According to our collective imagination, diversity has many effects on how a group works together. It is often said that when women come into traditionally male environments, people listen more, work together better, and are more peaceful. On the other hand, traditionally female environments benefit from the presence of men to bring more logic to relationships and divert attention from female rivalries…

Our essentialist stereotypes are like these sets of expectations regarding diversity. But what really happens? Do conversations really take a different turn when women and men play on the same field?

What happens when women and men chase the same prize?

Researchers from the Australian National University, Seinan Gakuin University in Japan and the IZA Centre for Economic Research in Germany wanted to find out.

They studied the competitive behavior of women and men depending on whether they are confronted with challengers of the same sex or of both sexes. For the field of this study, they chose an ultra-popular sport in Japan: jet skiing, and its most popular competition, the Kyotei race. The particularity of this sporting challenge, which requires excellent physical condition, good mental health and intensive training, is that it is mixed: women (who account for 13% of competitors) and men aim for the same medal!

Women are more competitive with each other; men are more aggressive with women who challenge them

The researchers observed the strategies and processes of competition leaders, where the pressure is felt most acutely. With only male rivals, women are much less aggressive than when they are challenged by one or more female opponents. The increased competitiveness triggered when one or more women threaten their success, and they are inclined to break the rules, to the point of risking a sanction or even disqualification.

Women are much more competitive with each other than when they face men. They even underperform when they are in contention for victory alongside male competitors.

The glass ceiling puts pressure on women to be more aggressive to other women rather than men

For the authors of the study, these observations can be transposed to other worlds than sport, and are particularly useful for analyzing the effects of gender diversity on behavior in the context of other types of competition or in competitive workplaces. The hypothesis they formulate is that cultural stereotypes of masculinity and femininity make the victory of a woman over a man less tolerable than the victory of a man over a man.

As for the fact that women are more aggressive with each other than they are with men, it doesn’t seem, as is sometimes thought, to be an expression of the Queen Bee Syndrome (which basically posits that “women in positions of power treat subordinate women worse than they do men”) but the result of an integrated prediction of their failure in a situation of gender diversity that restricts the scope of their competitiveness to female-female relationships. In other words, the glass ceiling creates a kind of “housing crisis” in the few narrow fields where women are inevitably in the majority, provoking internal aggressiveness within a situation of forced isolation.

New players around the table, new rules of the game?

These findings (counterintuitive as they are) challenge both the traditional notion that competitiveness is an inherently masculine trait (since it appears to be situational factors, rather than the gender of those involved, that trigger and sustain it) and the idealistic assumptions about the benefits of gender diversity for workplace equality and team dynamics. That said, none of this should be taken as grounds for abandoning the goal of shared leadership and responsibility.

On the contrary, they invite us to think about how to transform the rules of the game when new players arrive on the scene. Redefining competition, its rules, its practices and even its objectives; rethinking performance, its criteria, its paths, its evaluation methods; re-examining success, its means, its manifestations and rewards, its articulation between the individual project and the collective project, are all necessary to make diversity a real factor of inclusion. And inclusion, as we know, is about allowing all members of a group to express who they are, so they can give their very best.