In 2011, researchers at the University of British Columbia published a study with a provocative finding: women are more likely than men to engage in competitive behavior when the competition is framed as being for a group rather than for themselves. When the stakes were personal, women competed less. When the stakes were communal, they competed just as hard as men — sometimes harder.

The study suggested something interesting: women’s competitive drive is not absent. It is redirected by social expectation into channels that are more socially acceptable. The woman who fights relentlessly for her team is applauded. The woman who fights relentlessly for herself is a different kind of story.

The Myth of Female Non-Competition

The idea that women are naturally collaborative and men are naturally competitive is one of the most durable fictions in popular psychology. It is repeated in business books, parenting advice, pop evolutionary psychology, and workplace diversity training alike. The empirical foundation for it is considerably shakier than its cultural dominance suggests.

The economics research on competitive preferences — developed by Uri Gneezy and colleagues through a series of elegantly designed experiments beginning in the early 2000s — does find gender differences in competition entry: in Western societies, men are more likely to choose competitive payment schemes over guaranteed payment schemes, even when their performance would not benefit from the choice. This finding has been replicated.

But what the same research also found, in a pivotal comparative study by Gneezy, Leonard, and List (2009), is that these differences are not universal. Among the Khasi, a matrilineal group in northeastern India, women were more likely than men to choose competitive payment schemes. The gender gap in competitive preferences reversed entirely. This is a striking finding: if competitive preferences were biologically determined, they should not reverse based on the social structure of the society in which people grow up.

What the economic research actually shows is not that women don’t compete. It is that competition preferences are socially shaped, and the specific social shaping of Western societies discourages women from competitive entry in particular contexts — particularly contexts where competition is overt, positional, and individual.

How Female Competition Is Actually Policed

If women’s competitive behavior is comparable to men’s in magnitude, why does the stereotype of female non-competition persist? Partly because female competition is policed into less visible forms, so it becomes less legible as competition.

Research on competitive behavior in social contexts — as opposed to laboratory economics experiments — finds that women compete extensively, but through different mechanisms. Where men’s competitive strategies tend to be more direct and positional (direct confrontation, hierarchical assertion, public performance), women’s tend to be more indirect and social (reputation management, alliance formation, social exclusion of competitors). The sociological term for the latter is “relational aggression,” a term that accurately describes the behavior but has accumulated unfortunate connotations suggesting that indirect competition is somehow more vicious than direct competition.

What this means practically is that female competition is real, it happens, and the pretense that it doesn’t — enforced by the social expectation that women be cooperative and nurturing — simply ensures that it is never acknowledged, examined, or regulated by the norms that govern acknowledged competition. This is worse for women, not better.

The “Queen Bee” Problem and What It Actually Is

The “queen bee” phenomenon — the observation that women who reach positions of seniority in male-dominated organizations sometimes fail to support or mentor junior women — has been discussed for decades and is often cited as evidence of distinctive female competition pathology.

The social psychologist Belle Derks has done the most careful empirical work on queen bee behavior, and her findings are considerably more nuanced than the popular framing. Derks and colleagues found that queen bee behavior is not a stable personality trait in women who reach senior positions; it is a response to discrimination. Women who experience strong gender discrimination in their workplaces are more likely to adopt the distancing strategies associated with queen bee behavior. When workplace discrimination decreases, the behavior decreases.

The implication is that queen bee behavior is a symptom of structural sexism, not a cause of female failure. Individual women distancing themselves from gender identity is a rational response to being in an environment where gender identity is a source of professional stigma. The appropriate response to this finding is to address the structural discrimination, not to castigate individual women for adapting to it.

The Ambition Gap Is Not a Pipeline Problem

For decades, the dominant explanation for the underrepresentation of women in senior leadership was the “pipeline problem”: not enough women were entering STEM fields, business schools, professional programs. Wait for the pipeline to fill, the argument went, and representation would follow.

The pipeline has filled. In the United States, women have been earning more bachelor’s degrees than men since the mid-1980s and more master’s degrees since the early 1990s. In many professional fields — law, medicine, accounting — women are now a majority of graduates. The pipeline is full. The leadership gap has not closed.

What this tells us is that the problem is not women’s ambition — women are demonstrably willing to invest years of education in pursuit of professional goals. The problem is what happens to that ambition when it encounters organizational structures that were not designed for women, that penalize the expression of competitive ambition in women, and that reward behaviors women have been socialized away from.

Research by Hannah Riley Bowles and Linda Babcock on negotiation and gender shows that women who negotiate assertively — who compete openly for better salaries, better assignments, more resources — face social penalties that men do not face for the same behavior. Women are called too aggressive. They are liked less. They are sometimes punished professionally. These are not imaginary costs: studies show women’s assessments of the costs of negotiating are accurate, not distorted by risk aversion.

What Women Lose by Pretending Competition Isn’t There

The cultural requirement that women not acknowledge their competitive feelings — not feel them, not express them, not act on them — has costs that are rarely named.

First, there is the psychic cost of self-betrayal. Competitive drive is a human trait that exists in most people. Requiring women to suppress or deny it doesn’t make it disappear; it makes it shameful. The energy that goes into managing the shame of wanting to win, of wanting to be recognized as the best, of feeling the edge of rivalry with a peer, is energy not available for other purposes.

Second, there is the strategic cost. Competition, when managed well, makes people better. The awareness of where you stand relative to others, the motivation to outperform, the sharpening of skills under pressure — these are competitive benefits that women are systematically discouraged from accessing. The aspiration to mediocrity that “don’t be too competitive” encodes is not a female virtue; it is a strategic disadvantage.

Third, there is the collective cost. Female competitive networks, when they operate openly, can build industries and institutions. The invisibility of female competitive ambition means that the energy of ambitious women is frequently captured by institutions that were built by and for men, rather than invested in building new structures. The women who have built organizations, industries, and movements from scratch have always been competitive — Madam C.J. Walker, Oprah Winfrey, Vera Wang, RuPaul — but the competitive element of their achievement is usually underemphasized in how their stories are told.

Competition and Solidarity

The framing of competition and solidarity as opposites is one of the most unhelpful binary choices in feminist thinking. The two are not opposites; they coexist in every effective institution human beings have built.

The best competitive environments are also cooperative environments: people who compete vigorously for resources, recognition, and advancement within a team also cover for each other, build on each other’s ideas, and generate collective outcomes better than any individual could achieve alone. High-performing academic departments, law firms, newsrooms, and sports teams operate this way. The competition and the solidarity both need to be functional, and both need to be acknowledged.

What women’s collective advancement actually requires is not the suppression of competitive drive but its redirection and normalization. Women need to be able to compete openly, to acknowledge their ambitions publicly, to advocate vigorously for themselves — and also to recognize that other women doing the same is not a threat. The scarcity model of female advancement — the idea that there is only room for one woman at the table, so other women are competitors for a limited resource — is a product of structures that limit women’s representation, not an inherent feature of female psychology.

When the number of seats at the table is not limited, competition is not zero-sum.

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