Two thoughts:

1. Yep, don't like where you rank. Then, improve yourself. Work harder/better/smarter to move up.

2. Fell in rank? Learn to count your blessings. At least, she is still on the list.

Funny, my wife and I watch a show called "Beat Bobby Flay" in which guest chefs try to win cooking competitions against Bobby Flay. She complains constantly that Bobby is "mean" and that it isn't "fair" that he wins all the time. Boo hoo, I explain, he's a winner and I don't care about the losers.

Direct competition is *mean* however passive aggressively stabbing your competition in the back, or slipping arsenic in hef tea, is perfectly acceptable.

I don't know what the solution is... don't make these lists include women?

There should be separate lists for every woman, so each can have her own on which she ranks #1.

Isab, you are right. Women compete covertly.

Women Olympic Athletes seem to be able to compete for rankings.

Oh, I forgot, Women Olympic Athletes only compete against women, not men.

However, our President, who makes decisions based on science, has rejected a $36 million dollar study by the Marines that determined mixed sex combat units are 70% less effective. I suspect that is largely because women are not "designed" for combat.

So we have a subjective list and people get upset because someone's opinion changes?

I was more struck by the concept that this list was supposed to advance uteri. How the heck was it supposed to do that?

Do you know the difference between nine year-old boys and Ms. Min? Nine year-old boys know that, in life, you win some and you lose some. You celebrate the wins, you suck it up after the losses, and there's nothing worse than a sore loser.

Absolutely right about the 9-year-old boys. Note that boys hang out in groups -- competiting -- and girls tend to pair up.

It's women like this that make it bad for the rest of us who have no problem competing against men and don't cry when we lose.

Someone needs to smack her with a clue-by-four.

Someone needs to smack her with a clue-by-four.

alt.tasteless? alt.support.childfree?

I recognize a voice . . .

"an influential woman in the entertainment industry who burst into tears and left a red-carpet event because her rank on the Hollywood Reporter's top 100 women in entertainment list had fallen from the previous year"

They have medication for that.

I am very competitive and I do not get offended easily. Most of my female friends are super competitive also and not prone to hurt feelings. I also have surrounded myself with a group of women who support one another and don't backstab. Maybe we're the minority.

If there is a good guy in a group of men who is obviously superior on the task at hand, I have seen men cajole him into being the leader when he is reluctant. Why? Because men know that a group with a good leader is better off which means they are better off.

Thank you for posting this. I now understand why, growing up, I had trouble making/keeping friends who were girls. I tended to get along much better with the boys - or with girls 2+ years older or younger than me.

Of course, I seem to be somewhat of an outlier in the female group - having no interest in shoes beyond "are they comfortable?"

I am, however, competitive to a fault, and I can see the down side to that, now that I'm a parent. I have serious trouble taking a back seat, say, in a game - not to let my kids with (that's so wrong) but perhaps to make a move to teach them something.

Shannon, that's interesting. It's true that the reaction you're more likely to get from a man is, "Oh yeah? Well, I'll show them!" And you get that from a small percentage of women too, such as yourself. It's motivating factor.

Min was right about one thing: the list was a novelty act. It's along the same lines of "the first person of ethnicity X to do Y"; maybe useful information if you're a Jeopardy! contestant, but otherwise it tells you nothing meaningful because it's isolated from the larger context.