The Urge to Win

NY Times ^ | May 31, 2005 | JOHN TIERNEY

[neverdem]

After I wrote about research showing that women have less appetite for competition that men do, a number of women wrote to inform me that they're just as competitive as any guy. If the tone of their letters is any indication, I have no doubt they are.

Nor do researchers doubt that such women exist. As Danica Patrick showed in the Indianapolis 500, some women can successfully compete with men at the highest level. But why aren't there more of them?

Discrimination is one big reason, because men have traditionally made the rules to suit themselves and keep out women. But if you think that leveling the playing field would eliminate gender disparities, consider an unintentional experiment conducted in the Scrabble world, which is hardly a hostile environment for women.

For a quarter-century, women have outnumbered men at Scrabble clubs and tournaments in America, but a woman has won the national championship only once, and all the world champions have been men. Among the world's 50 top-ranked players, typically about 45 are men.

The top players, both male and female, point to a simple explanation for the disparity: more men are willing to do whatever it takes to reach the top. You need more than intelligence and a good vocabulary to become champion. You have to spend hours a day learning words like "khat," doing computerized drills and memorizing long lists of letter combinations, called alphagrams, that can form high-scoring seven-letter words.

Suppose you draw the letters AELNRST. A mid-level player could shuffle the tiles for a while and find one or two seven-letter words. If the T in that rack were a U instead, the player might spend a couple of minutes fruitlessly looking for an anagram of AELNRSU.

[kenavi]

Somehow, what I remember most about my Mom isn't that she was willing to do anything to "win".

Yet, what she did for the good of her kids and her family was amazing, including becoming a top saleswoman for the phone co. But that never seemed important to her when we were growing up.

I shudder for our culture if the ideals of fatherhood and motherhood get superceded by overweening ambition.

[sageb1]

They already did...and therein lies the problem.

[driftless]

Speaking of moms and women playing Scrabble, my mother was/is an excellent player and one who I rarely beat. I say this because I'm a pretty good Scrabble player myself. It's not that women can't compete and beat men or that discrimination prevents them from doing so. I've found that simply what intrigues men does not necessarily intrigue women. That should be obvious to all the lib why-don't-women-compete-with-men-equally liberal morons.

Many men are like my son-in-law who is a computer whiz and a Star Wars fanatic with a major F. How many women are combination Star Wars/computer geeks? I'd say very few. I'd say men outnumber women disproportionately in this category. However I've also found that many more women than men will be able to tell you why a particular persons clothes, furniture, etc. don't match. Vive le difference.

[CatoRenasci]

The New York Times, in a stunning revelation, discovers the obvious: men and women are different in their appetites for risk (competition being a form of acceptance of risk).

Of course, the Times will never draw the equally stunningly obvious corollaries:

1. Organizations (and societies) have changed dramatically over the past 30 years as they have increasingly accommodated women's concerns and approaches, emphasizing process over results, becoming increasingly risk averse.

2. Socialism's emotional appeal, in the main, fundamentally consists of risk aversion.

2. Organizations (and societies) that are obsessively risk averse are not, on the whole, successful.

[gwbgirl]

Just because some women are as competitive as men, doesn't mean all women are ... or should be ... or want to be. If a handful of gals want to play rough in a man's world, that's fine, but don't force me to in the name of "social equality."