康迪-赖斯的高中照片

The Rise of Gamma Girls

Peer pressure, cliques and social conformity are just some of problems that teenage girls have to face every day. No matter how much one may claim, “I don’t care what others say,” everyone has a subconscious voice that says, “What will the Joneses think?” Where do these instincts come from? Is everyone born with a society-conscious inner voice? Actually, these instincts are not born, but bred by their parents, shaped by the environment and enforced in schools throughout the country. In her 2003 book “Queen Bees and Wannabes”, Rosalind Wiseman detailed the different social roles girls play in adolescent society. It provides valuable insights into the parallel universe of teenage girls.

Some girls spend their whole lives trying to become popular, and never quite make it. They hover around the popular girls trying to get their attentions and acceptance, often without success. They stay stuck in their beta, or ‘wannabe’ position.

Some girls don’t care much about popularity; spend time thinking about their futures rather than their clothes. They do well in school and in extra-curriculum activities such as music and sports. Some may even like their parents. These are the so called the gamma girls.

And then, there are the rulers of the school: the alpha girls, a.k.a. ‘popular girls’ or ‘queen bees’. These alphas are looked up to as the top of the pyramid, what every girl strives for. But how did these girls get up there in the first place? True, some are nice, funny, pretty, and really deserve to be popular. But others got up there by backstabbing, gossiping, and by being mean girls. They stay popular with a mixture of vigilance, lies, and nastiness.

However, despite the early success of alphas in school, it seems like that few of them ever make it to the top in the adult world. No matter how pushy they are, these alpha girls end up being crushed by their nerdy gamma peers later on in life. But why? Isn’t adult society very much the same as the teenage one, the same ‘social butterflies’ that reigned at school would still be crowned ladies as adults?

The fact is that few alphas are prominent in the job world. New York Times article “Mean, Nasty and Missing” claimed, the alpha girls who make it to the top seem to always end up fired (Carly Fiorina of HP) or in jail (Martha Stewart). And many former alphas are working at mediocre jobs or not working at all.

The disappearing of alphas in adult world is not entirely surprising. In school, they were distracting themselves with trivial pursuits of clothes, looks, boys and popularity. Few of them got into good colleges and had a serious career. Many of them married early and became stay-at-home moms, taking care of their alpha husbands and alpha kids. The rest of their lives were spent doing rather unproductive things.

Gammas seemed to have done better. These girls were teacher’s pets, bookworms, class presidents, valedictorians, underneath the alpha girls on the social totem pole. But in the adult world, they somehow managed to flip the hierarchy over. Gamma girls worked hard in school which enabled them to go into top universities and take a serious major. Now, they are the professionals and bosses of the company, and the girls who once made their lives miserable are working for them. It’s payback time.

Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi are just some of representatives of gamma girls. According to Maureen Dowd, New York Times’ the only female editorialist, “There was Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was an alpha at the White House but acts more like a gamma in the Senate. In the House, Nancy Pelosi is just a gamma with a whip.” Now with Nancy as the speaker of the House, Condi as the Secretary of State and Hillary as a leading presidential candidate, 2007 is indeed a banner year for gamma girls.

Being popular does have many perks, but it also comes with high price tag. For many girls, becoming and staying popular are their full-time job. In long run, successful alpha women are really few and far between. On the other hand, gamma girls have their eyes on larger prizes and focus their energy on something that is more important, like learning; this gives them an edge later in life. Perhaps it is a good idea to stop raising kids to be weight-obsessed and popularity-crazy alphas, rather, encourage them to become gammas.

Alpha girls get all the attentions, but gamma girls are the ultimate winners of the race. This is the best kept secret of middle and high school.