Abstract—Robots are machines and as such do not have gender.However, many of the gender-related perceptions and expectations formed in human-human interactions may be inadvertentlyand unreasonably transferred to interactions with social robots.In this paper, we investigate how gender effects in people’sperception of robots and humans depend on their emotionalintelligence (EI), a crucial component of successful human socialinteractions. Our results show that participants perceive differentlevels of EI in robots just as they do in humans. Also, theirEI perceptions are affected by gender-related expectations bothwhen judging humans and when judging robots with minimalgender markers, such as voice or even just a name. We discussthe implications for human-robot interactions (HRI) and proposefurther explorations of EI for future HRI studies.Index Terms—emotional intelligence; gender; social robots;human robot interaction