How Does Female Competition Differ From Male Competition?

David Geary says female competition runs through social networks inside the institutions men build, while male competition builds the coalitions, the technology, and the institutions.

Men start with kin-based coalitions, then pull in everyone who shares a language when stress rises, and later use religion or another ideology to make the groups larger. Conflict drives the advances, including drone and robot use in the Ukrainian war, and it drives how societies organize. As societies expand, men sort into a political class, a military class, an ideological class, and an entrepreneurial class, each a niche for competition, and they build coalitions of men to run the institutions.

Women are embedded in the institutions. The evolved strategy is a social network inside the group that provides social support and lets women extract resources from a husband or from other people they are connected to. Women work individual relationships, tracking who is friends with whom, who is a coalitional partner, and who is in a conflict, and they use the information to manipulate and improve their own status in the group.