Women and girls may not injure and kill one another as frequently as men and boys, but they manipulate relationships and spread malicious gossip at least as frequently if not slightly more often (Archer & Coyne, 2005; Björkqvist, Osterman, & Lagerspetz, 1994; Card, Stucky, Sawalani, & Little, 2008; Feshbach, 1969; Grotpeter & Crick, 1996; R. Martin, 1997; Rose & Rudolph, 2006).Read more at location 4735
The heightened interpersonal intimacy among women and girls comes at a cost of greater vulnerability to social manipulationRead more at location 4750
girls who are the victims of relational aggression are 2.6 times more likely to suffer from depression or anxiety (for elaboration see Geary, 1998b) than are girls who are not victims or boys who are victims.Read more at location 4753
physically attractive girls, but not boys, were victimized more often than their less attractive peers;Read more at location 4757
Women compete on the basis of physical attractiveness, and those with an advantage are targeted for social and reputational attacks.Read more at location 4760
hide this aggression in the guise of rationality, advice, and casual comments should be at a competitive advantage.Read more at location 4764
Many perpetrators are at risk of exclusion from the very groups they are trying to control, but others appear to be more successful.Read more at location 4766
Socially aggressive and popular peers, however, are not well liked, especially by other girls.Read more at location 4768
aggressive girls, directed largely toward other girls, were more popular among boys than were other girls.Read more at location 4769
If the victim discovers the source of the rumor, especially in contexts in which there are few successful or attractive men and thus the competition over these men is stiff, female-on-female aggression can escalate to physical violence.Read more at location 4772
polygynously married women typically have less healthy children and fewer surviving children than do monogamously married women, although the reasons are not fully understood (Josephson, 2002; Strassmann, 1997; Strassmann & Gillespie, 2002).Read more at location 4791
The premature mortality was not due to diminished resources per child but may have been related to less paternal investment and competition from cowives.Read more at location 4798
“In addition to neglect and mistreatment, it was widely assumed that cowives often fatally poisoned each other’s children …. Cowife aggression is extensively documented in Malian court cases with confessions and convictions for poisoning” (Strassmann, 1997, p.Read more at location 4799
This competition may explain why the mortality of Dogon boys is 2.5 times higher than that of their sisters.Read more at location 4805
family provides a dowry to the couple or to the groom’s family in less than 6% of societiesRead more at location 4810
societies in which wealthy men invest the bulk of their resources in a single woman and their children, rather than in many wives and families.Read more at location 4812
Gaulin and Boster argued that dowry is a form of female–female competition to attract these high-status men as marriage partners.Read more at location 4813
In societies without a traditional dowry but with socially imposed monogamy, a woman’s financial prospects contribute to her attractiveness as a marriage partner. In the United States, men rate the financial prospects of a potential marriage partner as important,Read more at location 4814
do women’s financial and other forms of cultural success translate into reproductive success, as they do for men?Read more at location 4818
Using a nationally (U.S.) representative sample of 3,902 women age 45 years and older, B.S. Low et al. found a trade-off between years of education and thus earnings potential and number of children.Read more at location 4823
These SES differences in lifetime number of children are largely due to the delay in childbirth commonly associated with obtaining a higher education in modern societies.Read more at location 4828
In these species, males and females show sex-typical (e.g., higher testosterone in males) hormone levels, but there is preliminary evidence that prenatal exposure to androgens, circulating testosterone levels, and perhaps a heightened sensitivity to testosterone contribute to the aggressiveness of these females (e.g., Fivizzani & Oring, 1986; Langmore, Cockrem, & Candy, 2002).Read more at location 4838
There is, nevertheless, evidence that testosterone (produced by the adrenal glands in women), estrogens, and other hormones can influence women’s assertiveness and competitiveness and how these are expressed (Archer, 2006; Cashdan, 1995, 2003; Schultheiss et al., 2003),Read more at location 4842
Van Goozen, Cohen-Kettenis, Gooren, Frijda, and Van de Poll (1995) found that male-to-female transsexuals who were administered antiandrogens and estrogens reported a decrease in overt aggression and an increase in relational aggression after 3 months of hormonal treatments.Read more at location 4852
A core estrogen, estradiol, may be the key hormone. Schultheiss et al. (2003) and Stanton and Schultheiss (2007) found higher estradiol levels were associated with stronger implicit social power motives for single, but not romantically involved, women.Read more at location 4857
Similar to men, women with high implicit social power motives show an increase in stress hormone (cortisol) levels when they lose a competition (Wirth et al., 2006).Read more at location 4862
