Gender, Competition, and Patriarchy

It appears that most psychologists believe that women are less competitively inclined than are men, even when women are equally capable of successfully performing tasks.

I have seen arguments both from a nurture/socialization perspective (women are socialized to be cooperative and men are socialized to be competitive) and a nature/biological perspective (men and women are inherently different) that purport to explain this disparity.

An interesting experiment briefly described here runs counter to a purely biological argument. It refutes the idea that in any given society, men are more competitive on average than are women by finding one society in which this is not the case. What is this culture? A matrilineal and matrilocal one. (The researchers note that they originally attempted to find a matriarchal culture, but found that "the sociological literature is almost unanimous in the conclusion that truly matriarchal societies no longer exist.")

The abstract reads:

"This study uses a controlled experiment to explore whether there are gender differences in selecting into competitive environments across two distinct societies: the Maasai in Tanzania and the Khasi in India. One unique aspect of these societies is that the Maasai represent a textbook example of a patriarchal society whereas the Khasi are matrilineal. Similar to the extant evidence drawn from experiments executed in Western cultures, Maasai men opt to compete at roughly twice the rate as Maasai women. Interestingly, this result is reversed amongst the Khasi, where women choose the competitive environment more often than Khasi men, and even choose to compete weakly more often than Maasai men. We view these results as potentially providing insights into the underpinnings of the factors hypothesized to be determinants of the observed gender differences in selecting into competitive environments."

The researchers take a tentative position that gene-culture co-evolution (interaction between biology and culture) is at work:

"This process is subtly different from that outlined under the nurture hypothesis. If competitiveness has evolved (biologically or socially) over time, it is not necessary that matriliny and matrilocal marriage cause families to teach their daughters to be competitive. Rather, the prevalence of competitiveness in the society could increase over time due to the superior fitness of this personality trait within this institutional environment, whether it is learned through imitation or inherited genetically. In addition, this view suggests that current cultural features might be less important than past cultural features in explaining current preferences; evolution of socially learned behavior is not instantaneous."

They conclude:

"Viewed through the lens of extant models, our results might have import within the policy community. For example, policymakers often are searching for efficient means to reduce the gender gap [in wages and in prospects for advancement in the workplace]. If the difference in reaction to competition is based primarily on nature, then some might advocate, for example, reducing the competitiveness of the education system and labor markets in order to provide women with more chances to succeed. If the difference is based on nurture, or an interaction between nature and nurture, on the other hand, the public policy might be targeting the socialization and education at early ages as well as later in life to eliminate this asymmetric treatment of men and women with respect to competitiveness. Our study suggests that there might be some value in this second avenue. We trust that future research will refine this insight and more thoroughly explore the sources of gender preference differences."

Of course, how one would actually change the socialization process is the big question. It's not enough to create good environments for girls (e.g. single-sex schools with staff and programs that bolster their motivation to compete), though that may show some short-term effects. (I believe the literature shows that girls are more competitive with other girls than with boys.) How are we going to socialize boys to value female competitiveness? How does any real change occur when the underlying structure of our world is patriarchal?