The purpose of this descriptive study was to examine the relationship between the emotional intelligence and gender of the principal, and teacher’s perceptions of the principal’s leadership effectiveness. The researcher administered the Emotional IQ Test (Jerabek, 1998) to 32 randomly selected principals. One hundred and sixty randomly selected teachers in the buildings of these administrators then took the observer form of the Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI) (Kouzes & Posner’s, 2001) to measure the leader’s perceived effectiveness. The leadership practices and gender were correlated to the two aspects of emotional intelligence to determine possible relationships. Findings show that principals with higher emotional intelligence are perceived to be more effective. Overall, women have a higher EQ than their male counterparts and the building level assignment had a significant impact on how principals were perceived.