Emotional Intelligence: The Secret Power Women Weren’t Meant to Use
BY KENNA CASEY
We’ve all heard it: “you’re too sensitive,” “you take things too personally.” But what if those things told to women, telling them to tone down, were truly the things making them incredible leaders? Emotional intelligence (EI) has turned out to be one of the most powerful leadership traits out there, and studies show women usually score higher than men in 11/12 competencies.
As Harvard Business School puts it, emotional intelligence is the ability to understand and manage your emotions, as well as recognize and influence the emotions of those around you. Furthermore, research from careerbuilder.com shows that 71% of employers value EI more than IQ when evaluating candidates. So, if such an invaluable trait, why is it weaponized against women? Here’s the problem: when females use EI they often walk on a tightrope: be too warm and you're dismissed as sensitive, be too assertive and you’re labeled as cold. Show the same emotion as a man? He’s labeled as passionate while you’re too emotional. Women’s emotional strengths lead them to take non-promotable work as mindtools reveals that managers are 50% more likely to assign non-promotable work to women than men. Mindtools calls this the empathy trap. In essence, you do the emotional heavy lifting that keeps a team running, but the recognition goes elsewhere. Sound familiar?
That’s the trap: as women we’ve been praised for our “warmth” while it’s used to keep us in place. So how do we break this cycle? The answer isn’t to suppress empathy, it's to stop allowing it to be exploited. We need to refuse to apologize for what makes us effective, and use our strengths strategically. Women lead with EI on a daily basis, yet those same traits companies claim to value get mislabeled as helping instead of leading. To fix that, we have to start by advocating for ourselves with the same energy we advocate for everyone else. Speaking up when team-glue expectations begin falling on you, shamelessly taking up space in conversations and claiming achievements loudly, reminding people of your value. Secondly, we must redefine what assertiveness looks like. The tightrope women walk on only exists because leadership has been defined by men for centuries. Power doesn’t have to be defined by hardness. Using EI as power means reading people, but also steering them. It means using our awareness to make hard calls and lead instead of feeling out of place and lacking confidence. To fix the system women don’t need to be quieter or smaller, we, instead, need to refuse to downplay what we do and ensure that our work earns us power.
