It’s been a longstanding view that women are fiercely competitive with each other. This view has been echoed by many women around the world, who have noticed this attribute either in themselves or in other women they’ve spent any length of time with.
Is there any truth to this?
A number of studies have been conducted in the area of female competitiveness. Tracy Vaillancourt did a literature review in 2013, where she found that women displayed indirect aggression towards other women. The key elements of such behavior included making themselves look good and putting their rivals or competitors down.
Why does this happen?
Multiple theories have been proposed on why women are competitive with each other. Two areas, evolutionary psychology and feminist psychology, seem to have revelatory answers, as reported by Emily Gordon in The New York Times.
Evolutionary psychology pins this aggression on women’s need to protect themselves — essentially their wombs, and keep other women at bay. Feminist psychology helps push this understanding further by suggesting that, since a woman prides on being prized by men, she competes with this prize with other women, and quite fiercely at that.
How does this manifest?
This need to compete comes from multiple places. It comes from feelings of insecurity. In these times, when the slim figure is shown as the prized female attribute — largely due to depiction in the media, it’s easy to feel threatened by the beauty and talent of other women who more closely match this prized attribute.
Often it’s also because you don’t feel like you’re good enough. This results in competition with others, as you try to show yourself that you’re good enough in some way. The need to be accepted is a factor too, because after winning against other women, you hope to achieve the approval that you’ve sought all your life.
Emily Gordon, the author of the New York Times story on female competitiveness and the book, Super You: Release Your Inner Superhero, proposes another interesting theory.
“We aren’t competing with other women, ultimately, but with ourselves — with how we think of ourselves. For many of us, we look at other women and see, instead, a version of ourselves that is better, prettier, smarter, something more. We don’t see the other woman at all.”
So in the end, it may well be just a competition with yourself, and not really with other women, as you try your hardest to imbibe the qualities of women who you identify as smarter and prettier than you are. One can see how this quest could last a lifetime.