You probably can’t judge your own emotional intelligence from how you feel about it
A meta-analysis in Emotion by Hausfeld, Hampel, Bach and Menges combines 1,279 papers covering 609,278 people in 76 countries. On average, women are better at recognising and understanding emotions and at managing other people’s emotions; men score slightly higher at regulating their own. Women’s advantage is large on performance-based tests and almost disappears on self-reports, so how people rate themselves is a poor guide to their actual ability.
Emotional intelligence is several separate skills, not one trait, and self-assessment is a weak way to find the weak one: use a performance-based test or specific colleague feedback. It is also a warning for skills-based models that rely on self-rating, and a prompt to check whether emotional labour is being handed out by stereotype rather than skill.
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