Do you believe that boys have a uniquely competitive nature, more than girls?

[mix]

Particularly in their K-12 years? Some of my professional development involves working with various educational consultants, one of whom believes strongly in this. There is recent research, which I have not yet read, that claims this fact.

If this is so, then is this competitive nature in boys due to biology or culture? Are they hardwired or is this gender programming, i.e. ideological? I am adverse to competition in the classroom, simply because there are students who are not competitive and feel alienated. I also think that there are more important qualities to model and teach than competitiveness.

I have my doubts that boys possess a uniquely competitive nature. When I first heard this, in fact, I felt instant disagreement, though I am not entirely certain why. I don't have kids of my own, so perhaps, if this is true, my uneasiness with this assertion is due to inexperience in raising children. Still, I am doubtful that boys are more competitive and feel uneasy with the idea of cultivating this supposedly special quality in the classroom.

[imdjh]

1. My best friend when I was a child was a girl.

We were amiably competitive in just about every aspect of our lives. We competed physically, socially, and academically.

[DJ13]

2. Hell no

I've found in my 50+ years that girls (& women) are actually far more competitive.

They just arent as competitive in physical activities, but they hate losing in everything else far more than males do.

[HeresyLives]

3. Absolutely not.

Any differences you see between boys and girls comes from cultural conditioning.

I've seen 3 month old baby girls, wearing all pink, complete with earrings and hairbows. Even on one wisp of hair. :)

[Confusious]

32. Bullshit

I've seen children who have no idea of what or who they are, girls play with dolls, boys play with guns/sticks/swords.

Some things are hard-wired. I have a 14 year-old daughter. Didn't want her near barbie, I hate barbie. She found barbie.

[Sparkly]

39. Why do you assume she was hard-wired to find Barbie?

The image of Barbie involves a cultural definition of beauty; the importance of beauty for girls and women is everywhere... No reason to think that what's she's seen, heard, experienced had nothing to do with it, is there?

[JDPriestly]

41. And some children play with both dolls and guns/sticks/swords.

The stereotyping is learned. But girls play with dolls because they want to be like their mothers. Also, that is probably hardwired. I actually preferred taking care of the smaller children in the neighborhood to dolls and otherwise played with both girl and boy toys. I think I was pretty normal.

[lindisfarne]

4. Males are more likely to be assessed as risk takers. It is not either nature or nurture.

It is an extremely complex interaction between the two. Environment can cause gene expression to be turned on & off.
Testosterone during puberty can change male behavior.

All you have to do is look across cultures at crime rates and realize, behavior is not simply due to genetic factors.

Also, define "competitive". That will be difficult enough. But it has to be done before any further meaningful discussion can proceed.

[mix]

10. in this context

"Competitive" means that boys have a desire to win that girls do not. For me, by implication, it means creating lesson plans that encourage students, particularly males, to contest each other...as a means of learning...and with the requisite rewards for winners.

(sorry for the edit change)

[lindisfarne]

54. Girls & boys express desire to win in different ways. Girls can be awfully nasty toward other girls

& boys - not that girls exclusively use methods like gossip, laugh at clothing, hair, make-up, etc., & ostracize, but I'd hazard a guess they do it more. I'd guess that this reflects competitiveness, although getting at this requires carefully defining terms, figuring out how one would measure "competitiveness", and so on. Not an easy thing to do.

Keep in mind that by "Girls & boys express desire to win in different ways", I'm saying that when you average across all girls & all boys, there are some ways that are more common to girls & others that are more common to boys. But that doesn't mean that some girls don't use more typical boys tactics. And it tells us nothing about whether nature or nurture makes the larger contribution.

[Mind_your_head]

5. No. Absolutely NOT. n/t

[Mind_your_head]

13. But, hey, don't look at amurikans for your male/female study......

In amurika....not riding a bike without a helmut qualifies one as a "risk taker". for example. :eyes:

[Solomon]

6. I don't believe it. Maybe there are more competitive

boys because of culture, but within that class of people, competitive, girls are just as competitive as boys.

[Skittles]

7. no

they are simply given more license to act on it

[bemildred]

8. No, it's a stereotype, a pernicious one. nt

[mix]

12. I am inclined to your view.

[bemildred]

29. Thank you.

Some people are more competitive than others. You can have long boring arguments about why that comes about. But gender has no predictive value with regard to individuals.

[mix]

31. Well said.

[FarCenter]

9. Boys are more competitive, but girls are meaner to each other

[HeresyLives]

16. If they're not allowed to compete

in any other way, they will often turn on each other, which is where the stereotype comes from.

Allowed to live freely, outside cultural constraints, this wouldn't happen.

[JDPriestly]

43. And why are girls meaner? Because it is a form of competition. It is a way

of putting other girls into inferior social positions.

[Warpy]

11. They're certainly more likely to try to establish a pecking order

while girls establish cooperative structures. I don't think we can point to either nature or nurture because it's most likely a combination.

There are strengths and weaknesses to both systems, the hierarchal and the cooperative.

[MrsBrady]

14. no...I loved to win, and still do. n/t

[JDPriestly]

45. In my work in my later years, I competed with men -- and won and won

and enjoyed winning. I was devastated at the slightest setback. I'm competitive, probably more so than a lot of men. No one would ever mistake me for a man. I'm extremely feminine. As a matter of fact, my femininity is kind of a secret weapon albeit not one I can do anything about.

[Forkboy]

15. I can't wait to see who comes out on top in this thread!

:hide:

[Mz Pip]

17. I don't know about "equal"

but from my experience the competitiveness is there in both sexes, it just manifiests itself in different ways. Boys just tend to be more agressive about it. With girls it may be more subtle. When I taught school I found the really smart competitive boys tended to be more verbally competitive, whereas the girls would be less agressive but would nail the tests and the written work.

This is purely anecdotal and only from my experience. Some of it was cultural.

Personally, I can't really speak for girls since I just had boys. One was very bright and tended to take over, the other was quiet and flew under the radar.

[Mythsaje]

18. Speaking for myself and my oldest (who's an awful lot like me)

NO. Competition (unless it's against myself) tends to bore the hell out of me.

[mix]

33. I myself am competitive.

But I have also seen many many students throughout my years in education who simply were not and flourished in other ways.

[virgogal]

19. I raised 3 boys and 3 girls and think the type of competiveness

for each sex is different,and of course allowances have to be made for individual differences.

I do think the good old "Y" chromsome makes boys more physically aggressive,which often leads to athletic competitiveness.

Girls seem to compete more for attention or approval,so they compete in their own way.

That said,the best,most competitive athlete in my family was a daughter and she's still at it in her mid-forties.

[lunatica]

20. I saw a documentary about how baby boys and baby girls react differently

to problem solving in their little world. Babies that are still not able to sit up were given something they could kick in order to get a response from their mothers. after a while, when they got it that kicking the little bell made their mommy come to them they realized that kicking the bell meant that mom would come to them.

After they got this, then the rules changed to see how they would react. They would kick the bell and mom wouldn't come. The interesting thing was that the boys got more aggressive about kicking the bell and would continue to do so as they obviously became more and more frustrated. On the other hand the girls would quickly give up and start crying for their mothers.

Before you come to the obvious adult conclusion it's good to know that the child behaviorists actually surmised that the girls weren't being wimpy but that they were actually changing their tactics about how to get mom to come to them. That they knew that the last resort to get mom's attention was to cry for her. Which in turn meant that the boy babies were more willing to keep trying on their own even if they became frustrated. So in some ways the girl babies seem to get the reality of their situation sooner. But that's not necessarily so though. The boys just tried longer, which has nothing to do with intelligence but has everything to do with the belief that insistence also gets results, which it does.

Interestingly enough this showed a basic difference in the gender reactions. Both were valid in equal measure because both were the babies' ways of dealing with problem solving. Neither way can be considered better because in their own way both are effective. But it did show a fundamental difference in how problems were perceived and solved.

[JDPriestly]

47. Yes. Girls are cunning rather than physical. Girls brains in general

mature earlier than boys. That may be the difference. I believe that on the average, girls speak and are toilet trained a little earlier than boys.

[leftyclimber]

21. Dunno.

The reason I say this is that I was fiercely competitive as a child, but not in sports. You could not outspell me, among other things.

So it depends on what the researchers have chosen as their operational definition of competitive.
Sports? No, I was not competitive until college. Academic stuff? I could be the shit out of you. So what's the operational definition of "competitive" in these studies?

[mix]

23. the classroom, pedagogical games

[Sparkly]

34. How is that measured, though?

I was competitive academically and achievement-wise, too. But if it's about behavior and communications, the researchers might be seeing differences and assigning them meanings that aren't necessarily correct. (= bias from the researchers.)

For example, we learn early on how to get a positive response from others, how to use what power we have to get what we want, etc. For boys, speaking up, being assertive, even being aggressive are rewarded or "work" on some level. For girls, that can backfire -- being charming, accommodating, and even just plain quiet can seem to "work" better. Doesn't mean the girls aren't competitive, though.

[mix]

35. I have to look at the research to see how it is measured...

But the gist is that learning games that produce winners and losers appeal to the innate competitiveness of boys and thus facilitate knowledge acquisition for them, if that makes sense.

[Tikki]

22. Depends on the culture....

Tikki

[mix]

28. Neoliberal patriarchy

Culturally, that seems the best way to describe the view the boys are more competitive and instructors must appeal to this supposedly unique trait. A neoliberal patriarchal culture, the one we live in.

[gleaner]

24. I think......

that a competitive nature is learned by both boys and girls. I have known both fiercely competitive women who live to show up others, and very easygoing men who work and play to meet their own standards, not to outshine anyone else.

My nephew is your stereo typical dreamer. He shied away from competition and concentrated his interests in areas like astronomy, geology and other pursuits which caught his fancy. He was a gentle child with a strong will who would not be pushed but who would come if you could give him a good reason. Now he is a web designer and very good at it. He loves the nature of the work and the chance it gives him to learn and apply what he knows. He does it for himself, and is happy with the more or less solitary nature of the job.

My niece, however is extremely competitive. For her college was not only an educational experience, it was a place where she could "show" people whom she felt had slighted her abilities, that she could do better than they could. I love both children very much, but I think she is the unhappiest of the two.

Most behaviors are learned at home or school, or from the culture at large. I do not believe that boys are inherently more violent, or competitive or even more naturally interested in sports. Those are attributes that are pinned on them as "masculine" from outside. It's just as hard for girls. When you are very young, you are counseled in what is "lady like" and expected to adhere to those stereotypes. I have always thought that children of both sexes had the same capacity for learning, performing and behaving. Very few things are hard wired into the brain. Most of what we learn about behavior comes from what we see and experience.

[kenny blankenship]

25. Anyone who thinks that girls don't have competition in their nature

will never see it coming.

[JDPriestly]

48. How right you are!

[timeforpeace]

26. I think so.

[saltpoint]

27. No. I believe that if you take nature and nurture and mix them up

in a kind of shake-and-bake frenzy, you would come up with the same amount of territorialism, ambition, guile, bile, blessedness, and bitterness as you have now.

In many aspects genetics is a hit-and-miss proposition.

You'd still get the occasional Capone. You'd still get the occasional Buddha.

[Sparkly]

30. A very interesting question.

I work with young children and don't see this. I do see differences in *general* though (which by no means apply to all boys or all girls). Boys seem much more likely to have some drive to pounce on each other -- play fighting the way puppies and kittens do. Girls seem much more likely to interact cooperatively.

Again, that's a very general statement based on my own experience. For me, a class of mostly girls is usually easier to teach than a class of mostly boys.

However, I do see girls as being competitive. They definitely rival each other and stake out their own ground, terms, roles, etc., and can have some conflicts, but they're more likely to work them out. ("Okay, you can be the princess and I'll be a fairy mermaid." "Okay!")

I grew up with all sisters though, and when we played games, we felt bad if we won, and apologized. If someone ran out of Monopoly money, we gifted them more (such liberals!). When we played softball, we'd say, "I'm sorry, that was a bad pitch -- let's make your swing not count" and give each other five strikes... On the other hand, we were also quite jealous of each other in various ways.

As for how much is biology and how much is social conditioning -- that is THE question! Twin studies are the only ways some clues have come about, but it still seems hard to separate out.

(I applaud you for being skeptical, by the way!)

[sallylou666]

36. Nope

Boys are allowed to compete openly. Girls are told to "be nice."

If you don't think that girls are competitive, you haven't spent any time around middle school girls establishing a pecking order.

[Newshues]

37. approval based on my experience

raising my two kids.

I suspect that if we looked at the cause of competitiveness - seeking and getting approval in one form or another that reinforces the competitive behavior - we would find explanations for what we see in competitive behavior that fits both the nature and the nurture aspects of it. Most of us don't come with an innate desire to "win", we do come with an innate desire for approval.

[abumbyanyothername]

38. +`1 for girls are more competitive, just in different ways

Girls generally have more social awareness, and competition is just another form of social interaction.

[JDPriestly]

40. Girls are just as competitive as boys. They just compete in different ways.

Girls are punished for engaging in the direct competition that boys enjoy. Girls compete by badmouthing their rivals. Girls also compete through social strategies that isolate and ostracize their rivals. Girls compete for social advantage. So, girls also compete for different things than boys.

And, anyone who remembers the ordeal of grade school remembers that little girl who sat in the front row, knew all the answers, waved her hand wildly to try to get the teacher to call on her and tattled on all her classmates. She was a classic fixture in nearly every classroom I was in. Oh, and that little girl was usually one of the plainest in the room. The pretty girls did not have to compete through those blatant methods. They would just smile sweetly and cross their legs provocatively. Social or genetic? I don't know, but I had two daughters and was one of four sisters. No boy could be more competitive than my daughters and I and my sisters were. Boys are less clever about hiding their competitive natures. Now that I believe.

[mix]

44. Thank you.

You've opened my eyes.

[Withywindle]

50. Totally agreed.

That girl pecking-order manifests really early too. By 4th grade, I already knew my place (low). And I found there was less social mobility in the girl world than the boy one - a boy could move up by becoming better at sports, getting cooler toys, having "cool" taste in music, etc.- for a girl, once you were marked "plain" and "unfashionable" and "lower-class" and "dirty" and "slut" (for whatever imagined reason) your only hope is to move out of town.

I was pretty competitive in the realms I was allowed to shine - spelling bee, Latin club, writing, public speaking-won lots of prizes, yada yada. But those were low-status realms of competition in the girl world.

Small wonder "womyn-only space" never felt very safe or welcoming to me as a young college feminist?

[XemaSab]

42. I think that some things are hard wired

I suspect that one of the things that is hard wired is that physical competition is a part of life, and it's a reasonable way to resolve conflicts.

I'm not saying all men are wired this way, or that no women are wired this way, but I think it explains the male predilection towards sports, fighting, and war.

(And that being said, girls will CUT EACH OTHER DOWN in a way that few men will.)

[waiting for hope]

46. My 4 year old daughter is more competitive

than my 8 year old son. She is also very willful and headstrong, which I think plays into that. I think it's culture to be honest because as a middle child myself between two boys, I was more competitive , especially when it came to sports.

[MisterP]

49. even if it were genetic/instinctual, insticts are mediated through the brain

they're not triggers that turn the organism into an automaton

[happyslug]

51. First, the key to being Human is cooperation more the competition.

Yes, we do compete, but the most satisfying is competition that emphasis team work more then individual efforts. People try to be the "best" ballplayer NOT to be the Best Ball Player but to help his or her team win.

This is one of the problems with the whole concept of Human Competition, we are NOT successful as individuals buts as individuals working in a larger group. How Men and Women address that competition is different, some of the difference is Cultural some is innate and if it often hard to see which is which.

My Sister did a paper in the 1980s as part of her Collage classes and one of the things she did research on was how boys and girls played in the playground without adult input (i.e. recess more then Gym). The Difference was remarkable, the Boys tended to play team sports, baseball in rural area, Basketball in Urban areas. The Girls played individual games during recess, hopscotch etc. My sister position was this difference in recess activity was one of the chief reason women tend to NOT go as far as men in the Work Force, Women look at how her herself can make the system work, while her male co-workers are looking at how we can get the system to work.

Part of this appears to be innate, but parts are Cultural, for example since the 1970s most little league teams now permit girls to play on their teams (Physically, before puberty, there is little if any PHYSICAL difference in the strength of girls and boys so little league works out) but if you exclude School sports, most women no longer play any TEAM sport after little league (Yes, we have high school team sports for women but the majority of women do NOT play in them, just like the majority of men do NOT play in School Sports). Men continue to play pick up sports while into their adult years (Go to any inner city playground and you will see men playing basketball and in many rural areas you will see adult men playing baseball). Part of this is learning to play as a team with another person and retaining that lesson, part is to try to show one is better then another as a member of a team.

Women, if they participate in ANY sports after little league tend to dance classes, karate and other one on one type sports NOT in a sport that requires one to be a team member. I had another sister who participated at her work in a "Team building" activity, while she did well in the activity, many of her fellow women did not, because there were NOT use to working as a member of a team. Even the Army has seen this as a problem and when it comes to Women Basic Training try to switch from straight exercise (Which the combat arms, being all males, still do more then the non-combat arms) to exercise that require people to work together (Such as moving a log while on top of the log and as member of a team so that people get use to working together as a team instead of as individuals). Men tend to do the team worker easier then women, part of it may be innate (look at the playground during a recess for example) but part of it may be cultural (i.e. team sports tend to be for men not women through given the nature of Title IX a lot of schools have to have team sports for women so that they can have basketball and football for men).

Remember my observation is NOT about the top athlete, but men and women taking as a whole. When men and women do work together the male tend to be the "Dominate" player in that he gets to use his superior strength while the women tends to sue her superior endurance and greater ability to deal with small items. One of the comments about men and women is that if you had three teams on an island, a team made up of two men, a team made up of two women and third team made up of a man and a woman, the last team will out compete the other two. The two men defeat the other two teams in any fight and drive them away but could NOT exploit all of the little things that occur on the island that women see and exploit. The two women could exploit those same small items but lack the physical strength to take on heavier duties. Then man and the women could exploit BOTH and survive. In a showdown the man and the woman would lose to the two men, but the man and the woman could put up enough of a fight to permit the woman to exploit an area before the man and woman team had to leave it. Sooner or later the two men would have to leave for their can NOT exploit the small items, leaving the area to be exploited by the woman of the man and woman team. The man could could the two women team out and that team could NEVER exploit anything that required any strength.

Ancient people understood this and came up with rules for their society to make sure such male and female teams could exploit their environment to the furtherest extent. Some of these rules are still with us which is why some of the division of labor is so male or female in division. This is also one of the reason you have to be careful when comparing men and women, what society expects out of each sex is different and some of that difference is how each sex could exploit their environment in ancient times.

[abumbyanyothername]

52. This is a great analysis

And one of the reasons I was happy that my daughter became an elite-level athlete in a team sport (Kansas State University Volleyball -- she could have gotten a scholarship in at least 4 other sports -- basketball, track, softball and soccer).

[mix]

53. When I think about it...

...I too was an elite level child athlete for over 10 years in one of the few sports in which boys and girls competed against each other--equestrian events. I won a few, but would also get beat by girls in my age group quite often. I saw very clearly the potency of their talents and competitive spirit. Also in the horseshow world women have reached the absolute heights of competitive fame and fortune. So when I heard this statement at a conference session in Atlanta a few weeks ago, I was mystified.