Females more competitive with each other than men are, study says

Women would be more envious than men of someone with resources that they did not have

WOMEN can be more competitive than men, a Harvard study has found.

Scientists discovered that women were more competitive with other women than men are with other men, upending decades of stereotypes.

“I must admit the findings stunned me,” study author Dr Joyce Benenson, a human evolutionary biologist at Harvard, told “The accepted wisdom both within evolutionary biology and psychology is that men are the more competitive sex.”

However, Dr Benenson also found the results only applied for same sex assessments. “Men are more competitive towards women than women are towards men,” she said.

The scientists have not yet found out why women are more competitive with each other than men are, but speculate it may be to do with raising children. “We do not know why this is, but theoretically it is likely that women with children need resources more than men with children do,” Dr Benenson explains. “Women generally are the primary caregivers around the world. Therefore, women would be more envious than men of someone with lots of resources that they did not have.

“The implications of the results for understanding human society are important in that they indicate that while women and men employ different competitive strategies and often pursue different goals, women may have an even greater motivation to compete with same-sex peers than men,” the researchers write in their study, published in Scientific Reports.

“Thus, it seems reasonable that women may be more envious than men of same-sex peers who are better able to care for their children.”

Dr Benenson conducted a study on 596 parents of both sexes who had children. Each person was shown a hypothetical individual who had a desirable asset that most people would want, such as a nice car or house, and asked to think about how that person would be judged by their real-life friends and family.

Half of the almost 600 people in the study were asked to think about how this person would be viewed by men in their life, and the other half asked to assess how women they knew would see the individual.

Research into the competitiveness between genders has been ongoing for decades and has often been cited as part of the gender pay gap issue.

A 2019 study found that women were less likely to try again after losing out in a competition, adding to previous findings that women are more likely than men to shy away from any form of competition.