Women-are-wonderful effect
The women-are-wonderful effect (WAW) is the phenomenon that people associate more positive attributes with women than with men. The phrase was coined by researcher...
Women-are-wonderful effect
The women-are-wonderful effect (WAW) is the phenomenon that people associate more positive attributes with women than with men. The phrase was coined by researcher Alice Eagly and Antonio Mladinic in 1994 after finding that both male and especially female participants tend to assign positive traits to women.[1][2][3] Women themselves find women even more wonderful than do men; in fact, the tendency to give members of one's own sex more positive evaluations, i.e. in-group preference, is 4.5 times higher in women.[4]
Women are actually worse in many regards
Women are frequently regarded as more empathetic, less violent, more nurturing, loyal and nice etc., science has found women to be actually worse than men in many regards. For example:- Women more often initiate and perpetrate intimate partner violence (though, being physically weaker, they inflict less harm).[5]
- Women are less cooperative with their own sex.[6]
- Women in high-status positions are less generous.[7]
- Women report more same-sex conflicts and take longer for conflict resolution.[8]
- Women more often than men slut-shame other women.[9]
- Women have a stronger anti-female bias in peer review.[10]
- Interrupt other women more than do men.[11]
- Females more likely to socially exclude others, a difference already emerging during childhood.[12]
- Female gossip has been a concern throughout history.[13]
- Queens were more likely to wage war than kings.[14]
- Women are thought to be less loyal to their own group,[15] as evidenced by French women adoring German soldiers.[16]
- At least some women also love criminals and fantasize about being raped.
- Women lose their love a lot sooner in terms of interest in sex, pointing to a less intense, more extractive/utilitarian and fleeting love style.[17]
- Women yield nearly the same rate of affairs as men, with the gap closing in recent times.[18]
- An affair for women more often means actually falling in love with the new partner and leaving their previous one.[19]
- Some suggest there is a biochemical natural four-year sexual cycle for the human female, at the end of which it is their natural tendency to “liberate” themselves from her mate.[20] This is in line with divorce statistics where women are the initiator 75% of the time (though that may also be explained by divorce laws being stacked against men).[20] Overall, this points to a female sexuality that appears to be stuck in a more r-selected past despite being more coy and choosy during the initiation of a relationship.
- Women also have a slightly lower IQ and worse spatial abilites (though very similar general intelligence, g, and slightly better verbal abilities).[21]
- Women are less emotionally stable and more childish.[22]
- Women are much more likely engage in mass hysteria.[23]
- Women are physically weaker (implying they are worse hunters and fighters).[24]
- Women hare an (unwarrantedly) higher in-group preference bias.[4]
- Women have historically always been dependent on men.[25]
- Women are likely also overall more sneaky as evidenced e.g. by more often lying in certain regards, more often having a pathological urge to steal (kleptomania) and feigning orgasms (see female sneakiness).
- Female scientists were found to commit scientific fraud just as often as male scientists,[26][27] but this result may be confounded by women having less agency over research decisions.
- Women are actually not consistently more empathetic.[28]
- Indirect aggression among adolescents.[29]
- Spite, e.g. willfully burning others without self-interest nor altruism in economic game.[30]
Evolution
The authors suggested that the bias comes from the association between women and nurturing characteristics, that their women's nurturing is seen as inherently positive and indulgent.The in-group bias, i.e. women regarding each other as (a lot) more wonderful than men, may derive from female neoteny, namely their childishness evoking mothering adaptations in other women.
It may also come from men having selected women who stick to themselves (and stick fingers into each other) and find other men uninteresting. This helps men to avoid getting cuckolded. This is why women are seen to form flocks and spend time with each other on the toilet etc.
The women-are-wonderful effect might also be related to women's tendency to rate men's physical attractiveness as worse, which might be born from an inclination to avoid initiating a relationship and hence bearing the responsibility, making it extraordinarily easy to quash unwanted sexual approaches.[31]
Conversely a better evaluation of women by men may stem from men being more strongly drawn to women than vice-versa due to Bateman's principle, expressing in a higher male sex drive.
With runaway virtue signaling due to the prevalence of feminism lots of men are pressured to be nice to women which possibly only increases their sexual frustration, making them virtue signal about women's superiority even more.
An evolutionary explanation for women being actually worse in almost all regards may stem from the fact that they have reproduced twice as reliably, so they have been subject to less evolutionary pressure, so women are in that sense more inbred, less honed by nature. Men are nature's experiments, women are mere selectors. This might explain why women's sexuality also seems to be stuck in a more feral past. It has not evolved much since then as most women have reproduced no matter how they acted.
