate effect	Joseph & Newman (2010); Thompson & Voyer (2014)
Self-reported empathy differences overstate actual capacity differences	Supported	Eisenberg & Lennon (1983); Klein & Hodges (2001)
Women are more outwardly expressive of most emotions	Supported	Kring & Gordon (1998); Brody & Hall (2008)
Men score as high or higher on some trait facets of stress tolerance and impulse control	Supported for at least one major instrument	Bar-On (1997)
Men maintain same-sex relations across conflict more readily	Supported by several studies	Benenson et al. (2009); Benenson & Wrangham (2016)
The evaluative climate is more favorable toward women	Supported	Eagly & Mladinic (1989, 1994); Rudman & Goodwin (2004)
Men’s harm receives less concern and men are more readily cast as perpetrators	Supported	Reynolds et al. (2020); FeldmanHall et al. (2016)
Men receive harsher formal sanctions for comparable offenses	Supported for U.S. federal sentencing	Starr (2015)
Men face greater barriers to disclosure and help-seeking	Supported	Addis & Mahalik (2003); Vogel et al. (2007)
Popular EI discourse overweights perception and expression relative to regulation	Supported by construct analysis	Mayer et al. (2008); Roberts et al. (2001)

10.2 What the Evidence Does Not Support

Claim	Status	Contrary or limiting evidence
Men regulate emotion better than women in general	Not supported	Else-Quest et al. (2006); Cross et al. (2011)
Women are more emotionally intelligent in general	Not supported	Facet-specific findings; Hyde (2005)
Men are more tolerant than women in all respects	Not supported	Weisberg et al. (2011)
Women as a group evade accountability or lack self-reflection	Not supported by any reviewed study	Evaluative asymmetries concern how others judge, not women’s character
Men’s suppression is costless	Not supported	Gross & John (2003); Butler et al. (2003)
Display-rule penalties fall only on men	Not supported	Brescoll & Uhlmann (2008); Salerno & Peter-Hagene (2015)

10.3 What Remains Unknown

Several questions central to a reassessment of emotional intelligence have not been studied directly:

• Whether men and women differ in regulation performed under real provocation in naturalistic settings, as opposed to laboratory or self-report measures.
• Whether men’s habitual suppression is general or selective by audience, and whether selective restraint carries the same costs as general suppression.
• Whether the accuracy of judgments about disclosure risk differs by sex, and whether men’s guardedness is calibrated to the actual risk in their environment.
• Whether the capacity to absorb another person’s distress without escalation differs by sex.
• Whether consensus-scored emotional intelligence items show differential item functioning by sex that tracks display-rule expectations.

11. Implications

11.1 For Measurement

The findings indicate that emotional intelligence measures, as currently constituted, weight emotional perception and articulation heavily and assess regulation largely through knowledge rather than performance. A reformed construct would add:

• performance measures of regulation under provocation and load;
• informant and behavioral measures of distress absorption and conflict de-escalation;
• measures of tolerance and post-conflict reconciliation;
• measures of disclosure calibration, assessing whether disclosure matches the trustworthiness of the audience;
• routine testing of items for sex-differential functioning, with independent behavioral validation of items that show it.

11.2 For Practice

In counseling, education, and organizational settings, the findings caution against treating men’s emotional guardedness as a presumptive deficit. Guardedness may reflect difficulty identifying emotions, a pattern Levant (1992) and Levant et al. (2009) documented in a minority of men. It may also reflect accurate perception of a disclosure environment that receives men’s vulnerability less sympathetically. Distinguishing the two requires attention to context rather than a uniform prescription to disclose.

Interventions intended to increase men’s disclosure are unlikely to succeed if the reception of that disclosure does not change. Addis and Mahalik (2003) argued that help-seeking increases when settings reduce threats to standing and permit reciprocity. The same principle applies to emotional disclosure in families, workplaces, and congregations.

11.3 For Evaluative Standards

The findings on moral typecasting, harm sensitivity, and sentencing document asymmetries in how blame and sympathy are assigned. The findings on display rules document asymmetric penalties for different emotions. Taken together, they support adopting a reciprocity standard: any expectation of emotional restraint, accountability, or care applied to one sex should be applied equally to the other. This principle is consistent with the symmetrical standards of conduct found in Scripture, which call men and women alike to sobriety, temperance, and freedom from false accusation (Titus 2:2–6), and which hold each person accountable for his or her own conduct (Ezekiel 18:20).

12. Limitations

This review is a narrative synthesis, not a systematic meta-analysis, and the selection of studies reflects the domains judged most relevant to the emotional intelligence construct. Most reviewed research was conducted in Western, educated, industrialized populations, and cross-cultural generalization is limited except where noted. Several key findings, particularly those concerning post-conflict tolerance, rest on a small number of studies. The EQ-i facet findings are drawn from instrument norming data rather than independent replication. Findings on evaluative attitudes and sentencing come from distinct methodologies and should not be combined into a single measure of social bias. Finally, the review addresses average differences; it makes no claims about any individual.

13. Conclusion

The research literature does not support the popular belief that women are more emotionally intelligent than men in any general sense. Women hold a modest average advantage in emotional perception and are more outwardly expressive. Men hold competitive or higher scores on some facets of stress tolerance and impulse control, and appear to maintain cooperative relations across conflict more readily. Each sex shows characteristic regulatory strengths and vulnerabilities. The emotional intelligence construct, as commonly measured and discussed, credits the strengths associated with perception and expression more than those associated with restraint and tolerance.

The literature also documents asymmetries in social evaluation. Women are evaluated more favorably on average. Men are more readily cast as perpetrators, their harm draws less concern, and they face harsher formal sanctions and greater barriers to disclosure and help-seeking. Women face their own penalties for anger in status-relevant settings. These findings justify a reassessment of the emotional intelligence construct and of the standards applied to emotional conduct, with a single, reciprocal standard for both sexes and with measurement that captures regulation as it is actually performed.

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Notes

1. Mayer and colleagues hold that emotional intelligence is an ability and should be measured by performance rather than self-report (Mayer et al., 2008). Within that framework, the management branch is assessed by asking respondents to rate the effectiveness of strategies in described situations. The resulting score indicates what a respondent knows about effective management, which may diverge from how the respondent manages emotion when personally provoked.
2. The EQ-i facet pattern is drawn from the instrument’s normative data. It should be treated as indicative rather than conclusive until confirmed by independent studies using the current version of the instrument.
3. Archer (2000) noted that findings differ by sample type. Community samples tend to show sex parity or slight female predominance in the use of physical aggression, while samples drawn from shelters, hospitals, and police records show strong male predominance, reflecting the greater severity of injuries caused by men. Both patterns must be reported together to avoid misrepresentation.
4. The Benenson and Wrangham (2016) study included athletes from multiple countries and sports, including tennis, table tennis, badminton, and boxing. The study is cited here solely for its findings on human post-conflict behavior.
5. Starr’s (2015) analysis concerned U.S. federal criminal cases. Patterns in state systems and in other countries may differ and have not been reviewed here.
6. Scripture references are to the King James Version.

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