Women behave more competitively when presented with competitive scenarios

What is it about?

This paper assesses if women are more intrasexually competitive when presented with competitive situations, how much more competitive women are in these situations, and if there are factors that influence this relationship. I found that women do respond more competitively to competitive situations and none of the factors that I assessed changed this relationship.

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Why is it important?

There has been a growing interest in intrasexual (same-sex) competition as an area of psychological research. However, most of this interest has been on men's intrasexual competition, as sexual selection theory often presents women as "coy choosers" and men as "intrasexually competitive". Recently, researchers have realized that this is not the whole story and have begun investigating the ways in which women compete intrasexually. The results of this study summarize some of the literature on women's intrasexual competition to assess how large of an effect there is of competitive situations on women's behavior.