Women's Competition and Aggression

Abstract

For female mammals, the rewards of aggression (such as increased rank) rarely outweigh the costs (injury or death). These costs exert a stronger effect on natural selection in females than males because offspring survival depends more strongly on maternal than paternal survival. To support the proposal that greater avoidance of aggression (and other risky activities) by women is mediated by a more reactive fear system, experimental, psychometric, hormonal, and neuroimaging studies are reviewed. Evidence suggests that monogamy, characteristic of the Homo line for over a million years, has resulted from sexual conflict (reproductive advantage accruing to women more than men) rather than sexual selection (within‐sex advantage to men who remained with a single mate). However, monogamy means that women as well as men must compete for the best mates. This competition is usually expressed through intersexual strategies in which women advertise those traits favored by men or through low‐risk indirect forms of within‐sex aggression (e.g., stigmatizing, ostracizing). Ecological factors including age, early menarche, operational sex ratio, extreme variance in male resources, and local cultural norms can decrease the threshold for women's use of direct physical aggression.

The Psychometric Evaluation of Human Life Histories

“…Given the laws of supply and demand, securing the favor of such men will involve assuming an appearance and demeanor that advertises willingness to engage in a short-term relationship. Conditions of poverty intensify women's intersexual and intrasexual competition for mates (Campbell, 2013(Campbell, , 2015.…”

Ingredients of ‘rituals’ and their cognitive underpinnings

“…Coalitional psychology allows human beings to entertain the notion of groups of any size as agents with beliefs, intentions and memories [29]. The evolutionary background (males engaging in group defence and inter-group conflict, women having to form alliances with unrelated females) would explain why men and women typically build different kinds of alliances (recruiting large groups for specific goals, and cultivating durable small-scale cooperation, respectively) [30,31].…”

An Experimental Examination of Demand-Side Preferences for Female and Male National Leaders

“…Broadly speaking, the explanations can be categorized as supply-and demand-side factors (Sweet-Cushman, 2016). Leading supply side factors, which affect the number of female candidates willing to run, include the lack of female role models at elite levels of professional life (e.g., Mansbridge, 1999;Campbell and Wolbrecht, 2006), differential political ambition (e.g., Fox and Lawless, 2004; see also Campbell, 1999), and family role commitments (e.g., Sapiro, 1982;Fulton et al, 2006), which include biological factors related to sexual reproduction (gestation and lactation; Brown, 1991;Low, 1992;Campbell, 1999Campbell, , 2013Benenson, 2013;Garfield et al, 2019). Key demand-side factors, which motivate followers' leadership preferences, include gender stereotyping (e.g., Huddy and Terkildsen, 1993;Kahn, 1996;Sanbonmatsu, 2002;Bauer, 2015), media treatment (e.g., Kahn, 1992Kahn, , 1996Devitt, 2002), and political recruitment (e.g., Niven, 2006;Fox and Lawless, 2010;Ashe and Stewart, 2012).…”