Teenage girls in the UK: Navigating a world still defined by boys

A felt‑tip sign taped to the door of a private room announces "GIRLS ONLY", "Boy's don't Eneter!" [sic], and, by way of a cheeky flourish, "don't worry boys!". The sign is covered in colourful hearts and stars. A group of around a dozen girls at DRMZ youth club in Carmarthen, Wales, are already deep into a competitive card game when I join them at a large round table. Conversation flows easily as we chat and pizza is duly ordered.

This visit is part of my Radio 4 series About The Girls, for which I spoke to roughly 150 girls, the vast majority aged between 13 and 17. What we discussed at that table echoed so many of those conversations.

Savvy, chatty, funny and bright, the girls were uplifting and brilliant company. Full of ambition and plans for their futures, love for their friends, and a great awareness of the value of caring for family members.

The conversation hopscotched between the card game at hand, school dramas, teachers they like, stuff they'd seen on social media and debate about whether there were enough slices of Cheese Feast to go round.

This project follows my series About The Boys. In the wake of Covid-19, #MeToo and all the noise about Andrew Tate, I was curious to know what they were thinking. Repeating the experiment with girls next seemed logical and fair. It happened that the Epstein files were released just as I set off for Carmarthen, and the work suddenly felt even more urgent.

What I was not expecting was that across all the conversations I had, one theme kept resurfacing: teenage girls still tend to see themselves through the lens of boys. And, importantly, there seems to be an acute understanding of this.

When I asked my opening question "What is it really like to be a girl in 2025/26? Tell me the truth, don't be polite!" The answer almost invariably began with the words: "Well boys think/say/want/ feel…". These conversations felt like some odd real-life version of the Bechdel Test.

"Growing up as a girl," said one "so much of that is about how boys are behaving around you and what they're doing to you. So there isn't really a way to talk about that without mentioning boys... and it is frustrating."

So why does this dynamic persist? The girls I met talked fluently about the weight of gendered social expectations, the influence of boys in school environments, versions of feminine "perfection" seen endlessly on social media, and described something deeper about how girls learn to behave while trying to safely navigate the world.

After the girls in Carmarthen had all gone home, I spoke to Alison Harbor, manager at the youth centre. She was delighted that they had all talked so freely. "The boys at the club are quite vocal" she told me, "and pretty confident in telling you all their opinions and thoughts. Well today, the girls have been the same! My worry is that they usually internalise a lot of their troubles…".

Though the girls did not hold back, the irony was that almost all of them said their behaviour was different than when boys are around. Girls told me about not wanting to be seen by boys as "too much", "too loud", "weird", or "annoying". They described not wanting to "take up space" and trying to be "smaller and quieter" in mixed company.

Dr Ola Demkowicz, senior lecturer in psychology of education in the Manchester Institute of Education, says: "There is certainly a pressure that we heard from young women around that - really translating into they need to be polite and respectful, and that they feel the behaviour expectations on them were greater."

Elsewhere, girls talked about their fear and experiences of sex–based harassment and violence. Girlguiding's latest research suggested that 68% of girls change their everyday behaviour to avoid sexual harassment.

Most of my 150 interviews were done in schools, where data about the rise in misogynistic behaviour was no surprise to girls. A teaching union recently warned that a "masculinity crisis is brewing" in UK schools after almost a quarter of female teachers it surveyed reported that they have been subject to misogynistic abuse from a pupil in the last year.

Chronic absenteeism is on the rise. In 2017/18, only 6% of girls affected by absenteeism were severely absent. In 2024/25, that proportion more than doubled to 13%. Tom Campbell, who heads up the ACT Academy Trust, told me: "The decline [for girls] is real. And the data is flashing red."

Nevertheless, every single girl I met had dreams for her future. They also described how they understood the challenges that their mothers, sisters, aunties, godmothers and grandmothers had faced, and how they still come up against some of the same ones.

They reported seeing "older men… in their twenties" freely sharing their opinions online about "what women should look like". Their frustration at being entangled in the machine of it all was sometimes palpable.

And so I wonder: in all the chatter about trying to prise our teens off their screens, by banning social media - where teens do feel that they meet and "commune" now - whether we have failed to think properly about what better places must replace them, in the real lives of teen girls?