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From: welsch@houxu.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.women
Subject: Some thoughts on Competition
Message-ID: <198@houxu.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 7-Sep-83 09:15:55 EDT
Article-I.D.: houxu.198
Posted: Wed Sep  7 09:15:55 1983
Date-Received: Wed, 7-Sep-83 15:07:46 EDT
Organization: Bell Labs, Holmdel NJ
Lines: 44

I just finished reading an article where the author made the
statement that "women should be encouraged to compete."  I have
very ambivalent thoughts about this statement.   I would rather
see the statements "women who are by nature competitive should be
encouraged to compete" and "men who are by nature not
competitive should be encouraged not to compete."  I am speaking
from the viewpoint of a man who is not competitive.

There are two implicit assumptions being made by the statement
"women should be encouraged to compete."  The first is that
competitiveness as a trait is better than non-competitiveness .
Competition taken to extremes stinks and there are many
situations where competition is not desirable.  A classic
example of where a blend of competitiveness and
non-competitiveness is on teams that compete against other
teams.  There, the team as a whole must be competitive, but it
is undesirable for individual members of the team to compete
against other.  On athletic teams one often hears of the
leadership qualities that a player brings to a team that do not
show up in the statistics or the no-name team that makes it to
the playoffs.

The second implicit assumption is that "if only women would
change to be like men then women would succeed in this male
dominated world." Yes that is probably true. I question, though,
if this is desirable, particularly in with respect to a
"competitiveness" trait. Perhaps, men should be trained to
reward team building, helpfulness, ability to inspire, general
excellence, and ability to support instead of only
competitiveness. Maybe men should change to value traits
commonly associated with women, whether a man or a woman has the
trait.

Some caveats - I am not saying that men are be nature more or
less competitive than women, or that men have certain traits in
greater abundance than women. That is a separate argument.  I am
saying that many traits associated with women are not as highly
valued by "Western Culture" as many traits associated with men.
I am also saying that this evaluation is in many cases wrong and
that societies values should change.  Competitiveness is one
example.

				Larry Welsch
				houxu!welsch