Alpha Girls: Understanding the New American Girl and How She Is Changing the World - Hardcover

DAN KINDLON, PhD, is a clinical and research psychologist specializing in the behavioral problems of children and adolescents. He teaches child psychology at Harvard; lectures widely to groups of parents, educators, and mental health professionals; and is the author of numerous scientific journal articles and three books including the New York Times bestseller Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Lives of Boys (coauthored with Michael Thompson). He lives near Boston.

CHAPTER ONE

DAUGHTERS OF THE REVOLUTION

6:00 p.m. The January evening in Atlanta, Georgia, is unseasonably cold as four upperclasswomen from St. Ann's, an all-girls prep school, drive to the municipal courthouse. They are on their way to a fourth-round match of the National High School Mock Trial Championship.1 The Mock Trial was founded in 1984 to give high school students a taste of America's judicial system, and, perhaps, kindle their ambition to become lawyers and judges.

The Mock Trial case this year, The State v. Terry Woodward, is based on an actual lawsuit that went to trial and was posted on the Georgia Bar Association's Web site in November as a pdf file. Trial teams across the state downloaded it and began studying intently, preparing to do battle in court.

The case involved the leader of a country music band who allegedly murdered the group's former manager in a dispute over royalties.

Before sending it out to students, volunteer attorneys doctored the case, planting loopholes in both sides. Teams alternate in each round as the defense and prosecution. The Mock Trial isn't about who wins or loses, but which team argues most effectively. The students need to understand rules of evidence, prepare opening and closing statements, and present cogent objections. Teams are awarded points by a panel of three volunteer jurors, attorneys chosen by the Young Lawyers Association, which runs the program. The court is presided over by a volunteer attorney.

Tonight the St. Ann's girls will face their number-one rival, St. Luke's, an all-boy's school, for the city championship. If they win city, they advance to state. They are St. Ann's A Team, and they know they're in for a fight. The boys have already beaten St. Ann's B Team, who are younger and less experienced.

"We know the boys will be cocky," says Nora, one of the team's attorneys, who is hoping to attend Dartmouth next fall. "We eat lightly before the trial--we're keyed up and nervous and we don't want throw up in court. To get in the mood for the case, we put good country music on the car stereo. We play the Dixie Chicks really loud, sing along, and get pumped up. We like the Dixie Chicks because they're adversarial."

Tonight, Nora and her colleagues will argue for the defense. That suits her co-consul, Walker, whose nickname is Winky. "I like defending," Winky says. "It's more intense and interesting than arguing for the prosecution. You're breaking down something instead of trying to build it up. The prosecution's job is simple, ABC, construct a logical argument. I'd rather raise doubts, demolish arguments, hound witnesses. I like to swirl all the evidence around and turn it into a messy puzzle. But in real life I don't think that I'd be objective enough to be a defense attorney. I don't think I could do my best to help someone get off who I thought was guilty. I wouldn't want to wonder what he would do next."

The girls, dressed in suits, enter the building, go to the law library, and refine their opening and closing statements before heading down to the courtroom itself. The St. Luke's team is also in suits, two of the boys with their long hair pulled back in ponytails. The judges enter, the court is called to order, and the trial begins.

"The strongest point for the defense is reasonable doubt," says Nora, who handled the opening statement for St. Ann's. "So we hammered away at that. We go through the prosecution's case and show that it is a house of cards. We tell the jurors that if even one of those cards is in doubt, the whole house collapses, and they can't convict."

One of St. Luke's attorneys, a talented actor, tries to control the proceedings with theatrics, a ploy that worked against the girl's B Team. But that strategy doesn't work against St. Ann's A Team.

"The St. Luke boys were drama queens when we competed against them for city," says Winky. "They tried too hard to rely on style and charm. The fact is that we know the rules better than they do. We know what we're talking about."

St. Ann's captured the Atlanta title and went on to win second place in the state championships, losing in the finals to a magnet school in Savannah.

"We were pleased with second place," says Nora. "But we would have liked to have won."

"I didn't sense too much disappointment on the way back," said Susan Croy, a history teacher and the girls' Mock Trial coach, in her Georgia drawl. "I mean, second in the state isn't bad. What these girls really like is running over the guys in the city rounds. They consistently display tremendous confidence--and this confidence can be intimidating."

Croy described a witness on the St. Ann's team named Lindsay, who spoke fluidly even when she was on shaky ground. This often caused opposing attorneys to drop damaging lines of questioning: They simply assumed Lindsay knew more than they did.

"These displays of confidence rattle the boys," said Croy. "Boys, of course, often display confidence, too. But it's easy for it to slide into arrogance and bravado. Girls tend to maintain a fine line more effectively."

I met Croy in the faculty room of St. Ann's newly expanded campus of three- story brick buildings with white shuttered windows and an Episcopal church at its center. Each day the school's 600 girls fill the long wooden pews in a light-filled chapel, where they sing hymns, pray, deliver announcements on events and school policies to the student body, and giggle as senior girls hone their public speaking skills by delivering humorous homilies on the trials and tribulations of growing up.

I asked Croy about her students. "You know, I've been here fifteen years," she said. "And in the last ten I've noticed a definite change in who these girls are. Many of them fit your alpha girl profile. I give them a questionnaire each year about their career goals. The last five or six years I've been getting more and more responses like 'Senator' and 'Astronaut.' Winky is a good example. She has AP [advanced placement] physics down cold. But that isn't even her subject. What she's really interested in is history. These girls are locked and loaded. They don't even blink. These girls say, bring it on. They feel like they can do anything. And they can."

The bring it on confidence of alpha girls, the feeling that they can do anything, is part of what characterizes them. The alpha generation is full of girls who feel empowered. This is at least partially due to the fact that they are entering a culture in which many women are already high achievers. Teenage girls today are entering an environment of achievement and possibility that is unlike anything that existed for women in the past.

When I asked Winky about her career plans, she said she was interested in law, politics, or intelligence work with the CIA. At St. Ann's, I also met Minnie, who wants to be a senator or president; Becky, who wants to produce films; and Gertie, who has been accepted at West Point.

"Why do you want to attend West Point?" I asked her.

"I want to be challenged," she says. "I know that I could be intellectually challenged at many colleges. But West Point has physical challenges, mental challenges, leadership-type challenges. I really wanted to push myself. That's why I chose the Point."

Bring it on, indeed.i

American girls today are the daughters of the revolution--the first generation that is reaping the full benefits of the women's movement. Their mothers and grandmothers fought and won the battles that produced the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, giving women the right to vote. They spearheaded the efforts that resulted in the 1973 Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion. They pressed for Title IX, giving girls equal access to sports participation in school. Thanks in part to the courage and perseverance of these foot soldiers, women today play a wide range of professional sports, have easy access to effective contraception, and attend Ivy League colleges and West Point (Harvard and the U.S. military academies didn't admit women until the mid 1970s).

From a psychological point of view, the move toward economic and social equality for women has made our daughters see themselves in ways that are unfamiliar to those of us who are older. Girls today are growing up in an environment where the status of women is at an all-time high. The oldest members of the cohort of alpha girls we studied were born in the late 1980s- -a tipping point of sorts--just as women began to outnumber men in college. They have grown with women's ascendance. Consider the following:

The newest data from the National Center on Educational Statistics show widening gaps between men and women at the undergraduate and master's degree levels. For the first time, women earned more first professional degrees than men.ii In the 2004-2005 academic year, 59 percent of all degrees were granted to women (see Figure 1-1). Women earned 62 percent of all associate's degrees, 59 percent of all bachelor's degrees, 60 per-cent of all master's degrees, 48 percent of doctorates, and 51 percent of professional degrees.2

Figure 1-1

PERCENT OF DEGREES (ALL LEVELS*) AWARDED TO MALES & FEMALES, 1970-2005

*Includes Bachelor's, Associate's, Master's, Doctorate, and First Professional Degrees

The professions of law, medicine, and business administration are increasingly gender-balanced. In 1970, fewer than 10 percent of students earning graduate degrees in these fields were women. In each decade since, that number has increased. Today women earn approximately 40 percent of these professional degrees3 (see Figure 1-2 on page 10).

The 109th U.S. Congress (2005-2007) contained a total of 84 female members-- the highest number in its history, with 14 women in the Senate and 70 in the House, including the Minority Whip. In 2006, there were three states where both senators were women--California, Maine, and Washington.4 As a point of comparison, in 1991 there were only four female senators and 28 congresswomen in total5 (See Figure 1-3 on page 11).

Figure 1-2

PERCENT OF DEGREES AWARDED TO FEMALES-SELECTED FIELDS: 1970-2003

*Includes Master's, Doctorate, and First Professional Degrees

Since 1971, the number of women serving in state legislatures had increased more than four-fold. In 2006, 22.8 percent of the 7,382 state legislators in the U.S. were women. Women held 20.8 percent of the state senate seats and 23.6 percent of the state house or assembly seats. Three women served as presidents of state senates (CO, ME, WA), and two women were speakers of state houses (OR, VT). Additionally, women had been elected to statewide executive offices in 49 of the nation's 50 states and held 25.7 percent of these positions across the country6 (see Figure 1-4 on page 12).

In The Second Sex, an enormously influential book published in 1949, Simone de Beauvoir argued that there is a direct link between the status of women in a society and the attitudes and expectations of that society's girls.

De Beauvoir wrote: "If a caste is kept in a state of inferiority, no doubt it remains inferior; but liberty can break the circle. Let the Negroes vote and they become worthy of having the vote; let woman be given responsibilities and she is able to assume them. The fact is that oppressors cannot be expected to make a move of gratuitous generosity; but at one time the revolt of the oppressed, at another time even the very evolution of the privileged caste itself, creates new situations; thus men have been led, in their own interest, to give partial emancipation to women: it remains only for women to continue their ascent, and the successes they are obtaining are an encouragement for them to do so. It seems almost certain that sooner or later they will arrive at complete economic and social equality, which will bring about an inner metamorphosis."

Figure 1-3

NUMBER OF WOMEN IN THE U.S. CONGRESS, 1979-2005

Source: Center for American Women and Politics, 2005

Figure 1-4

PERCENT OF WOMEN IN U.S. STATE ELECTIVE OFFICES, 1979-2005

Source: Center for American Women and Politics, 2005

The alpha girls we interviewed showed us that de Beauvoir's inner metamorphosis has occurred. Large numbers of girls are feeling the effects of the feminist revolution and no longer carry the conscious or unconscious assumption that they are a second sex.

It makes sense that there is a time lag between cultural and personal change. For psychological transformation to occur, a girl needs to be born into a society in which women's status is already high.7 The way we parents treat our daughters from a very young age--the kinds of assumptions that we make about their potential and role in the world--shapes their psychology. If the status of women is high, parents will instill the expectation of accomplishment and attainment in their daughters.

Children are also shaped by what they perceive society values as well as by how they themselves are treated. They are adept at picking up subtle social cues that point to what is and is not acceptable, and they adapt to their environment. Although we like to think of ourselves as autonomous, self- created beings, most of us carry the imprint of the world we were born into.

Our daughters' inner assumptions about themselves reflect the ascendant status of women. But how profound, really, is this change? Has social and economic equality for men and women been achieved? In the United States, women earn only 77 cents on the dollar compared with men and the boardrooms of the Fortune 500 companies remain over 90 percent male.8 We've yet to have a woman run as the presidential candidate for either major political party, and the boardrooms of the Fortune 500 hundred companies remain over 90 percent male.9

Nevertheless, what the trends show is that there is a powerfully accelerating movement toward equality. Although some of the girls we interviewed recognized that there were clear inequities still in place, they were sanguine about their futures. They felt opportunities were now tilted in their favor in what had been male-dominated professions: Employers would tend to hire them because they were female. If they bumped up against glass ceilings, their attitude was that they would deal with that when it happened; and even the girls at the younger end of our spectrum, in their early teens, were aware that they would have legal recourse if they were sexually harassed or discriminated against on the basis of sex.

Many of the girls we interviewed felt that their mothers and grandmothers had paved the way for them, that they owed them for their sense of empowerment and opportunity (the only thing that any of the girls we interviewed thought they couldn't do was play pro football). They recognized the struggles and sacrifices women in earlier generations had made. Some (to the extent that this is possible for adolescent girls) were even grateful. But their attitude was that things had changed and now it was their turn.