What Girls Need: How to Cultivate the Skills That Give Our Daughters Lifelong Confidence

"A powerful book about how we can raise girls to become bold, ambitious women." --Adam Grant

A former White House strategist and fighter jet pilot now at the helm of one of the premier schools for girls in the country illuminates the ways parents and educators can support audacity and ambition in girls everywhere

What do girls really need to succeed?

As a student at the all-girls Baldwin School outside of Philadelphia, Marisa Porges was raised in a community designed to produce strong, independent women. After earning a BA in geophysics from Harvard, she fulfilled her childhood dream of flying jets off aircraft carriers for the US Navy and served as a counterterrorism expert in Afghanistan and the Obama White House. In 2016, in an unexpected move for someone whose ambitions had taken her so far from home, Porges returned to head The Baldwin School. In doing so, she began to see with great clarity how small moments and turning points in her early education gave her the tools she would eventually sharpen and deploy to excel in areas that were traditionally perceived as being part of "a man's world."

What Girls Need combines lessons Porges learned along her career path with the practices she and her colleagues are developing at The Baldwin School to help today's girls cultivate the skills and traits they need to become tomorrow's leading women. The traditional means of commanding a room have often been dubbed "unfeminine" and women of previous generations were pressured to behave like a man in order to win the day. But the ways we define leadership are changing, and the women now stepping into leadership roles are mapping new paths to inhabiting traits such as grit, resilience, audacity, and self-confidence. Porges is writing to prepare the next generation to confidently hold their own later in life in whatever fields they enter, whatever challenges they face, and to celebrate and own the ways that traits which might have been undervalued in the past--empathy, collaboration, and an evolving mind-set--can and will define the future's leaders.

Dr. Marisa Porges is known for her work on leadership, education, and national security. She is currently the eighth headmaster of The Baldwin School, a 130-year-old all-girls school outside of Philadelphia renowned for academic excellence and for preparing girls to be leaders and changemakers. Prior to joining Baldwin in 2016, Dr. Porges served in the Obama White House; was a visiting fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and at the Council on Foreign Relations, where her research focused on worldwide counterterrorism efforts; and served in the US Navy as one of eight female fighter jet pilots in a battalion of two hundred. She graduated from Harvard University in 2000 and the London School of Economics in 2001, and now lives in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, with her family.