Emotional intelligence among women: a systematic review

Abstract

Background: Emotional intelligence (EI) involves a combination of competencies which allow a person to be aware of, to understand the emotions of others and to use this knowledge to foster their and others success. Objective: This study aims to provide a systematic review of published researches on the emotional intelligence among women. Methodology: To achieve this aims, papers were selected in January 2019 with search terms “Emotional intelligence” “Emotional intelligence among women” and “Gender in emotional intelligence” from five databases: Scopus, PsycINFO, Springer, Google Scholar, and ScienceDirect. 26 research based article were evaluated published from 2010 to 2018. Results: The analysis the published articles considered two basic central themes in the study of emotional intelligence among women: level of women emotional intelligence and emotional intelligence attributes. The study revealed the level of emotional intelligence is low, meaning that women are less emotionally intelligent. Similarly, the study identified ten (10) emotional intelligence attributes among women which include empathy, social responsibility, stress tolerance, emotional self-awareness, emotional expression, independence, flexibility, problem solving, impulse control, interpersonal relationships and optimism. Conclusions: Considering the results of various studies analysed in this review clearly, identified methodological weakness in emotional intelligence study such as sample size most of the studies but only few studies recognised and report the limitation. Similarly, none of these studies investigate the causes of this low state of emotional intelligence among women. The findings add to the growing empirical evidence regarding emotional intelligence. Future researches should look into some of these limitation and address sample size challenges, for batter generalization of research findings, sample size should always be considered. Future work should as well examine in more detail the role of cognitive or other factors in determining the emotional intelligence among women.