by Alfie Kohn
Can I take this guy, or not? . . . Maybe it isn’t so physical. Questions like, “Am I smarter than this guy?” and “If we start talking about jobs, will mine sound more impressive?” are part of the same response. So is “Am I better looking (or thinner, or funnier)?” It’s the competitive instinct reduced to its pettiest essence, but there it is. Boys are taught to win. If winning involves beating some other boy who wants to win just as badly, then you’ve got to take him or suffer the consequences.5
This observation appeared in the “About Men” column of the New York Times Magazine, a forum for male rumination. The very frequency with which competition appears as a theme in these essays is noteworthy. Here, for example, is a column written by one of the magazine’s editors:
Sports is where the boy child of our culture learns what’s expected of him when he grows up: winning. Some of us may seem to outgrow any need to heave our middle-aged carcasses around a softball diamond or a tennis court, but we have an unconscious inner core where that painfully vivid childhood lesson is ever fresh. It emerges when we put down our kids, when we undercut our colleagues—and when we dream.6
It emerges also in the way men talk, often arguing even when there is no substantial disagreement, just for the chance to come out ahead. For men, the very act of speaking is often an opportunity to establish “who really is best, stronger, smarter, or, ultimately, more powerful.”7 So much for men. The training they receive and the character structure it builds are depressingly straightforward. Competition appears in full-strength concentrate. On the other hand, some girls are raised to compete while others are not. Mixed messages are common, creating profoundly ambivalent feelings toward competition. Finally, attitudes about the desirability of competing for women are in flux today. The question for females is, in short, far more complex—more interesting intellectually, more urgent politically. This is why I have devoted a chapter to the subject of women and competition without a corresponding chapter about men.
One of the most influential ways of accounting for women’s greater reluctance to compete was devised by Matina Horner in the 1960s. Psychologists who study motivation have long talked about “the motive to approach success” and “the motive to avoid failure,” two constructs used to predict behavior and explain levels of accomplishment. In her doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan, Horner proposed a new motive: “fear of success” (also known as “the motive to avoid success”). The idea was created to explain differences between the sexes: women are brought up to regard pursuit of achievement as unfeminine and thus to become anxious throughout life at the prospect of doing well. Presumably, then, they exhibit more fear of success. Horner tested this by asking undergraduates to write a story about a fictitious student (of the same sex as the subject) who was said to be “at the top of her (his) medical school class.” She reported that two thirds of the women, as compared to only about 9 percent of the men, told stories that contained fear of success imagery. Since the basis of all projective testing is that such stories reflect the psychological state of the storyteller, the women here were understood to be saying that they hold themselves back because they are afraid of success.8
Horner’s work received considerable attention, and the catch phrase “fear of success” quickly became part of the language. Unfortunately, it has not stood up well under careful scrutiny and further study. The concept’s status as an enduring trait has been questioned, and Horner’s technique for measuring it (on which the findings of differences between men and women depend) has seemed dubious to many scholars. “The projective measure of fear of success is ambiguous, has low reliability, and lacks predictive validity,” as two psychologists put it.9 What Horner scored as fear of success in the stories told by her subjects might have been affected by the testing situation or the occupation she used (medicine) or the sex of the person being written about rather than the sex of the subject. In any case, attempts to replicate her findings have rarely succeeded. Sex-based differences in fear of success imagery usually have been slight, and many studies have found no difference at all—or even more fear among men.10 Part of the problem may be that the disparity Horner discovered was rooted not in underlying differences between the sexes but in social factors. As the latter have shifted, women’s and men’s attitudes toward success have converged.11
The real problem with Horner’s “fear of success” construct, though—or at least the problem with how her data have been interpreted—is the tendency to confound success with competition. As I tried to show in chapter 3, these two are not at all the same thing; in fact, competitiveness can be an impediment to success. Horner quite explicitly stated that she “referfs] to this disposition to become anxious in competitive achievement situations as the motive to avoid success.”12 Similarly, a later study that corroborated Horner’s findings assumed that anyone disagreeing with such statements as “I am happy only when I am doing better than others” or “The rewards of a successful competition are greater than those received from cooperation” was exhibiting fear of success.13 This raises the possibility that women are backing away from the prospect of having to beat other people, not from success itself.
Psychologist Georgia Sassen made just this point in a 1980 article, noting that when fear of success tests do not limit themselves to competitive success, there is no difference between the sexes.14 Then she went a step further. At about the same time Robert Helmreich and his associates were taking the long overdue step of breaking down success into its constituent parts (or what are assumed to be its parts)—and discovering that the most competitive professionals are actually among the least successful (see [>])—Sassen did something similar. She devised a way to measure how much someone’s idea of success is based on competition, a scale she called the competitiveness-of-success concept (COSC). Sure enough, while there seemed to be no difference between the sexes on fear of success, per se, men’s COSC was higher than women’s. Sassen concluded that “the sex difference in earlier work on fear of success was actually a sex difference in how people define success for themselves. . . . Men define success competitively, as Horner [and] those who replicated Horner’s research . . . did.”15
So what happens when women are allowed to work at a task in a noncompetitive situation? Horner herself provided the answer: “In the absence of interpersonal competition and its aggressive overtones, whereby the tendency to avoid success is minimally, if at all, aroused, these women [who are high in fear of success] will perform efficiently.”16 Several years later, when Maccoby and Jacklin reviewed the literature on the subject, they found that: “Boys need to be challenged by appeals to ego or competitive motivations to bring their achievement up to the level of girls’. Boys’ achievement motivation does appear to be more responsive to competitive arousal than girls’, but this does not imply a generally higher level.”17
Even those women who are said to fear success do just fine at noncompetitive tasks. This much is fact. But what of our values? What do we make of this state of affairs? Let’s begin by acknowledging that the phrase “fear of success” is not merely imprecise but loaded. It suggests a deficiency, a problem to be remedied. There would seem to be something wrong with people who have such a fear, just as with those who are afraid of the dark. If we substitute a more neutral term such as “aversion to competition,” we are then freer to ask whether this is really a bad thing. One of Horner’s subjects spun a story which imagined the mythical medical student “no longer feels so certain that she really wants to be a doctor . . . [and] decides not to continue with her medical work but to continue with courses that she never allowed herself to take before but that have a deeper personal meaning for her.” Another subject has the student saying, “‘To hell with the whole business’” and going into social work—“not hardly as glamorous, prestigious, or lucrative; but she is happy.” These two excerpts are cited by Horner under the heading “Concern About One’s Normality or Femininity” and are said to reveal fear of success.18
a heightened perception of the “other side” of competitive success, that is, the great emotional costs at which success achieved through competition is often gained—an understanding which, while confused, indicates some underlying sense that something is rotten in the state in which success is defined as having better grades than everyone else.19
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It is competition and not success that separates men and women. There are signs, however, that the gap between the sexes is narrowing even here—and not because men are coming to share a distaste for beating others. Over the last decade or two, a chorus of voices has been urging women to compete and to accept competitiveness as appropriate and even healthy. Magazine articles and books too numerous to list here sing the praises of winning. One sample, fairly representative of the genre, should suffice to convey the flavor. Entitled “The Thrill of Competition,” it appeared in Seventeen magazine in 1982. “Don’t get hung up—climb that ladder to success,” it counsels teenage girls. Betty Lehan Harragan, author of a book called Games Mother Never Taught You, is quoted as follows: “It’s true that some people would rather that you weren’t competitive. These people may prefer to succeed themselves rather than see you get ahead.” Thus warned that all critics of competition are cynical opportunists, readers presumably will be more receptive to the advice that they “start competing in high school and . . . get a strong foothold on the ladder to self-improvement.”20
Similar exhortations aimed at grown women typically observe that a sexist culture has limited its endorsement of competition to men—and then go on to urge women to correct this imbalance by becoming as competitive as possible. This is the gist, for example, of a book called The Femininity Game, written by Thomas Boslooper and Marcia Hayes. In another article, a psychiatrist says this:
We haven’t integrated rivalry into the development of women. It’s only been worked out for boys. I was at a swimming pool the other day, and two little boys were racing to the other end of the pool. When one of the boys lost, his father said, “Mikey, listen, this is why you lost: You didn’t start off soon enough.” But the mother said, “Listen, Michael, it’s just a game.” You see what I mean? I think a lot of women are still not comfortable with competition.21
Notice, first, that the mother’s comment is assumed to reflect discomfort rather than principled opposition to competition or a simple sense of perspective about the importance of games. Second, the speaker not only assumes that this discomfort is problematic—something to be gotten over—but makes no effort to defend her assumption; it is so obvious as to require no support.
The pro-competition line has been winning adherents, changing the way both sexes think about women. Not only has it become the dominant viewpoint on the issue in the United States, but it has succeeded in reframing the controversy. There are now only two positions: either you agree that competition for women is desirable and long overdue or you are part of a patriarchal structure that believes only men have a right to be successful. This kind of rhetoric, combined with a legitimate impatience with sex-based discrimination, has led women to readjust not only their behavior but their cognitive and emotional response to the idea of competing.
Now it may be argued that women in competitive cultures have always competed—for men, for the status of being most attractive, and so on.22 What is new is the sheer intensity of the competitive drive, the absence of shame or hesitation, the fact that women are now competing with men, and the shift to the public arena (notably, the marketplace). Consider some examples of the last. A recent advertisement for Fortune magazine, which bore the legend, “Every success story starts with a kid who hated to lose,” featured a photograph of an unhappy little girl in a baseball uniform. Pro-competition magazines for businesswomen, like Savvy and Working Woman, are prospering. Women increasingly are “modeling themselves after the hard-driving men who have preceded them on the fast track . . . with single-mindedness that can disrupt families and friendships,” according to an article that profiles investment banker Karen Valenstein.23 (Valenstein is quoted as praising her mentor, who “‘taught me the words gelt and shmuck. I figured out for myself that if you don’t have any you are one.’”)24
It may not be terribly important in itself, but fashion in the business world reflects this transformation. Women bought 24 million suits in 1984,25 suggesting a style of dress that is conservative, asexual, “powerful,” and that can even include shoulder pads. Clearly the idea is to look as much like a man as possible. Again, clothing is merely the outward manifestation of a rush to emulate male, competitive models of success. One writer remarks that “so many of the women I know are driven people, more afraid of failure than success, more afraid of complacency than of competition, more afraid of one another’s successes than of the successes of the men in their lives.”26 The wistful preference for noncompetitive success—such as the sentiment in this chapter’s epigraph—now tends to be mocked rather than taken seriously.
Precisely the same thing is happening in sports, and, again, it is difficult to find a single voice raised in dissent. “Whether they change reluctantly or enthusiastically,” one observer reports, “women’s athletic programs look more like men’s athletic programs every year. . . . Excelling at the highest levels of competition is emerging as the first commandment of women’s sports.”27 In March 1985, Ms. magazine featured a musclebound female body builder on its cover; several months later, editor Gloria Steinem interviewed another body builder—this one boasting a physique that seemed literally indistinguishable from that of a male body builder.
The presentation of women in cinema is another good index of the cultural conversion. Indisputably, females still appear as little more than window dressing in many contemporary movies—a sidekick to comfort the hero or cheer him on or be rescued by him, someone to be ogled or seduced. But to the extent there has been a departure from this sexist tradition, it has chiefly been to feature women in the same dismal roles that men have hitherto occupied. In 1968, Funny Girl depicted a love story in which Barbra Streisand as Fanny Brice clowned and swooned, allowing Omar Sharif to chuckle at her antics and indulge her girlish whims. She was a girl who won her man. Fifteen years later, in Yentl, Streisand played a girl who became a man. This is a literalization of what was beginning to happen in American film by the early 1980s. In Flashdance and Heart Like a Wheel, for example, women overcome considerable obstacles to win, enthusiastically embracing a competitive dream, no matter what the cost. They derive their fulfillment from triumphing over others, becoming, in effect, men with higher voices. In Heart Like a Wheel, the heroine’s private life is in a shambles by the time she brings home the trophy as a victorious race car driver. Hearts don’t win, so they have to be transformed into wheels. The story has been told a thousand times before, of course, only with men at the controls. We are supposed to cheer the woman who insists that it’s her turn to drive.
In real life, the conversion to competitiveness can, at the risk of some oversimplification, be broken down into three stages. At the beginning, a woman resists the whole enterprise of competition. In the second stage, she competes, but with serious misgivings: “I had no choice,” she might apologize to someone she has stepped on. Finally, her feelings and beliefs catch up to her behavior. She internalizes the competitive values, stops feeling conflicted about what she is doing, and rids herself of guilt. This last stage is precisely what women are urged to reach. Workshops and seminars, books and articles, therapy sessions and informal support groups, all encourage women to compete without reserve. Moreover, these exhortations often use language such as “Accept your own competitiveness!” in order to disguise the conversion as self-discovery.<
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There has always been opposition to this model, but it seems lately to have been drowned out by the pro-competition clamor until only a few lonely voices of protest are audible. I want to add my own in support of the dissident position. This perspective does not deny the reality of sexism; it asserts that becoming competitive is a spurious and unhelpful response to it. It resists the pseudofeminist posture—I think this blunt label is warranted—which seeks the liberation of women through the imitation of men. It does not object to androgyny in the name of la différence but instead to the particular male values, such as competition, that women are being encouraged to adopt. It rejects the implicit motto of pseudofeminism: If you can’t join them, beat them.
A commitment to relationship, an other-regarding posture that places special emphasis on the connections between people, traditionally has been a signal feature of women’s worldview. In the choice between competition and relationship—and it is a choice, as I tried to show in chapter 6—women have affirmed the latter.28 Carol Gilligan’s 1982 book, In a Different Voice, represents one of the most lucid descriptions (and, if one reads between the lines, defenses) of this orientation. She calls it the “feminine voice,” noting that it is predominantly found among women but is not necessarily beyond the reach of men. Let me offer three examples of how this concern with relationship plays itself out and how it usually has been regarded.
The first case is the central focus of Gilligan’s book: moral development. Some theorists have pronounced women less sophisticated in their ethical thinking, by which they mean that women are less likely to resolve dilemmas in accordance with abstract notions of rights and duties. Women have tended to think in terms of the obligations that flow from a sensitivity to our interdependence. While girls approach moral problems by wondering how to avoid hurting people, boys more often see the whole enterprise as “sort of like a math problem with humans,” in the words of one eleven-year-old subject.29 Gilligan’s point is that the allegedly universal standards of moral development, according to which women have been found wanting, are actually based on an implicitly male-oriented model. Rather than trying to conform to it, perhaps women and men alike should consider the value of an ethical orientation enunciated in the feminine voice. In Gilligan’s words:
