The Complex Dance for Social Dominance Between Male and Female Leaders

metalbird

Tool-Bearing Hominid
Tool-Bearing Hominid
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Sep 20, 2015
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When we talk about being an "Alpha" male or female, we're referring to one of two things:
The role of "most dominant" in a particular group or social environment. The "Alpha" of a particular pack.
or
The general character and attribute set that gives a person a greater propensity to "rise up" in the social hierarchy, making it more likely for them to wind up in leadership positions.

Now, from my experience, a sexually homogeneous group is a straightforward hierarchy. Everybody knows who the head cheerleader is, or the captain of the football team. And even once you start mixing the sexes in social environments, there is often still a clear cut leader, either a male or a female. But what happens when a male and a female find themselves competing for the top leadership role in a particular group? It gets a lot more complicated and, often, nasty.

For one thing, there's a lot more at stake. When a male and a female vie for social dominance of a group, it's not just about deciding who's in charge. It determines:
  • Will this group be a matriarchy or a patriarchy? These models function differently, and people are subconsciously aware of that.
  • Who stays and who goes? Dominance disputes between members of the same sex tend to be resolved fairly quickly and subtly, and the loser falls in line, often with still relatively high social standing. The more complex hetero disputes often take a while to show a clear victor, and once one person wins out, the loser is often forced to choose between leaving the group entirely, or taking a very, very low place on the totem pole.

Think of the campaign competition of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton for President for example. The fact that a male and a female were on opposite sides of the ballot made the election process many times more heated and complex, just because of the simple "Battle of the Sexes" factor.

Some observations I've made from personal experience are:
  • Women get a huge handicap boost from the start. I think this is mostly due to the Peacock factor -- fighting with a penalty is impressive. Because it is still much more common in Western society for men to be the leaders, anytime a woman takes a shot at the corner office, it's automatically much more impressive, because she's seen from the beginning as both the underdog, and having more mojo for standing up.
  • Small children are much more likely to gravitate towards female leaders, while older people are much more likely to gravitate towards male leaders, with a fairly linear transition between the two extremes. Middle aged people seem to have the least inherent bias towards either matriarchy or patriarchy, while young adults still prefer females more than males, usually.
  • The woman picks the rules, or the "weapons of the duel," so to speak. If the man can beat the woman at her own game, he'll clobber her in the eyes of the crowd. If the woman manages to beat the man in his own frame, she wins hands down. But if the woman loses the man's game, it's not nearly as big of a loss as if the man loses in the woman's frame.
  • Men get a huge advantage in particular settings. I can't readily define these settings, but there's definitely still a strong bias in favor of men for certain, usually official, roles.

What do you guys think?
 

Chase

Chieftan
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tribal-elder
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metalbird-

This is a fascinating theory. I hadn't given this much thought before.

When I look back, it's been my experience, at least in Western social competition, that when a male and female compete for the alpha role, the two have different desired end states:

  • The male, if winner, seeks to retain the vanquished female as an ally
  • The female, if winner, seeks to turn the vanquished male into a subordinate

However, if the male wins, the female is spiteful and usually will not ally with the male, and instead seeks to undermine him.

Meanwhile, if the female wins, the male will chafe at the subordinate role the female attempts to place him in, and usually ultimately leaves the group.

I suspect this has to do with the male-female dynamic:

  • A male who overcomes a female in a group power struggle will typically overcome her the same way he would a male: by overtly questioning her competence, showing her up with superior output, and basically making her look obviously bad in comparison. The social reputation wringer he takes her through causes her to hate his guts (auto-rejection) and become spiteful. She also respects him less for not turning her into a full-on subordinate. When women compete, they typically do so in a much more gracile, nuanced way, gently positioning themselves as superior rather than bludgeoning their adversary the way males tend to. But then assume clear superior-inferior roles after.
  • A female who overcomes a male in a group power struggle, on the other hand, loses respect for him, the way all women lose respect for all men who rank beneath them in power. A man like this is not an "ally"; women don't really do allies. Men do allies, where we respect that we may have vanquished a man in one contest, but that doesn't mean we are necessarily always going to be superior to him, and that he is powerful enough to treat as almost an equal. Women don't do allies though. With women, you are either their superior or their inferior.

The end result is a victorious man wants a vanquished woman as an ally, a role she wants nothing to do with due to the rude way she feels he overcame her and his overly-generous treatment of her as ally instead of subordinate (which she views as weak and not proper conduct for a victor). Meanwhile a victorious woman wants a vanquished man as a subordinate, a role he wants nothing to do with because it fails to respect him as the "almost as good" power level he knows he is at, and instead bumps him down to a far more subservient role.

So, the vanquished female backstabs and undermines, while the vanquished male checks out and soon leaves.

Hmm. How interesting.

Chase
 
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