Customer Reviews

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

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Alpha Girls: Understanding the New American Girl and How She Is Changing the World, is author Dan Kindlon's analysis of the present and future life of "alpha" girls: those girls who are excellent academic achievers, leaders in high school, shine in sports, and have high levels of self-esteem, motivation, and confidence.

Kindlon argues that, whatever the decade old AAUW study on girls reported, the new alpha girl is either immune to bias in the classroom or situated in the "new age" of education that provides opportunity and removes barriers based on sex. He reaches this conclusion after interviewing a bit over 100 "alpha girls," kids recommended to him by teachers, principals, and other students. He compares these girls to students who have completed a questionnaire in about 18 high schools concentrated in the east (6 public and the rest private).

I appreciate the analysis that Kindlon has undertaken, but I also recognize its methodological weaknesses. There is a difference in having interviews with top-performing girls (and they are going to admit that their life isn't perfect?) and looking at their school, home, and work records, and interviewing a random sample of students and looking at the characteristics of those who are performing at the top of some pre-developed scale. Also, the vast majority of kids in Kindlon's study were from private schools. This is not a random sample of Americana, and brings in biases of income, race, and social status. Thus, he states that there are these amazingly confident and motivated girls in high school as his conclusion. However, in 1999 there were 16 million kids in high school in the US. Certainly, there should have been no problem in finding about 100 of the 8 million girls to be fantastic students. One hundred out of 8 million is less than .002%. If I would look at the top .002% of girl scholars in 1950, or 1920, or 1890, I suspect these would always have been amazing girls. So one of the big questions is, what can studying the top .002% of students tell us about the experience of girls in high school today? Furthermore, how does a better understanding of this group affect the results of the AAUW study done in the 1990s? Finally, the kicker will be a longitudinal study where we can see how these girls perform in society and at home compared to a control group of girls.

This book, and the study design, would not make it into the peer-reviewed literature. However, I did enjoy, and appreciate, the lengthy discussion and review of the issues by Kindlon. I would really like this to be a book read by high school girls to get their feedback and reaction.

I wish he would have spent more time with girls in public schools. I also hope he utilized an Institutional Review Board (IRB) to gain permission to work with these minors. I didn't notice any reference to this critical oversight to make sure confidentialities and parental permissions were kept and obtained.

I think the one reviewer's comments about specious statistics and lack of supporting evidence is right on. I also have to take issue with the use of the term 'born leader'. A person is born into this world with either risk factors or protective factors...the more protective factors a person has, such as 2 parents, being white, having economic privilege, are the kinds of thing to factor in when really trying to understand what determines a person's ability to 'lead', that is, to feel at home and entitled enough in the world to successfully navigate it, and access and utilize resources...when a person is experienced in these ways, they can much more easily 'lead' as the world feels essentially 'theirs'. Classism, sexism, racism, still divide those who 'could' lead, vs those who were 'born with resources to lead.' A sense of inclusion is what helps shape confidence, and if you come from a home or socio-economic background that is not representative of those who hold power in the country or even just your school or town, then a feeling of exclusion can erode a wonderfully intelligent person's confidence.

The other thing I had a problem with in the book, is the notion that being an Alpha female is 1-a good thing, and that 2-being an alpha female is indicative of feminism 'working'. The idea of an "Alpha" is a male/patriarchal construct, so a woman being able to do what a man can do and to play well on his field, isn't authentic equality, nor is it feminist if today, the only ways women can be 'great', is to 'conquer' the world, be aggressive, competitive, perpetuate colonial thinking, and do things 'just like men'...which essentially are all signs of male-identification, not 'self-identification', something that would be a truer feminist goal.

While there is a lot of info here, the title is misleading. Maybe half the text is about alpha girls, the rest about the increasing status of women in general. There is a whole chapter on the "descent" of boys/men. There is a recitation of common wisdom that a woman will be president and that women professionals like/need flex time. There is also lot of peripheral text (for a book on alpha girls) for instance, about women in Norway, anecdotes about the status of women in the 50's, random data and interviews about the sexuality of college females, etc.

While the many charts are documented by source, I had the feeling that the author took the data at hand, rather than the best data to illustrate his points. The bar charts with alpha girls data plotted with all girls and all boys were very illustrative, but there were a lot of charts that seemed to be of general interest or just filler. Some charts extrapolated 45 years showing female predominance in various endeavors without comment. It is spurious to assume today's data, which represents an abrupt break from history, will meaningfully project so far outward. The charts are provided without comment on the potential for a plateauing of the trend.

The author cites Simone de Beauvoir's observation that once women were more valued by their families and their culture, a new psychology would follow. This topic of the "new girl" is worthy of treatment, which this book only promises to do.

As the father of an "alpha girl" (now a freshman in college), I strongly believe that the author has captured the essense of the dramatic changes that have occurred in the lives of girls. I came of age during the 1970's, in the era of women's liberation. I did my best to raise a strong and independent daughter.

What has amazed me, however, is the degree to which my daughter takes for granted her strength and independence. Some part of me wants to say, "But don't you get it? This is supposed to be hard. You're supposed to have to wrestle with the demons of sexism and fight for it." This book shows why I'm the one who "doesn't get it". Powerful changes going on under the surface have radically altered the landscape for smart, capable young women.

Girls today, such as my daughter, simply know that they are every bit as capable as boys. It is not a false bravado. My daughter has complained in her Karate class about the inequity of genetics that gives boys greater upper body strength. Those differences didn't stop her, however, when a boy at a dance club grabbed her from behind. Without hesitation, she put him on the ground in an arm lock.

These are the girls who grew up with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Zena Princess Warrior, and even the Pink Power Ranger. They simply expect to succeed. It's part of their internal mythology, in the same way that I grew up with John Wayne as an icon.

This book gives the underpinnings for how this transformation occurred. Just as interesting, the book also offers some glimpses ahead of a very different world. Current trends in rates of women versus men graduating college and getting higher degrees / professional degrees show a nation where in the top ranks, women will be earning more than men. That shift in power is hard for a middle-aged guy like me to comprehend. Alpha girls don't have any trouble with the idea; they simply expect to make a lot of money, and wield a lot of influence.

What the book does not address so well, as other reviewers have pointed out, is what happens with the other 99%+ of girls out there who do not meet the author's definition of "alpha girls". The author makes clear the limitations of his approach and methodology, but this topic begs for a larger, more inclusive look at the lives of girls.

It appears that an Alpha Girl is merely a boy in girl's clothing, competitive, grasping, aggressive. Climbing the political ladder, climbing the corporate ladder, dominating, gathering power. Just think how well that's worked so far.
Women have tended to be more cooperative, which is a mostly untried idea in male dominated societies. So, instead of developing better and more sophisticated forms of cooperation, Alpha Girls chuck that and go for guy stuff, right back into competition, me-on-top mode.
Girls, you had it right in the first place. Being concerned about throwing your best friend out in the ball game is a sign of intelligence, not a weakness, I don't care what some coach says (a man in the book, big surprise.) This book encourages women to quit following their own lead and start following the traditional male path. How is that either creative or unique? How does it, as the subtitle says, 'change the world' to simply do more of the same?
I am hardly advocating the Southern Belle approach. I don't normally talk about me, but this is a special case. I am a lesbian, a Gung Fu Master, and a 5th degree black belt in Taekwondo. I do not compete. I spar with men and women, not to win anything, rather to test myself, to shore up my weaknesses, enhance my skills. I live with two women, we share everything, including each other. There is no jealousy, no competition, no hostility. We are not climbing any ladders to so-called success, yet we make a very good living (without even trying to make a very good living, when you work WITH people instead of AGAINST them, the money appears.)
Why be another cog in the Big Machine, grinding down your soul to `prove' yourself? Prove yourself to whom? Some dork in a suit? Your daddy?
The world doesn't need any more Alpha...it doesn't need any Alpha at all.

I found this book helpful in placing my own experience in context. I was a high achiever (a 790 math SAT - perhaps a surprise to Larry Summers) high school girl back in the early 80s, and I think that Carole Gilligan's assessment of a girl like me at that time was right on; despite substantial academic and extracurricular success, I was diffident, filled with self-doubt, obsessed with my weight, conflicted about the enormous pressure to be a servant and sex object to men and my apparent abilities to do things through my own agency, stick my neck out, and be a leader. My experience also held the problems produced by patriarchy and identified by Sigmund Freud as "penis envy." I was trying desperately to hold my own and find a way to survive in a male-dominated and male-defined world, with an aloof and narcissistic father, and a submissive and dissociated mother, and I adopted male-identification perhaps as a coping mechanism. I have had to spend much of my adult life restoring my feminity, finding a way to reconcile femininity with career success, trying to reach parity in personal relationships with men and trying to manage my anger in living and working in a world that is still male-dominated and male-defined (although there is improvement).

I think this author does a good job of tracing how the improved status of women in public life from Freud's time to the era of Carole Gilligan's work to now has a lot of positive ramifications for the mental and physical health of girls. It is not hard for me to imagine that these current girls will have less depression, fewer eating disorders (including anorexia, bulimia and obesity), fewer substance abuse problems, have healthier, more responsible sexuality, and will be much more effective parents and partners than those of us of previous generations. It kind-of breaks my heart with happiness to hear that these girls are healthier in this way than the Gilligan girls of my generation were. It has been hard work by a lot of women, and some men, to improve things for girls. Gilligan's work at identifying these issues was critical to improving things, and this author's work at showing the improvement is critical as well.

Now, we just have to keep working on encouraging emotional availability and relational skills in boys as well so that both boys and girls will have the improved psychology necessary to handle the equal status boys and girls will have in the future (I hope). I found the DVD "Raising Cain" very helpful on this issue. I believe this author was a co-author on the book version of Raising Cain.

Despite how much I liked the book, I had two reservations:

1. As another reviewer noted, the projections of ultimate female dominance seem far-fetched. I do not think women will be earning 100% of college degrees in the future. I also had reservations about the name "alpha girls." As another reviewer noted, the concept of "alpha" is a patriarchal concept where status competition between men is the driver. The author himself notes that these girls have relational skills, ethics and good social skills (suggesting they have empathy and compassion), in addition to their ambition and resilience in competitive environments. This suggests they will not create a "Matriarchy" that mirrors patriarchy (i.e. with the resources controlled by women who engage in a status competition and then pick men based on their looks & fertility), but instead may create a world of more well-rounded men and women where men are not denigrated but are equal to women.

2. The author says that the patriarchy has been in place since the Pleistecine Era. He provides no support for this assertion. I have read other claims that it is of more recent development and that there have always been some cultures in the world that are not patriarchal, such as some island communities where men do more child care, and I believe a cultures in India, Tibet and Brazil where land was owned by women, and where women were more autonomous and self reliant, and may have even held status closer to that of men or perhaps even equal. There are also cultures like classical Greece where the pantheon included goddesses with substantial powers, autonomy and personality that reflect back to times when the paternal connection to a baby was harder to establish and the "law of the blood" tying the baby to the mother was supreme. The Greeks definitely had a concept of woman as "human being," even if she was lower status than man. Since that time, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and an increasingly complex economy where work is performed far from home all heavily reinforced the elevation of man and the denigration of woman.

Reviewed by AJ Cooper for Reader Views (11/06)

"Alpha Girls" to me is a study of how girls and their ambitions and goals have changed over the years. It is a book that I feel is mainly for someone in the psychology field. The study and the information come from schools over a wide range of areas in the United States and Canada. The views of girls that are high achievers today have changed dramatically even from 10 years ago. This book provides some very scientific statistics and information that I would not necessarily need or want to know. Some parts were very interesting and I can clearly see how girls' thinking has changed over the years.

At first when I started reading the book the information really made me stop and think about how school was for me when I was growing up. I remember being encouraged to go into nursing. I was not really that interested in nursing so I dropped out and joined the military. My parents did not feel that was a good role or job for me to be involved in. They tried everything possible to persuade me to stay in school.

The most interesting part of "Alpha Girls" for me was the girls' lack of anger about adults in society making traditional statements about women and girls and discounting the fact that women/girls can do anything they set their minds to. It seems the girls really did not care about women's lib and that whole movement and were more interested in their achievements and their goals in life.

I did start to lose interest in "Alpha Girls" and found myself skipping back and forth through the book. It was a lot more technical writing than I had anticipated. It was all very understandable and formatted well, but just not the type of technical book I am interested in. I can see some of my ideas and feelings in the girls that were interviewed from when I was in school. I did not enjoy typical stereotypes of women growing up and always worked to be able to compete with my brothers. I was and still am very competitive.

Received book free of charge

As a classroom teacher that first came into the profession at the height of the "Reviving Ophelia" type of research done by Mary Pipher. I have participated in classes, seminars and training sessions about how girls are being short-changed in the classroom and in our culture. It was not until I ran across some research I was doing in my Master's Degree program some 15 years later that my eyes were opened to a new possibility: the girls are, on the whole, doing just fine. The boys, on the other hand, are falling by the wayside in heart-cringing numbers. Go to any public school and you can just about guarantee that 7 or more of the top ten will be girls. Look at the special education numbers and 7 out of 10 will be boys.

Dan Kindlon's "Alpha Girls" does not address what is going on with boys, but it does look at a relatively new phenomenon - the hyper-achieving academically gifted, socially skilled, generally athletic, well-connected Alpha Girls.

What makes an Alpha Girl?

-GPA of 3.8 or higher
-Leadership role in an extracurricular activity
-Participation in that activity at least 10 or more hours per week.
-High motivation to go to college, own a home, make a lot of money, have a good reputation, study and save money for the future.
-High self-esteem based on personal dependability.

While clearly not trying to be openly critical of feminist researchers Carol Gilligan and Mary Pipher, Kindlon's findings blow giant holes in the universal apllicability of their theories, although he does admit that changes in American culture may well be what accounts for the differences. He also notes that the differences between previous research and his research may well be due to the fact that men and women talk about themselves differently - men often do not recognize to their own shortcomings as well as do women, especially young men. So a perceived drop of self-esteem on the part of women could very well be an unrealistic level of self-esteem among their male counterparts (pp. 96-7).

So, what is an Alpha Girl like? Well, I had a surplus of them in my classes this last year (I was teaching a lot of college track classes) and I can tell you that Kindlon hits them right on the head when he describes them as "hybrids" and girls that speak the language of boys. They understand boys well and boys understand them. They are stll, however, all girl. They compete, they prepare, they write poetry and they are generally the highest achievers in any classroom. Generally, Alpha Girls have had an involved father (but now always). Kindlon notes that, on average, fathers spend a lot more time with their kids than in decades past, and he theorizes that this interaction has helped socialize their girls a little differently.

Kindlon's book occassionally wanders of-course, with a foray into suppositions about chemical imbalances in the environment creating more macho girls and less macho boys being responsible for some of our cultural changes (he mentions the "metrosexuals" [p. 175] as a new phenomenon. This history teacher will tell you that we've had "metrosexuals" many times in history - I suggest that they are more a product of leisure and disposable income than chemicals. Think of Ancient Rome and the court of Louis XVI as prime examples of metrosexuality in the past). The discussions of lesbian experimentation (pp. 228-32) doesn't really keep with the main theme of the book since it is not limited to the Alpha Girl phenomenon.

On the whole, the book is interesting, seems well-researched and fits with my own classroom experiences.

Other books I recommend on boys and girls in school are:

-Boys and Girls Learn Differently!: A Guide for Teachers and Parents and The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons From Falling Behind in School and Life by Michael Gurian.

-The WAR AGAINST BOYS: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men by Christina Hoff Sommers

-Keeping Black Boys Out of Special Education by Jawanza Kunjufu

As the mother of a 14-year-old field-hockey-stick-wielding girl with far more assertiveness than I ever had, I just ate this book up. And, boy, did it make me think about the ways in which I have "projected my own psychology" onto her -- and have been repeatedly startled to realize that her level of confidence is utterly unlike mine at that age. Reading 'Alpha Girls' was eye-opening, thought-provoking, and very, very helpful.

This book is completely biased and the research published inside of it as false. This is because the author studied only girls in private schools who were mostly white and from very affluent backgrounds. From there he extrapolated that girls everywhere are doing perfectly and all getting 4.0's. Obviously from the standpoint of being a girl myself, I know that this is false. Don't waste your time with this book!