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Historically, girls have evoked images of sweetness and light, purity and beauty. In this fairytale land of youth, girls are angels and princesses, characterized by positive adjustment and certainly not by behavioral or emotional problems. However, as Mae West observed, in reality female children and adolescents are much more complex, with both positive and negative aspects to their development and adjustment. Unfortunately, the complexity has been understudied in the developmental psychopathology literature. Compared to the amount of research attention given to boys' development and adjustment, girls have been relatively neglected. This lack of attention has obvious negative implications for our ability to understand girls' development and our efforts to promote optimal development and to remediate problematic development.

Women are two to three times more likely to experience unipolar depressive disorders as seen in both community-based and clinically referred samples (Kessler, McGonagle, Swartz, Blazer, & Nelson, 1993; Nolen-Hoeksema, 1990;Weissman & Klerman, 1978;Weissman, Leaf, Bruce, & Florio, 1988). This is true whether depression is diagnosed as a (mood) disorder or measured along a continuum of symptom severity. Knowledge of factors that alter the course of depression can help improve both prevention and treatment efforts. Early intervention is important given the negative developmental trajectory for depression in childhood and adolescence (Harrington, Fudge, Rutter, Pickles, & Hill, 1990).

Throughout the course of the 20th century the role of women in society has evidenced dramatic changes that continue through the present day. During this time period, American women were finally granted valuable civil rights and the power to make decisions for themselves. Many women rose into positions of authority and control in nearly every field, from business and industry, to education, government and law, medicine, science, and beyond. The range of lifestyle choices also became more open for women, a clear and distinct change from eras past. Indeed, girls need look no further than the popular media to find female role models representing the range of lifestyle and career choices before them, from Maya Angelou to Sally Ride, Madonna to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Hillary Clinton to Mia Hamm. It is unclear, however, whether these welcome and hard-fought choices have also ushered in a range of stressors and risks to girls' physical and emotional health that were unknown to our foremothers during their early years of development. In this chapter we explore a well-documented but poorly understood phenomenon, that girls and women evidence higher rates of many fears and anxiety disorders than their male peers.

Despite a density of research on attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in the past several decades that can conservatively be described as voluminous—and despite the considerable attention and controversy that have attended to this diagnostic category in both the scientific literature and popular media (see DeGrandpre & Hinshaw, 2000)—only an extremely small proportion of relevant investigations has focused on girls. Indeed, the predominance of males in the current literature far outweighs the ratio of boys to girls with the disorder, which has been estimated to be approximately 3:1 in community samples and perhaps twice as high in clinical samples (American Psychiatric Association, 1994; Lahey, Miller, Gordon, & Riley, 1999). As a result, the field's predominant models reflect what is known largely or exclusively about males. Much of our current chapter constitutes an attempt to redress this state of affairs; we initially take up the question as to the roots of the male-predominated literature and evidentiary base in the field.

Until the 1990s, childhood aggression was generally thought to be the province of males. Theories and research developed either based mostly on male samples or without regard to gender. Since 1990, however, researchers have focussed considerably more interest on antisocial behavior in girls. Some have questioned whether definitions of aggression shouldbe constrained to examinations of harm to people and property, or should be expanded to include intentional harm to relationships (e.g., Bjorkqvist, 1994; Crick & Grotpeter, 1995). Others have recognized that even if girls generally display lower rates of physical aggression and delinquency than boys, substantial numbers of girls show antisocial behavior at some point in their lives. For whatever the reason, research on aggression that focuses specifically on girls has begun to emerge.

Substance use and abuse in girls encompasses using tobacco (primarily cigarettes), drinking alcohol, smoking marijuana, and using other illicit drugs. Although there is co-occurrence among the use of substances, with some similarity in causes and consequences, each substance is unique, with a unique developmental trajectory and a unique set of predictors. In general, boys engage in more binge drinking and use marijuana and other illicit drugs more frequently than girls (Johnston, O'Malley, & Bachman, 2002). Boys also report more problems (i.e., missed school or work) associated with substance use than girls (Johnston et al., 2002). In addition, although boys initiate alcohol and cigarette use at a younger age than girls, girls quickly catch up, so that use is similar in the late teens and young adulthood. Further, more girls use prescribed psychoactive substances than boys throughout adolescence (Johnston et al., 2000).

Pervasive developmental disorders are a group of conditions sharing as their common features impairment in social reciprocity, developmental disturbances affecting communication, and manifestation of restricted and repetitive behaviors. Autism is the prototypical pervasive developmental disorder, and others include Asperger's Disorder, Rett's Disorder, Childhood Disintegrative Disorder, and Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS). Critical to understanding these conditions is appreciation of the developmental nature of the impairment, such that a lack of mastery in particular social developmental tasks early in life has implications for mastery of other more complex social challenges (Koenig, Tsatsanis, & Volkmar, 2001). Delays in the emergence of language, as well as deviant language use, impair the development of sophisticated communication strategies and the capacity for self-regulation. In addition, restricted interests or repetitive verbalizations and behaviors serve to socially isolate the affected individual to a greater extent as development progresses.

The issues of girls and young women—or even of sex differences in general—within mental retardation are woefully underexplored. To this day, we continue to lack even the most basic information about the course, associated features, and links of mental retardation to emotional or behavioral problems or other psychiatric diagnoses in girls. In specific areas, researchers and practitioners are uncertain whether the “usual” sexdifference findings concerning behavioral or emotional problems also show themselves when children have intellectual disabilities. Yet at the same time, we have enough glimmerings to proclaim the importance of this area for future work.

Learning disorders are among the most common of all childhood neurodevelopmental disorders with an estimated prevalence of between 3% and 10 percent of the school-aged population (American Psychiatric Association 2000). Estimates of prevalence vary across studies, however, with rates as high as 20% reported by some (e.g., Smith, 1998). In addition to their relative frequency, these disorders are of clinical and research importance because of their potentially negative impact on numerous other domains of functioning including social, emotional, and vocational outcomes (for a review see Willcutt & Pennington, 2000). As in many areas of developmental psychopathology, much of what is known about learning disorders is based on samples made up primarily of affected boys. This disproportionate overrepresentation of boys in many research samples has important consequences for our understanding of the nature of learning disorders, associated conditions, and effective interventions for girls. This chapter focuses on girls with LD and reviews the reasons why girls are typically underrepresented in most LD samples. The potential implications of this phenomenon as well as research focusing on girls with learning disorders are also reviewed.

Understanding gender identity disorder first requires an explication of what is meant by gender identity. As a psychological construct, gender identity has been conceptualized with respect to both cognitive and affective parameters. At the cognitive level, gender identity has been defined as the child's ability to accurately discriminate females from males and then to identify her or his own gender status correctly—a task considered by some to be the first “stage” in gender constancy development, of which the “end state” is the knowledge of gender invariance (Fagot, 1995; Kohlberg, 1966; Slaby & Frey, 1975). Most recently, Martin, Ruble, and Szkrybalo (2002) suggested that this rather crude, first-stage developmental acquisition be referred to as the basic self-labeling of gender identity, which most children appear to master some time between the ages of 2 and 3 years. With greater reliance on nonverbal assessment techniques, a number of studies have shown that, prior to this time frame, there is evidence that infants and young toddlers, perhaps as early as 6 months of age, are sensitive to various perceptual features that are reliably correlated with biological sex, such as voice and hairstyle (reviewed in Martin et al., 2002, pp. 917–922). Sensitivity to these and other kinds of perceptual cues (e.g., clothing style) are likely related to the subsequent emergence of basic self-labeling of gender identity.