The Female Intelligence Brief

THE FEMALE INTELLIGENCE BRIEF, ISSUE 1
On female intelligence

The Female Intelligence Brief is directed to women and men with female intelligence.
Female intelligence is not gender. It is capacity.

Many swedish companies are leaking profitability through a hidden systemic flaw: women’s emotional labor functions as organizations’ emotional infrastructure — without mandate, recognition or compensation.
This is not a soft issue.
It is a business risk.

In many organizations, women carry out the majority of the emotional work that holds culture, relationships and teams together. They listen, mediate, regulate energy, stabilize conflict and create psychological safety.
This is advanced leadership — yet it sits outside role descriptions and budgets.

This work is neither recognized nor distributed, neither defined as competence nor visible in the decision-making material leaders actually use. As a result, companies build their culture on an informal emotional support function that is unsustainable and too rarely carried by those with the time or mandate to lead it.

When relational work is concentrated in a single group — most often women — a structural vulnerability arises. It is the same mechanism as any other single point of failure in a complex system.
When these individuals are overloaded, decision-making, collaboration, customer relationships and innovation are affected.

This is not a gender equality issue.
It is a risk issue.

Organizations that unconsciously use emotional labor as a free resource experience higher employee turnover, lower creativity and increased friction in collaboration.
Companies measure productivity — but not the emotional reinforcement network that makes productivity possible.

The intelligence women are expected to carry is relational, intuitive, systemic and emotionally regulating. It creates stability, resilience and the human capacity to navigate complexity.
These are not “soft values” — they are critical infrastructure.
And when this infrastructure is invisible, unpaid and unevenly distributed, a profitability leakage occurs that few organizations are even aware of.

The solution is to professionalize what already carries the system:

Recognize relational intelligence as a business-critical leadership capability.
It must not be treated as a gender role, but as part of the organization’s operating and competence model.

Distribute emotional labor fairly.
It should sit where authority and mandate exist — not automatically with women. And when women are promoted, it should be because they carry — and have developed — relational and female intelligence.

Build structures that carry culture.
Cultural holding, nervous system literacy and difficult conversations are trainable skills — not individual acts of goodwill.

When organizations stop leaking profitability through unpaid emotional labor, capacity increases, decision quality improves and culture becomes more robust.

The leadership of the future requires emotional maturity.

Organizations that continue to rely on informal emotional carriers will lose both people and results.
Those that take responsibility for their emotional infrastructure will lead the next era of Swedish business.

This is not about fairness.
It is about profitability.

Anna Eliasson Lundquist
CEO KVINNOKOMPETENSEN, AB
Stockholm the 14 th of February, Stockholm, Sweden

Future issues are shared selectively.
www.kvinnokompetensen.com/brief