Females show strong capacity for aggression.

Males carry a hard-earned reputation as the more physically aggressive sex, but the female capacity for aggression and violence is surprisingly strong, according to several studies presented in Chicago last week at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association.

"Female aggression has been dismissed and minimized by many reserchers, [because] it's not as frequent or as intense as male aggression," asserts Victoria K. Burbank of the University of California, Davis.

Physical aggression among preschool-aged girls escalates sharply in particular cultures, reports Carol Lauer of Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla. Lauer finds that girls between 1 1/2 and 4 years old average fewer fights than boys of the] same age in the United States, and that Israeli girls so fight less than their male counterparts. However, Israeli girls start fights and use physical aggression about 20 percent more often than do U.S. boys, she reports.

"Girls and boys follow cultural dictates that can overwhelm any genetic influences on aggressive behavior," she concludes.

Lauer logged 1,900 hours of observation with groups of youngsters attending a U.S. daycare center and others living on an Israeli Kibbutz. The project involved a total of 160 children.

Although average gender differences in physical aggression often fell short of statistical significance in the small groups she studied, Lauer says children in both countries fought for the same reasons. Hostilities broke out most often over access to places or things, followed by aggressive incidents arising from rough-and-tumble play. Boys displayed a greater tendency to attack another child for no apparent reason, she notes.

Lauer suggests that the heightened physical aggression of Israeli boys and girls reflects the influence of living in a country that has continually prepared for war for more than 40 years. Israeli adults readily defend themselves physically and often fight over matters that seem trivial to visitors from the United States, such as saving a place in line at the grocery store, she points out.

Ethnographic work among adolescent gangs in working-class neighborhoods of Chihuahua, Mexico, yields considerable evidence of female participation in fighting and violence, says Laura L. Cummings of the University of Arizona in Tucson. The gangs she studied belong to a tough youth culture known as cholos.

A girl undergoing initiation into a gang typically engages in a fistfight with an established female gang member, just as a male initiate must spar with a male member, Cummings says. When a male gang members find themselves outnumbered in a fight with rivals, their female compatriots immediately join the fray. Groups of knife-wielding, rock-throwing girls from a rival gangs also engage in frequent brawls with each other, but male gang members stay out of those scuffles, Cummings says.

"These observations run counter to the widespread stereotype of passive Latin American women," she remarks.

In Finland, where women have long held positions of power in politics and the workplace, adolescent girls used direct physical or verbal aggression less often than do boys, but rely much more on "indirect aggression," reports Kaj Bjorkqvist of the University of Turku, Finland. Bjorkqvist and his colleagues interviewed several hundred high school students, asking each to rate every other student in his or her classroom on a list of aggressive behaviors.

Girls garnered the bulk of reports citing acts of indirect aggression, such as gossiping, breaking confidence, writing nasty notes about others and manipulating another person to do one's "dirty work." Teenage girls in Findland prove as aggressive as teenage boys when researchers combine both direct and indirect aggression, Bjorkqvist says.

He and his co-workers have initiated similar studies of teenagers in India, Japan, the United States, Israel, Poland, Italy and Mexico.