Book Club: Alpha Girls: The empowered women of the 21st century
Blog Post by Elise Spenner
If you walked into a stuffy, carpeted bookstore in the days before Amazon and the Internet, you would probably be hard-pressed to find a large selection of novels on female empowerment. While there have always been defiant female role models, it wasn’t until the 21st century that their stories were widely told. Today, however, it is commonplace to walk into a bookstore and find shelves, if not entire sections, devoted to female empowerment; novels with ambitious protagonists, biographies of women scientists and diplomats, doctors and politicians, memoirs of ground-breaking, glass-ceiling-shattering change makers. As a young girl, I grew up on a healthy diet of female books and entertainment that taught me my power to change the world.
But often, these women seem to work and work and work for little reward. And most of the time, they don’t seem to believe that they deserve that reward. They devalue their success and belittle their accomplishments, shining the spotlight anywhere but on themselves.
Most certainly, not many of these books are about women who dared to be venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, who dared to enter the male-dominated finance industry, and who dared to dream of earning a 6-figure salary.
Julian Guthrie’s Alpha Girls tells just this story. It is a classic female empowerment book, but one upgraded and enhanced for a 21st century feminist. Her four women protagonists are activists and fearless icons. But they are also successful, wealthy, and proud of themselves. They aren’t selfish, but they aren’t selfless to the point of martyrdom. Their stories show the next generation of girls that they can chase their dreams, while also thriving in a modern, male-dominated, technological industry.
Guthrie threads together four stories about empowered and ambitious women from across
the globe who have changed the face of venture capital. When these women — Mary Jane
Elmore, Theresia Gouw, Magdalena Yeşil, and Sonja Hoel Perkins — came to the desert outside
of San Francisco, Silicon Valley was where college graduates in pajamas burned through their
parents’ savings before taking up more ‘practical’ occupations. But as these women climbed
through the ranks of venture capital with aplomb and ingenuity, the Bay Area became the
epicenter of technological advancement — quite literally, where the future was born.
To a reader, the decades of their lives could be marked just as much by progressions in their personal lives as the advancement of the businesses they invested in and led. Their early careers, with Google, Oracle, and Apple still in diapers, brought about investments in antivirus software and other Internet infrastructure. Their later days, as e-commerce and social networking boomed, were marked by investments in trademark names like Sales Force, Facebook, Trulia, and Uber.
But beyond such modern behemoths as Google, Oracle, and Salesforce, whose names light up basketball stadiums and distinguish skyscrapers, many of the start-ups that these women funded and founded were foreign to me. Despite living just minutes from Sand Hill Road, I had always felt removed from the imposing bubble of Silicon Valley — I didn’t think I had a place in that world.
While I often felt my eyes skimming across Guthrie’s often arcane descriptions of these tech and software companies, I finished the book with a much firmer grasp of the general function of Silicon Valley. By the end of the novel, I could even understand some of the technical jargon of venture capital. I didn’t just learn about the women of Silicon Valley, I felt immersed in the industry. Reading Alpha Girls, I realized that I could survive, and even thrive, in that world.
If I could find one fault with the book, it is that the stories, while each have their ups and downs and twists and turns, seem to follow a very similar plot line. Each of these women end up at an elite university for their undergraduate or business degrees, excelling beyond expectation and quickly reaching the upper echelons of the finance and entrepreneurial firmaments.
Because of the conspicuous parallels in their stories, one could be forgiven for flipping chapters back to clarify who worked at which firm, invested in which ground-breaking company, and founded which niche start-up. It may be my relative naiveté when it comes to Silicon Valley, but I found the alternating dialogues, at times, quite hard to keep up with.
Simultaneously, these intertwining and overlapping plot lines provided a special magic to the story. Their stories may sound similar, but that is because they are all, together, chipping away at the barriers and double standards that women face, even in our modern society.
Each of these women brushed off almost identical misogynistic asides. Throughout the novel, I cringed as they were routinely mistaken for secretaries and assistants, and continuously asked for coffee and pastries rather than their opinion and input. More overt snubs were also frequent and couldn’t go unignored, even by these steely women.
Theresia Gouw, struggling with divorce and child care, was denied the sabbatical that men had enjoyed. To be present for her children, she would have to take family leave, which didn’t guarantee her job, and explain her personal situation to each top investor at Accel Ventures.
After intensive chemotherapy to battle aggressive breast cancer, Sonja Hoel Perkins, concerned about her health and missing her recently adopted daughter, yearned to work part-time and virtually for her long-time employer, Menlo Ventures. Her request was denied by an all-male group of partners — partners who hadn’t bothered to check up on her during cancer treatment, and now scorned her for wanting to work part-time.
While all the women were steely and unafraid to defy the norms of their time, Sonja had a special courage, almost a desire, to go against the grain and craft her own path through the woods. When she felt herself slipping into an obligatory marriage, she calmly backed out, reinvesting in herself, rejuvenating, and recentering her goals and values. If she was going to get married, it would be because she whole-heartedly wanted to, not because the rest of the world coined her a spinster or an old maid.
And when she did back out of Menlo Ventures, she founded Broadway Angels, a powerhouse, all women investing group that funded female-run start-ups and brought recognition to the impact of women in the venture capital sphere. And of course, Sonja Hoel Perkins is the founder of our very own Project Glimmer, inspiring and empowering girls to reach their full potential.
Through Guthrie’s incisive and piercing stories of these triumphant women, she doesn’t tell girls that they can change the world; she shows them real-life examples of women who have struggled and sacrificed and fought and won and made it out the other side. Alpha Girls doesn’t tell girls that they won’t face misogyny and double standards and exclusion; it shows them that sometimes shattering ceilings is worth being pierced by glass.
At one point in the novel, Theresia Gouw’s assistant gives her definition of a badass woman, as embodied by Gouw and other female entrepreneurs:
“She is not afraid to take risks is an industry that isn’t female-friendly; she shares the spotlight and empowers other women; she is philanthropic and cares about issues that aren’t just related to her world; she builds relationships rather than just networks; and she is an overachiever and high-performer who recognizes she can’t get half the things done without a village of people working with her.”
Theresia Gouw, Magdalena Yeşil, Mary Jane Ellmore, and Sonja Hoel Perkins are female badasses. Because a badass girl is an Alpha Girl.