discourses about‘girl power’in the news media in the Anglophone West (Harris
2004 ; McRobbie 2004 ;Ta 2004 ). For instance, we have increasingly seen
common-sense‘presumptions’that gendered equality in education and work mean
the labour market, and schools and universities have been‘feminised’. In 1997 the
UK left wing think tank, Demos, noted the‘future is female’(see, and cf., Segal
1994 ), suggesting women were set to enter the labour market in huge numbers and
that the kinds of work which stress characteristics ascribed to femininity—service,
empathy, communication, nurturance and, to be looked-at-ness would be the ones
in demand (Walkerdine et al. 2001 ). Ten years later, Ian Pearson,‘futurologist’for
British Telecom, Ian Pearson, confirmed the worrying trends in the‘gender order’
(Connell 1987 ), with the headline:‘The future is female’(BBC News, 23 April
2007), which warned of a future dominated by female-oriented jobs that will
‘displace’men. Similarly, Harvard psychologist Dan Kindlon’s book, Alpha Girls:
Understanding the New American Girl and How She is Changing the World
(2006), outlines the mythical qualities of the new‘successful girl’, suggesting the
‘Alpha girl’, as a new hybrid that embodies the best traits of masculinity and
femininity, is poised to change the world, economically, politically and socially, as
a new hybrid that embodies the best traits of masculinity and femininity. Kindlon
suggests this new hybrid is somehow confident, assertive, competitive, autono-
mous, future-oriented and, risk-taking, as well as collaborative, and relationship-
oriented, but not obsessed with boyfriends or her physical appearance. The UK
broadsheet, The Times, carried an article based on the book and titled:‘Free at last:
alpha teenage girls on top’(Allen-Mills 2006 , 15 October), which stated
[A]alpha girls [are] the new breed of...schoolgirl growing up free of gender stereotyping
and ideological angst. They are the daughters of the feminist revolution, but they see no
need to become feminists themselves because they know they are smarter than boys.We can witness the formation of a‘figure’of feminine success evoked in such
media representations, which shape how gender is understood as a binary con-
struction where in which girls and boys are pitted against one another in abstract
and decontextualised ways, and in which one gender’s success means the other’s
failure in a kind of zero-sum game which requires one side to lose and the other to
win.
In the article‘David Willets: feminism has held back working men’(Prince in
The Daily Telegraph, 1 April 2011) the then Minister for Universities and Science in
the UK Coalition government, is described as arguing in his recent book, The Pinch,
that the rise of equal rights for women has left working-class men struggling:—‘[A]
as a result of better education for women, households now contain two people who
are either bothfinancially successful or struggling to get on’. Mr Willett’s is also
quoted as saying
The feminist revolution in itsfirst-round effects was probably the key factor. Feminism
trumped egalitarianism. It is not that I am against feminism, it’s just that it is probably the
single biggest factor.390 J. Ringrose and D. Epstein