Associate Professor Kenneth L. Leonard

Q: I'll get right to the point. Are women as competitive as men in general?

A: The simple answer, before our study, was no.

Most studies found that when given a choice between being rewarded on a competitive or non-competitive basis, most women choose non-competition, and most men choose competition.

However, we [including coauthors Uri Gneezy at UC San Diego and John List and U of Chicago] searched for a culture that was less likely to teach girls that it was wrong to compete and found that women in this culture choose to compete more than men in that culture and at about the same rate as men in other cultures.

Thus, a preference for competition cannot be something that all women are born with.

Q: Is this culture matriarchal--are women in charge?

A: No. We found little evidence that there is any truly matriarchal culture in the world today. We compared two societies in our study. One is clearly patriarchal; men own all property, and women have so little control over their own lives that they have to ask permission to leave the household. The other is matrilineal and practices matrilocal marriage. Matriliny means that most property passes from mothers to daughters and matrilocal marriage means that when a couple is married, the husband leaves his parents’ house to join his wife's household.

Q: Where were the groups that you studied?

A: We studied the Maasai in Tanzania and the Khasi in India. The Maasai are very patriarchal.

The Khasi, on the other hand, is a culture in which women have significantly more power over important decisions in their households.

Q: What did you do to measure preferences for competition?

A: We picked a task that was unfamiliar and equally difficult for men and women and offered to pay them for each success out of 10 tries, or to pay them triple that amount for each success but only if they were better than another person we had paired with them. They did not know who they were paired with, and in particular, they did not know if the other person was male or female.

Q: And what did you find?

A: Among the Maasai, 26% of women choose to compete and 50% of men choose to compete. Among the Khasi, 54% of women choose to compete and 39% of men choose to compete.

Q: Which means that ...

A: Khasi women have a different view of competition than Maasai women. Whereas the competitive Maasai woman is different from her peers, the competitive Khasi woman is average.

The most important result of our study is to prove that these women exist and their existence tells us we cannot make generalizations about women such as saying "women avoid competition."

Q: So does this mean that in societies where women inherit property, they are more likely to be competitive?

A: The average female studying in an American university can own property; however, she would choose to avoid competition if she had a choice.

Therefore, it cannot be that simple. In fact, the average woman in industrialized societies has preferences over competition that are similar to those of Maasai women, even though their lives are clearly very different.

Q: Why are the Khasi women different?

A: I think it is due to the fact that when Khasi women are raising their daughters, they are raising people with whom they will spend the rest of their lives. In most traditional societies, families raise their sons to stay at home and take over their legacy, and they raise their daughters to go and live with someone else. Once a woman realizes her daughter will be a part of her household forever, she teaches her different things. Add to this the fact that if a woman is successful in her life, then it is her daughter who will inherit the fruits of her success, not her son. Thus, the daughters of successful women are even more successful because they have learned their skills at their mother's side and have inherited her success. Competitiveness is important to being successful.

Q: Do serious researchers really believe that women are naturally not competitive?

A: There is a tradition of telling evolutionary stories about humankind’s early years as a hunter-gatherer society on the open savanna. In this tradition (evolutionary psychology), men maximized the probability of passing on their genes by out-competing other males for access to the most fertile females, whereas women maximized their evolutionary fitness by investing resources in their own children; they didn’t have to compete with other women for access to the best mates, they had to make sure their children lived. Keep this up for one million years, and women's brains become focused on non-competitive investment in self, and men's brains become focused on making sure they are better than other men. Skip ahead to modern times, and we are all walking around with brains that were designed far in the past, and that we cannot change. But if this were true, why are Khasi women's brains so different? The easiest answer is, they aren't different, they are just used in a different society.

Q: So evolution plays no role in your findings.

A: Well, some people think it is possible that preferences for competition can change in a short time period (a few thousand years, say), particularly if we take into account the fact that culture and evolution can interact with each other. The gene-culture co-evolution theory posits that when an institution benefits from particular genes and those genes also benefit from the same institution, then they can help each other to propagate in a population. Thus, matriliny and matrilocal marriage are good for women with the genes to be competitive, and the genes to be competitive do better when they exist in a matrilocal matrilineal society.

Read more about Dr. Leonard's research at Slate.com

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Last updated: 01/12/2011