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.
Swedish companies are leaking profitability through a hidden systemic flaw: women’s emotional labor functions as the emotional infrastructure of businesses – without mandate, recognition, or compensation. This is not a soft issue. It is a business risk.
In many organizations, women perform the majority of the emotional work that holds together culture, relationships, and teams. They listen, mediate, regulate energy, stabilize conflicts, and create psychological safety.
It is advanced leadership – yet it sits outside role descriptions and budgets.
This work is not recognized, not distributed, not defined as competence, and not visible in the decision-making data leaders actually use. The result is that companies build their culture on an informal emotional support function that is not sustainable and is far too rarely led by those with the time or mandate.
When relational work is concentrated within a single group – most often women – a structural vulnerability emerges. It is the same mechanism as any other “single point of failure” in a complex system.
If these individuals become 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 more friction in collaboration.
Companies measure productivity – but not the emotional reinforcement mesh that makes productivity possible.
The intelligence women are expected to carry is relational, intuitive, systemic, and emotionally regulating. It creates safety, resilience, and the human capacity to navigate complexity. These are not “soft values” – they are critical infrastructure.
And when that infrastructure is invisible, unpaid, and unevenly distributed, a profitability leak emerges that few companies even reflect on having.
The solution is to professionalize what is already carrying the load:
Recognize relational intelligence as a business-critical leadership competence.
It should not be a gender role but part of the organization’s capability and talent model.
Distribute emotional labor fairly.
It should sit where the mandate exists, not automatically with women. And when women are promoted, do so because they carry – and have developed – relational and female intelligence.
Build structures that sustain culture.
Culture stewardship, nervous system literacy, and difficult conversations are trainable skills, not individual acts of goodwill.
When companies stop leaking profitability through unpaid emotional labor, capacity increases, decisions improve, 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 who 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 Rekr & Led utv AB
Stockholm, 14 February 2026
Future issues are shared selectively.
www.kvinnokompetensen/brief