Letters to the Editor
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Bzzt. Correlation is not causation, nice try, please try again and resubmit
Our experimental results reveal interesting differences in competitiveness: in the patriarchal society women are less competitive than men, a result consistent with student data drawn from Western cultures. Yet, this result reverses in the matrilineal society, where we find that women are more competitive than men. Perhaps surprisingly, Khasi women are even slightly more competitive than Maasai men, but this difference is not statistically significant at conventional levels under any of our formal statistical tests.
Is female non-competitiveness due to "patriarchal oppression", or is it due to women knowing that they can get by by doing nothing?
Are the results of the study true across all patriarchal societies, or have they just been studied in a very few?
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Symbol person those are not dumb questions
but there is no mistaken causal claim made here. It's just an interesting comparison. Your questions would certainly be worth studying.
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Either/Or Black/White Thinking
These type of studies annoy me, as does much that I read in Anthro pitched at us dumb sods. The authors inherently assume that societies are an either/or situation. Either the men rule or the women rule. Either everything is traced through the woman or everything belongs to the man.
Why can't a culture have its cake and eat it too? In many of the Eastern Woodlands tribes were, pre-Contact, power was pretty fairly distributed between sex roles (With the understanding in many tribes that some members with one sex's plumbing would invariably take the role of the opposite gender and that some members would prefer other members with the same plumbing.) although the power of each sex was different.
In those tribes you had some pretty fierce men; competitive sons of bitches who'd fight to the death in games of stickball and who thought anything less than being tortured to death if captured by the enemy was without honor.
I'm sorry, I'm not buying any conclusions drawn on the limited studies of two fairly obscure tribes when I know damn well that wasn't the case for a large swath of the American Indian population for a long time before the European Christian sensibilities moved in.
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Makes perfect sense
In any group, those being the feistiest and acting the alpha-est will receive deference by those who are less so. The others figure the alphas know what they are doing and that they will be most apt to protect the tribe from danger.
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Competitiveness?
I'm not really sure how this really quantified competitiveness, when the test subjects were in individual rooms. It looks good on paper, but wouldn't it have been better to have them in the same room at the same time. It's one thing to compete against an abstract, in this case what someone else tells you your competitor did, and a whole other kettle of fish to compete against someone who is in front of you. This isn't a criticism of the results, but of the methodology. I know that the fastest I ran in practice, was never as fast as I ran in a game with someone else trying to catch you, and my coaches made damn sure I knew about it. But I could swear that I ran as hard as I could in practice too. It usually takes someone else to draw that competitive fire out of you. The very best can compete against themselves with some success, but it is their competitiveness when "opponents" are involved that truly defines them.
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read Jane Austen
Women are just as competitive as men, perhaps ore so, when the competition *matters* to them.
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Julie...
Two points...
A) Austen wrote fiction...
B) Being more competitive about one thing, or a very narrow band of things, does not make up for a lack of competitiveness everywhere else... Maybe women are more competitive than men, or just as competitive as we are. However, in this culture, part of the world, etc. it by and large isn't true. Men can and do build mountains out of molehills over friendly competitions. Whether it is over women, a promotion, grades, the size of the TV, men are engaged in a constant "one up/one down" struggle. Check out Barbara Tannen's books on linguistic differences in the way men and women communicate. Whole chunks are devoted to the constant struggle for status and knowing your place in the pack. Most of the jostling for position is innocuous and can be seen in joke telling and storytelling, or spouting some of the useless knowledge we've managed to acquire. We are keenly aware of each others skill sets as they pertain to us, i.e. so and so is a better pool player than I am, but he can't tell a joke to save his life. There are women who are competitive and seek status in much the same way. However, they are greatly outnumbered by the rest of us.
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Hey, Symbol Guy, here's a quiz ...
(1) Describe the claim of causality made in the article.
(2) Give clear definitions of "correlation" and "causation," and explain the difference between the two.
(3) Explain the methods by which correlation can, in fact, be used to show causation.
Question 1 will establish reading comprehension. Questions 2 and 3 will establish whether you actually have the knowledge to use the phrase "correlation is not causation" in a meaningful way, or whether you're just mindlessly repeating a catchphrase beloved of people who are willfully ignorant about statistics and data analysis.
And if you can't answer any of the questions in a meaningful way, please just shut the fuck up already.
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I think woman are just as competive as men in all societies ...
It just may be exhibited in different ways in the different societies. How many men would have their pubic hair pulled out by waxing to look more attractive to women? I am not saying I approve of this or that it is right. It is just that fundamentally grooming standards are forms of competitions. Each person is competing to present themselves better than the next. It might be shaving or makeup or clothing or weight lifting.
In fact women probably compete more vigorously on appearance than men in our society. Men might compete more vigorously in some other area. But I think over all the competitiveness doesn't vary as much between males and females as much as it does between individuals. It is just that the arenas of competition between the sexes may be different. If we define competition only athletically as in throwing a ball we miss other areas of competition.