Female Competition: Causes, Constraints, Content, And Contexts‪.‬

In this article I offer an interpretation of female competition from an evolutionary perspective. First, it is useful to briefly review prior social science research (not informed by such a perspective) to indicate the richness of the qualitative observations and the alternative positions taken to their interpretation. Despite a recent surge of popular journalistic books (e.g., Fillion, 1997; Simmons, 2002; Tanenbaum, 2002), academic interest in competition among women was almost nonexistent until the 1980s. Initial research (Gilligan, 1982; Goodwin, 1980; Lever, 1976) found that girls tended to avoid competition in favour of tactics that diffuse conflict and preserve interpersonal harmony. When competition is made inevitable, girls used apologies and excuses to mitigate their behaviour (Hughes, 1988) or "double voicing" to promote their own cases while simultaneously taking into account the positions of their rivals, thereby preserving their relationships (Sheldon, 1992). This attenuation of competition in favour of sustaining positive relationships is thought to reflect socialisation into cultural norms against the overt expression of conflict among females (Miner & Longino, 1987; Tracy, 1991) and the greater centrality of intimate friendships to girls than to boys (Brown, 1998).