Women can be more competitive than men, a Harvard study has found.

Scientists discovered that women were more competitive with other women than men are with other men, upending decades of stereotypes.

“I must admit the findings stunned me,” study author Dr Joyce Benenson, a human evolutionary biologist at Harvard, told The Sunday Telegraph.

“The accepted wisdom both within evolutionary biology and psychology is that men are the more competitive sex.”

However, Dr Benenson also found the results only applied for same sex assessments. “Men are more competitive towards women than women are towards men,” she said.

The scientists have notyet found out why women are more competitive with each other than men are, but speculate it may be to do with raising children. “We do not know why this is, but theoretically it is likely that women with children need resources more than men with children do,” Dr Benenson explains. “Women generally are the primary caregivers around the world. Therefore, women would be more envious than men of someone with lots of resources that they did not have.

“The implications of the results for understanding human society are important in that they indicate that while women and men employ different competitive strategies and often pursue different goals, women may have an even greater motivation to compete with same-sex peers than men,” the researchers write in their study, published in Scientific Reports.

“Thus, it seems reasonable that women may be more envious than men of same-sex peers who are better able to care for their children.”

The Sunday Telegraph, London