Married women with children experience greater intrasexual competition than their male counterparts

Abstract

Human males are considered to be more competitive than females. However, females must also compete for resources necessary for their own and their offsprings’ survival. Since females use more indirect forms of competition than males, comparing observable forms of competition may be misleading. One critical driver of competition is resource asymmetry. Since competition occurs primarily within sex, reactions to resource asymmetry with same-sex peers should provide an important measure of competitiveness. We asked 596 married participants, 25–45 years of age with at least one child from three different countries to evaluate how same-sex individuals they know would react to a target individual who had a valuable resource that the same-sex individuals did not have. Half the participants evaluated reactions to same-sex targets, while the other half evaluated reactions to other-sex targets. Participants reported that women would react more negatively than men to resource asymmetry with same-sex targets, but not other-sex targets. These results suggest that women may be even more competitive than men in contexts when important resources related to reproductive success are at stake.