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Even the Best Female Athletes Are Less Competitive

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Most sports draw a line between men and women because of differences in size and strength. But a new study on distance runners suggests there are important differences in attitude as well: men are more competitive.

And the finding has implications for more than sports, the researchers say.

The researchers surveyed over 1,100 collegiate distance runners to see whether the already-known sex difference in competitiveness narrowed when considering the fastest runners.

They asked the runners about their training volume, and their desire to compete at an elite level after college. The most selective group was defined as those runners who were in the top one-fourth for their gender in 5000-meter runs.

They found the difference between genders was just as large among the fastest as it was among the slowest runners.

The researchers also compared runners based on their school’s NCAA athletic division, because generally Division I runners are fastest, Division II runners are intermediate, and Division III runners are slowest.

The gender difference in competitiveness was just as large among the Division I runners as it was among Division II and Division III runners.

The researchers considered possible explanations for the gender difference in competitiveness. They did not find evidence that female runners were more likely to be injured or to face greater childcare responsibilities. However, women reported greater commitment than men to their academic studies, suggesting a gender difference in priorities.

The researchers studied distance running because it is popular with both men and women, and the financial incentives, such as scholarships and prize money, do not favor men.

But they believe that their results are consistent with data from outside of distance running.

“Of course, we need to be careful not to assume that our running results will generalize to all sports or all domains outside of sports,” said lead researcher, Robert Deaner of Grand Valley State University, in a press release.

“Nevertheless, our findings do echo those from other studies, which show that even when men and women hold the same selective jobs, men are more likely to prioritize competing for recognition and status, while women have more communal orientations.”

Whether or not gender differences disappear among selective sub-populations has important implications outside sports, Deaner and his colleagues believe.

On one hand, if differences decrease at higher levels of competition, it would indicate that when women and men are provided with equal opportunities and training, then gender differences in behavior can be erased.

On the other hand, if differences persist, then it could support the case for gender diversity in the workplace, since men and women might have complementary strengths and weaknesses.

Although the new study is based on a very large data set and found a reliable gender difference in competitiveness, the researchers acknowledged there is much individual variability.

“By social science standards, the difference we found — men and women differing by about half a standard deviation on competitiveness measures — is moderate to large. But this kind of a difference still means that many of the female runners are more competitive than many of the male runners,” said Deaner.

2 thoughts on “Even the Best Female Athletes Are Less Competitive”

  1. I think the last paragraph of your latest post needs to be developed. The existence of a half-standard deviation spread is interesting and maybe significant, but it would be sad if some women thereby felt squeezed into a box of non-competitiveness by the study…

    Or, for that matter, by your headline, which is actually undercut by the last paragraph: Some of the best female athletes are as competitive, or more competitive, than some of the best male athletes; the study’s own statistics guarantee that. The headline, I believe, gives a misleading picture.

    A more accurate headline? “On Average, Women are Less Competitive than Men. But What’s That Got to Do With You?”

    Or, “The Statistics Speak: Most Women are Less Competitive Than Most Men. But Don’t Statistics Lie?”

    Or, “Most Women Are Less Competitive than Men. But Many Women Aren’t.”

    1. It’s a good point. It’s easy to make the leap from a statistical average to a generalization, and we all know where that leads. Definitely not all women are less competitive than all men.

      But how significant is this finding from a statistical point of view? Here’s what the authors say about this point.

      A second objection is that we have found an overall sex difference in competitiveness, but this difference is trivially small and unimportant (Gill, 2000). This objection appears to have little merit with respect to our study. One reason this objection is weak is that the sex differences in competitiveness and training volume we found (ds ∼ 0.50; see Table 1) are comparable in magnitude to those typically found in social psychology as a whole (d = 0.45) and about twice as large as those typically reported for studies of sex differences (d = 0.26; Richard, Bond & Stokes-Zoota, 2003; see also, Hyde, 2005). We also note that the sex differences in competitiveness and training volume varied substantially across performance quartiles (Table 2 and Fig. 2) and athletic divisions (Fig. 4), as expected by definitions of competitiveness (Gill & Deeter, 1988; Masters, Ogles & Jolton, 1993). Nonetheless, Figs. 2 and 4 show that sex differences in competitiveness and training volume were roughly similar in magnitude to differences across performance quartiles and athletic divisions; this pattern indicates that sex explains appreciable variance in competitiveness. A final reason our results should not be dismissed as unimportant is that they appear to explain ecologically relevant behavior. In particular, there is a substantial sex difference in the depth of outstanding American professional distance runners, as about two to three times as many men as women run fast relative to sex-specific standards (Deaner, 2006b; Deaner, 2013). This pattern is what would be expected if, among talented intercollegiate runners, women were less likely than men to be motivated to pursue a professional running career, as indicated in this study (Table 1).

      If you want to dive even deeper into the numbers, you’ll find them here.

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