Ovulating Women More Likely to
Downplay the Looks of Other Females

The next time that special woman in your life mercilessly attacks the character of the females around her you might want to take notice. According to a new study, hell hath no fury like a woman ovulating.

"When a female finds a potentially good mate she will compete for him, and do so most fiercely when it is critical for conception," says York University researcher Maryanne Fisher. Whereas intrasexual competition between men can often lead to a punch-up, women are more skilled at what Fisher calls indirect aggression.

"Women are much more likely to gossip or ostracize," said Fisher in an interview from Halifax. Topics of gossip might include another woman's looks, her promiscuous nature, or her inability to bear children.

To test the theory, published in the Royal Society's online journal Biology Letters, Fisher asked 57 female first-year university students to rate the attractiveness of photographs of other students' faces taken several years before.

Afterwards, they were asked to provide information about their ovulatory cycle. Women rated the attractiveness of the same female faces higher when their fertility was at its lowest.

When the participants were told afterward of the purpose of the study, many of them agreed with the findings.

"Some of them, who are quite in tune with their bodies, would say things like 'I notice I'm a bit more catty when I'm ovulating,"' said Fisher.

But what about men? Their reproductive capabilities aren't limited to a couple of days a month, and they practice a much more direct form of aggression. Are they always on the warpath?

"I don't think so," said Martin Daly, co-author of a study called Risk-taking, Intrasexual Competition, and Homicide.

"There's fairly good evidence that men become less dangerous creatures when they're married then if they're single," Daly said from his office at Hamilton's McMaster University. "Being currently mated takes you out of the game, and presumably out of the inclination to engage in particularly dangerous competition."

And previous studies have shown that men who are active in the dating game will also disparage the competition in areas they believe women care about.

"If women care about men being ambitious up-and-comers then the way guys disparage other guys is by saying he's lazy and will never amount to anything," said Daly. It follows that if a man cares about faithfulness, then the quickest way for a woman to shoot a rival down is to brand her promiscuous.

So does this mean that mean-spirited, nasty comments can be an effective way of determining when a woman's fertile?

"It might be, except that I think you're going to see that women derogate all the time, they just might be more pronounced in their derogation" when fertile, said Fisher. "It might be a very subtle thing to notice in day to day life."