Shakesville: Competition: It's Not Just for Men Anymore

Competition: It's Not Just for Men Anymore

| posted by Jeff Fecke | Saturday, February 09, 2008

We all know that women are not competitive. Men are competitive, what with the testosterone and the testicles and the testosterone. Don't like that I mentioned testosterone twice? Well stuff it, you little girly girl, because testosterone is the fuel that fuels manly, manly competition, fighting and playing basketball and all the other stuff that makes men men, and women not men. And this is why men do better in business and win more Nobel prizes and always seem to win the presidency. It's not sexism -- I mean, who could think it was sexism? It's just that men are born competitive, while women simply want to have children and knit or tat or crochet or whatnot. It's inborn.

Except for the fact that it isn't:

But is an enhanced or decreased competitive drive a result of biology, or simply a culturally instilled trait? University of Chicago professors Uri Gneezy and John List and Columbia professor Kenneth Leonard performed a controlled experiment to test this question, and published their results in the new working paper, “Gender Differences in Competition: Evidence From a Matrilineal and a Patriarchal Society.”

Their method consisted of studying two distinct social groups: the Maasai in Tanzania, a “textbook example of a patriarchal society” in which women and children are considered “property,” and the Khasi in India, who are matrilineal, meaning female-dominated through inheritance laws, household authority, and social structures — though still distinct from “matriarchal,” since, as the authors point out, “the sociological literature is almost unanimous in the conclusion that truly matriarchal societies no longer exist.”

[...]

Their results are summarized as follows:

Our experimental results reveal interesting differences in competitiveness: in the patriarchal society women are less competitive than men, a result consistent with student data drawn from Western cultures. Yet, this result reverses in the matrilineal society, where we find that women are more competitive than men.

So it seems that, contrary to the gender essentialists, competition is not an inborn trait -- it is one that has its roots in the culture one lives in.

Of course, that's inconvenient for the anti-feminists, because it suggests that women's inability to reach full equality with men is not due to their not really wanting equality, but more due to their not being taught that it's okay to compete.

Title IX gets attacked for its effect on college athletics, with anti-feminists wrongly arguing that it's led to the elimination of some men's non-revenue sports. Of course, Title IX affects more than sports, and many feminists believe that the attack on Title IX and its influence on athletics is just a backdoor attempt to discredit the whole concept of equality in education.

That may be, but I don't think we should ignore the reason for the antipathy toward women's athletics. Women who compete as athletes learn just that -- to compete. They learn that it's okay to win, that it's okay to beat your opponent. Indeed, they learn that it's better than okay -- it's expected. That's a lesson that they can carry forward into life.

That's a lesson that used to be taught to boys only, while girls learned their role was to stand on the sidelines and cheer. No longer. And I think that scares the anti-feminist and gender essentialists. Because if women truly internalize the message that competing is good, then some woman may just out-compete you. And guess what? Women are internalizing that message. And the sexists are scared.

But is an enhanced or decreased competitive drive a result of biology, or simply a culturally instilled trait? University of Chicago professors Uri Gneezy and John List and Columbia professor Kenneth Leonard performed a controlled experiment to test this question, and published their results in the new working paper, “Gender Differences in Competition: Evidence From a Matrilineal and a Patriarchal Society.”

Their method consisted of studying two distinct social groups: the Maasai in Tanzania, a “textbook example of a patriarchal society” in which women and children are considered “property,” and the Khasi in India, who are matrilineal, meaning female-dominated through inheritance laws, household authority, and social structures — though still distinct from “matriarchal,” since, as the authors point out, “the sociological literature is almost unanimous in the conclusion that truly matriarchal societies no longer exist.”

[...]

Their results are summarized as follows:

Our experimental results reveal interesting differences in competitiveness: in the patriarchal society women are less competitive than men, a result consistent with student data drawn from Western cultures. Yet, this result reverses in the matrilineal society, where we find that women are more competitive than men.