Competitiveness Is Profoundly Sex-differential

Abstract

The confirmation in major reviews of behavioural economics studies that competitiveness is a male (or far more a male than a female) trait is not challenged by efforts to find conditions in which there is apparent failure or partial failure to replicate, because this is mistaken interpretation in not recognising confounds. The error is through basing modelling on simple economics augmented only by internally-inconsistent and tautological 'gender'-sociological constructs. The pertinent major biological / evolutionary factors that should have been foundational are utilised in the framework here outlined. Biological theory on several ever deeper levels provides a key principle that competition is within- and not between-sex. Where there is ostensible inter-sexual competitiveness it is explicable as being instead implicit sexual display (and, given priming to make opposite-sex salient; an artefactual shadow of male deference or female co-operation). This analysis cuts through the confusion in the behavioural economics literature to yield albeit more complicated but more ecologically valid understanding to better inform hypothesis formation and testing.