Why are women less competitive?

The psychologist Matina Horner, from the University of Michigan, saw that, regarding personal achievements, feminine feelings are more ambivalent than masculine ones. Dr. Horner asked a group of students to write success stories and found that those that spoke of female successes put more emphasis on negative consequences – unpopularity, loneliness, guilt. In stories of male success, the two sexes only emphasized their advantages.

In the early 1980s, psychologist Carol Gilligan, the first professor of gender studies at Harvard University, published In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (1982). In this book, Gilligan explores the extent to which human moral development research has suffered from a sexist bias. We mature towards an ethic based on justice and independence. But what about compassion? Gilligan argued that our species can be directed towards an ethics of care – ethics of care -, a moral that would not be based on abstract terms such as justice and honesty, but on the responsibility of caring for other people. The ? Excessive empathy ? What Dr. Horner found in many women might not be a competitive drawback, but rather an adaptive advantage .

Luis Muiño