Earlier quoted context omitted.
What makes you think women, as a whole entire gender of people, enjoy making other people feel inadequate? Perhaps if she's going to wear a ring for the rest of her life, she wants it to be a nice ring that is color neutral. Perhaps she doesn't want something cheap and easily replaceable acting as a symbol for your marriage.
It's relevant not simply to "an entire gender", but to the whole world of people, primates and most other animals. It's because social status by definition is a zero-sum game. For status symbols, the absolute value is irrelevant; but what matters is the value relative to your peers.
+1 for social status as zero-sum game. Imagine your social status if you jumped back 2,000 years and could still conduct your current lifestyle: being able to feed yourself for a week from only a fews hours of labour; travel across the Atlantic in a 8 hours at the cost of one weeks labour; access all human knowledge in seconds at near zero cost.