When fertile, women seek status via prestige but not dominance

Abstract

Biological predictors of human dominance are hotly contested, with far-reaching implications for psychological sex differences and the placement of men and women in the social hierarchy. Most investigations have focused on dominance in men and testosterone, with diminished attention paid to dominance in women and other biological mechanisms. Investigating biological influences on other routes to status attainment popular among women—such as via prestige in addition to dominance—have also been neglected. Here, I examined whether status seeking via prestige and via dominance covaried with fertility probability in a citizen science project spanning 14 countries and 4 world regions. Across 4,179 observations, participants tracked their menstrual cycle characteristics, motivation for prestige and dominance, dominance contest outcomes, and three domains of self-esteem. Self-esteem is predicted by status within a group and helps individuals navigate social hierarchies. Bayesian mixed models controlling for menstruation indicated that the motivation to obtain status via prestige but not dominance peaked when conception was most likely, as did dominance contest losses and two self-esteem domains. Fertility appears to reorient female psychology toward prestige-based strategies to success, enhancing women’s desire for social capital through influence and admiration but not through fear, coercion, or intimidation. These insights fundamentally advance the understanding of the biological correlates of status seeking among women. They further suggest that fertility motivates not only mating competition but gaining rank and positive regard in social hierarchies.

Attractive Caregiving: Women’s Preference for Men that Care for Children and the Role of Nurturance Motivation and Menstrual Cycle Phase

“…As such, our inclusion of a single subjective questionnaire in a between-subject design as utilized in the current study is not recommended for future work and is thereby a limitation of this work. If hormonal assays are not feasible, a within-subject design with substantial power is recommended (e.g., Blake, 2022). Nonetheless, a potential lack of reliability in our measure does not easily explain the observed significant effect of the cycle phase.…”

The Multi-Capital Leadership Theory: An Integrative Framework for Human Leadership Diversity

“…Henrich, Cheng, and colleagues also outline mechanisms and predictions for dominance vs. prestige-style leadership, and subsequent empirical and theoretical work supports a distinction between dominance and prestige (e.g., Cheng et al, 2013;Henrich et al, 2015). Various versions and applications of the dominance-prestige model have proliferated across the social sciences (e.g., Van Vugt and Smith, 2019;Maner, 2017;Blake, 2022;Jiménez and Mesoudi, 2020;Koppl et al, 2021;Laustsen and Petersen, 2017), including within in management and business (e.g., Mayoral et al, 2024;Panchal and Gill, 2019;Bothner et al, 2022;Kakkar et al, 2020). In much of our work on leadership in diverse social and cultural contexts, results support the role of dominance and prestige in human leadership and status hierarchies.…”

Rebels with a cause? How norm violations shape dominance, prestige, and influence granting

“…Accordingly, we built part of our theorizing on the dominance/ prestige framework of social rank [32][33][34], and focused on dominance and prestige as possible mediators of the effects of (counter)normative behavior on influence granting. Although a considerable body of empirical work supports the notion that dominance and prestige are distinct routes to influence [e.g., 32,42,43,49,[107][108][109][110], it is worth noting that the distinction can become blurry in particular circumstances. For instance, traits or characteristics that are associated with dominance (e.g., physical strength) are sometimes also associated with expertise relevant for the survival of the group (e.g., conflict resolution; e.g., [108,110]).…”