2026-05-31
Update
2026-05-30
What does female-coded ambition look like?
Disclaimer
- personal
- target audience - strictly myself
Main
- I think my earlier hint to go read books on female psychology was a bad idea, and this is a better idea. What does female-coded ambition look like?
- I don't just mean, which fields do women study more? For that you can just google the stats, women are more into chem and bio, men into math and physics, women into psychology and education, etc.
- I mean something deeper, like, why are some women ambitious in the first place?
- Men naturally compete against other men. One obvious reason being to climb the status hierarchy and attract women. This is not the only reason men compete against each other professionally, but it is one reason.
- Why do women compete?
- Okay yes, definitely a lot of women compete on looks. That explains why some women would go into makeup/fashion or acting or singing or similar. In general, the entertainment industry. Looks is a natural status heirarchy women will climb to compete for men. But what else, besides this? Not all women compete on looks alone.
- I don't know. How many women even are truly ambitious beyond just achieving bare minimum financial independence? How many women does the world allow to be truly ambitious? Honestly my first question should have been that lmao.
- Lol reminds me of aella's whole sex thingie, yes I can see why an atypical woman might want to optimise hard on having good sex.
- Definitely some women are fine with attaching themselves to a powerful man, and improving this person's decision-making or emotional intelligence or similar. Not all women want a "main character" role.
Main 2
- I should go hunt for some books on this maybe. This seems like a better topic to read about.
Main 3
- I guess within STEM, women are more into experimental lab work? Like chem or bio. But why? Men are more likely into purely theoretical fields, like theoretical CS, or pure math, or theoretical physics.
- Wait, why are the religious leaders men? This makes no sense to me. If I was blinded from real world data, I would have actually predicted more women as religious leaders than men.
- I understand why self-made billionaire is one of the most male-coded professions to exist. Even politicians are more likely to be women than billionaires, because it is a more people-oriented profession. Religious leaders are even more community-oriented, so my natural guess would have been that women are even more suited for it?
- Or is it simply that religious leaders also need to be capable of violence to defend their ingroup, and hence they're more male? I don't know, this does not track.
- Hinduism is the only major traditional religion with women as gods tbh. Islam, Christianity and Buddhism are all male.
- (I will avoid publicly going into details.)
- Okay so there's obviously the whole privilege thing of like, for most of human history, women weren't exactly allowed to live very solitary individualist lives. And this seems like an important step to becoming a religious leader.
- Lol TIL heaven's gate was significantly run by a woman.
- note to self - maybe read more about ayn rand. It's actually quite countersignalling for a philosophy like hers to be created by a woman. Idk how many women follow Ayn Rand today though, it seems to be mostly men who follow it?
- I should also consider selection effects. Maybe philosophies invented by women just didn't become as popular because no king/politician/billionaires was willing to offer patronage to it?
- Okay ursula le guin definitely counts, she has lot of followers.
- I don't know, I need to study this more systematically, not using just anecdotes.
Reddit is annoying
- Reddit is busy arguing nature versus nurture, and discrimination and so on, for which fields people go into.
- I don't want to understand which fields people go into, I want to understand why they go into those fields. Like, a
male physicist and a female physicist could be there for entirely different reasons. This is not mentioned. Ugh
- Okay so this should maybe also be a survey question? Couldn't hurt, if I can pay for it.
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