FFS, apparently I have to explain the patriarchy

Start with the wine bottle challenge first and when it’s mastered that move on up to the tricky one.

:) Happy to help. If I can place the article I am thinking of (it was about how boys dominated the space in youth centres) then I'll post it.

How are you getting on @artisanparsnips ?

I'm no closer to teaching the cat how to open a wine bottle although she confirms she is very much up for smashing the patriarchy.

Loving your work Parsnips and Spartacus

rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1475-4762.00019

OP - are you familiar with the journal 'Children's Geographies'? This might be a good place to start. Youth and Policy is also an excellent source.

I also suggest that you look up some earlier material by Janet Batsleer and also by JeanSpence.

J. Batsleer (2013) Youth Working with Girls and Women in Community Settings: A feminist perspective (Farnham: Ashgate).

e-space.mmu.ac.uk/619859/1/Janet%20Batsleet%20-%20Resurgent%20Feminist%20Approaches%20for%20sympleptic.pdf

Jean Spence has also written quite a bit on girls

Spence J. (2014) Feminism and Informal Education in Youth Work with Girls and Young Women, 1975–85. In: Mills S., Kraftl P. (eds) Informal Education, Childhood and Youth. Palgrave Macmillan, London. doi.org/10.1057

I think the 80s was the heyday of girls' work (some crept into the 90s).

See

Nava M. (1984) Youth Service Provision, Social Order and the Question of Girls. In: McRobbie A., Nava M. (eds) Gender and Generation. Youth Questions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17661-8_1

V. Carpenter and K. Young (1986) Coming in From the Margins: Youth work with girls and young women (Leicester: NAYC).

M. Nava (1982) ‘ “Everybody’s views were just broadened” A girls project and some responses to Lesbianism’, Feminist Review, 10, 37–60.

J. Spence (1996) ‘Feminism in work with girls and women’, Youth and Policy, 52, 38–53.

Of course, I can't find the exact article I was looking for!

You need to draw attention to their public sector equality duty. This isa proactive requirement to ensure they meet the needs of all protected characteristics in all their planning.

So many good posts on here. I like Museum‘s approach

I also think some men get off on making women actually voice and name how they feel discriminated against, especially in a work setting. It’s a kind of fucked-up rank-pulling over us on their part. Its an othering exercise where they get to force and see female vulnerability. It produces a level of intimate disclosure that they like. The healthy ‘fact-finding’ interest isn’t real. Not nice, but that’s been my experience before.

I’d be so tempted to patronise in a reply about how unfortunate it is that they seem to be entirely unaware of an entire body of relevant literature and maybe need to add some additional expertise in these matters to the team if they want to be taken seriously.

It's so deeply unfashionable to care about girls in youth spaces right now, sadly. This is more about any recognition of girls' specific needs being seen as potentially anti-trans and therefore 'wrong think', but it also gives a green light to those who openly don't care, or who are effectively MRAs and want to dismantle the rights of girls.

I think artisan might actually work with a poster here. That wide eyed naivety is so very familiar

@YetAnotherSpartacus
Absolutely. It’s the supposed desire to ‘understand’. At first glance it gives the impression of wanting to know, but that’s not what it is at all, it’s just a way to try and make the OP look and feel stupid so they stop being difficult. You can keep explaining till you’re blue in the face, but all you’ll keep getting back is endless supposed credulity. It’s deeply arrogant.

I agree vermeil.

"May I ask, which methods do you feel would disenfranchise girls? I am really interested to understand why you think boys would be potentially overpowering in this process and particularly the way of engagement that you think might not be working well as proposed."

Is very different to

"Hey, we don't want the boys to overpower! The girls need to have an equal voice. How might we achieve this?" It's the 'as well as proposed' that gets me. This suggests that the OP is the outlier to a well thought out proposal that everyone else agrees with. It was passive-aggressive and likely said by someone who doesn't give a shit about girls.

There was a load of studies about this back in the day of youth clubs. The boys used the games tables and dominated the centre of the room, the girls ended up around the edges watching, or in any kitchen area. Girls' specific work was often about make-up or fashion - unless the youth worker had a feminist streak when it was often about why the boys were in the centre of the room...

I can’t be the only one who finds the tone of their reply unpleasant?
It’s something I’ve seen before from people who’ve done a bit of NLP but don’t realise that it’s really transparent. You make a statement and instead of an answer they’ll give you a series of seemingly innocent wide-eyed questions, but it’s a ploy to try and trip you up by forcing you to go into far greater detail than is necessary. The objective is not to give you any answers or admit there might be an issue, but to dig out a ‘gotcha’ that enables them to completely disempower you and dismiss you by nothing more than catching you on the hop. Horrible.

Is public space ever aimed at girls? YetAnotherSparticus is right - unless girls are specifically considered their needs are ignored.

In other words, it's obvious that in terms of method they need girls' only groups and the questions need to be framed very clearly about what might prevent girls using public space, what might encourage them to use it and so on (rather than being 'gender-neutral', and, in this case, tacitly 'male').

It's a toolkit about holding consultations with teenagers about public space

Ah. About men's space you mean?

Places that will be dominated by young men either because they are designed with their interests in mind or because they will naturally assume it is theirs and push the girls and young women out or simply make them feel unwelcome except as admiring spectators.

I wonder if the consultation explicitly contained questions along the lines of what would make girls and young women feel welcome in the spaces? What would make them feel safe (or what makes them feel unsafe)? Were there female-only focus groups led by a youth worker who specialises in girls' work?

Or was this another 'deal with boys' and young men's perceived anti-social behaviour by creating leisure facilities for them and fuck the girls' consultation?

Did they say "I guess"

If so ask them how they are going to ensure that the teams pick an equal balance.
Are they aware of the different ways girls and boys use language?

Did the tool kit mention disability? How they will include those with learning disability or autism? What considerations will be made for dyslexia, hearing or speech impairment? If they just suggest groups then it is not just girls' voices silenced.