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January-February 2008
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< previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Recognizing that a new psychology was necessary to describe his daughters’ generation, Kindlon studied more than 900 girls and boys across the United States and Canada and wrote about his findings in Alpha Girls: Understanding the New American Girl and How She Is Changing the World (2006). This new “girl power” is characterized by what Kindlon calls an “emancipated confidence” that is raising self-esteem, reducing depression, and altering gender roles among girls and young women. “Alpha girls” did not appear overnight, however. A century of social and economic change first tipped and then leveled the playing field, creating the circumstances for unprecedented gains for women in education and the labor force. These gains appear across socioeconomic strata, but they are less widespread among low-income and minority girls. To rectify the disparities, some “alphas” are creating innovative programs as part of a “girls’ movement” to make such progress available to all young women. Of course, once alpha girls enter the workforce and begin families, they will no doubt encounter the same tradeoffs their mothers did; how they will cope with these challenges is uncertain, but they are already changing wage and marriage patterns in unexpected ways.
Alpha Psych 101“The psychological demons that used to affect girls and women in this country just don’t affect today’s girls in the same way,” Kindlon asserts. In the 1980s and early ’90s, Carol Gilligan (formerly Graham professor of gender studies at Harvard Graduate School of Education and now a professor at New York University) and other feminist psychologists wrote that girls in their teens compromise their authenticity to fit gender roles, thereby “losing their voice.” In 1992, influential American Association of University Women (AAUW) research on late-1980s data on girls born in the 1970s found that girls’ self-esteem plunged in middle school, compared to boys’, and that classroom sexism (such as teachers’ calling on boys more than girls, or more competitive than cooperative learning) was a cause. The AAUW report recognized positive trends, such as young women’s ascent in college enrollment, while recommending correctives for the continuing shortfalls. Alpha girls are created in large numbers when the society that they are born into has sufficient equal opportunity, Kindlon says: “It wasn’t until the early to mid ’80s—when schools really started to get serious about Title IX, when women first began to outnumber men in college, when women began moving into leadership roles, such as Congress, in significant numbers—that societal conditions had changed enough to permit the alpha girl explosion.” He set out to discover how Beauvoir’s “inner metamorphosis” has changed girls’ psychology in the years since the AAUW report. He knew that past and recent research in a variety of fields had already revealed gender differences in mental illness: girls and women have twice men’s risk for depression and anxiety disorders, while boys and men are twice as likely to suffer substance-use disorders and schizophrenia. Some theories attribute this depression/anxiety gender gap, which appears in adolescence, to differences in the biology of sex hormones; other explanations focus on “gender socialization.” Investigators have located numerous gender-related risk factors for depression, including passive-feminine sex-role identification, helpless coping styles, and low self-esteem. Body dissatisfaction is also key: in adolescence, boys gain muscle while girls gain fat—just as body-image pressures intensify. 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | continued >  
 
 
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