Gender
Are Men Really More Competitive Than Women?
Sex differences: Men compete for women, women compete with women.
Updated August 13, 2025 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
Key points
- Men are generally seen as more competitive than women.
- This may be because women compete differently rather than less.
- Female competition is less likely to involve direct aggression, violence, and risk.
- New research suggests that some forms of competition are fiercer among women than among men.
“Intrasexual competition” is the term evolutionary psychologists use to describe competition between same-sex individuals for resources that increase reproductive success. Competitive strategies, however, vary consistently by sex. This is because the type of competition that favors males is different than that which benefits females.
According to sexual selection theory, this difference is motivated by the fact that males invest less in offspring than females but are at a higher risk of failing to reproduce altogether, particularly if they cannot demonstrate their status and dominance—both of which are attractive to females because they signal good genetics and an ability to provide for and protect the offspring. Men also face a lesser risk to their offspring (and reproductive potential) from engaging in physical confrontation. Thus, they have an incentive to favor direct, aggressive competition with other males.
Females, however, are more likely than males to reproduce and less likely to benefit from direct and dangerous forms of competition. As a result, male competitiveness is more visible, and males are thus seen (quite literally) as the more competitive sex. Research has shown, however, that under the surface, female competition rages on and may in certain contexts be fiercer than the male version.
Females do most of the offspring care, which requires securing consistent resources over a long period. The competition for these resources is therefore more frequent and the outcomes more significant for females than for males, whose interest in nurturing the offspring may be less urgent and persistent across time. (A woman must invest at least nine months in bringing her genetic offspring into the world; a man needs to invest a few minutes to that end.) For men, once they mate, the work is, in a sense, done. For women, it just begins.
Success and High Status
Evolutionary psychologists have found that mating success is enhanced for males by attaining higher status, while females benefit more from securing physical and social resources relevant to offspring care, such as healthy food, safe territories, and social support. Competition for these kinds of resources is more difficult to observe and study.
A recent, cleverly designed paper (2023) in the journal Nature set out to explore the stealthy world of indirect female intra-sexual competition. The authors recruited 596 participants, each of whom had to be both married and a parent (age range = 25-45), from three different countries. Participants were then asked to estimate the reactions of familiar same-sex individuals to over 20 different scenarios, each involving a different resource or positive characteristic that should be beneficial to females (food, safety) or males (status, strength). Participants were asked to indicate how most individuals of their own sex would react to either a same-sex or other-sex target in his or her 30s who was married and had children.
The researchers reasoned that same-sex individuals would have greater access to information about similarly aged people of their own sex and family status; they also reasoned that asking participants to estimate the reactions of a person who resembles them would eliminate the inherent biases known to undermine the validity of self-reports.
In the first study, the researchers analyzed reports of women’s and men’s reactions to same-sex targets. The second study, designed to control for potential sex biased responses, looked at women’s and men’s responses to opposite-sex targets.
Results showed that, overall, negative reactions to male resource advantages were higher in both men and women. In addition, significantly more female participants reported that women lacking a certain resource would feel negatively towards women who had that resource than male participants reported for men’s reactions towards a man possessing the resource.
Resource Asymmetry
This female tendency to report more negativity toward towards another same-sex individual held across multiple types of resources, including having a powerful position at work, being physically attractive, having helpful parents, being an influential member of the community, highly energetic, and in excellent health, living in a beautiful house, having a supportive spouse, being cool, calm, and collected, and serving high quality food.
The researchers noted the possibility that this difference may be explained by a general tendency among women toward negative evaluations. To examine this possibility, they looked at responses to opposite-sex targets, finding that significantly fewer female participants reported that women lacking a resource would feel negatively towards men with that resource. Overall, men were more negative than women. And while men were found to be more negative overall with opposite-sex targets, women were more negative with same-sex targets.
The authors summarize: “Results…show that participant-observers from three nations reported that based on their experiences, the women that they knew would respond more negatively to a same-sex target with a valuable characteristic than would men in the same situation.”
Women, in other words, tend to react more negatively than men to resource asymmetry (someone has something they want but don’t have) among their same-sex peers but not among other-sex peers. Women were found to be less negative than men towards other-sex peers. This means that women are neither more critical nor more sensitive than men to having less than others. Rather, they are sensitive to having less than other women.
These results suggest that, at least regarding 25–45-year-old married people with children, intra-sexual competition for resources is fiercer among women than among men. At the same time, women are less competitive with men than men are, which, the authors note, may explain in part why women are seen as less competitive than men.
Facebook image: Stanislaw Mikulski/Shutterstock
