Girlguiding in the news 2025

Stylist

She’s 13, loves skincare and hates history. She’s stopped wearing her hair up (too easy to grab) and last year a boy at school filmed up her skirt. The video is still online.

What it’s like to be a girl in 2025.

Is 2025 the scariest time to be a girl?

From unrealistic beauty standards to an ever growing tide of harassment and misogyny, are we failing girls? Stylist spoke to students across the country to get a true picture of what it means to be a girl in 2025.

Words: Holly Bullock, Susanne Norris and Meena Alexander

Photography: Rachel Louise Brown

Content note: this article contains descriptions of sexual harassment that readers may find upsetting

It’s 7.16am. You reach for your phone and start browsing social media. A video begins: “The problem with ‘pick me’ girls is…”. You scroll on. The next 15 videos include clips of men explaining what a woman’s “ideal body count” is, “high protein, low calorie recipes” for fat-burning and a friend talking about what happened when a man approached her at the bus stop last night. You lock your phone when it serves you a pop-up ad for porn. You apply your seven-step skincare routine, look in your illuminated mirror and wonder whether you should just stay at home today (you don’t like going out when you’re having a bad skin day). You check your direct messages: a random man is asking if he can “send you pictures”. You block him. You open the wardrobe and pull out your school uniform because you are only 13 years old.

What is it like to be a girl in 2025? Is it better for them than it was for us? Have years of progress for women shielded the next generation from sexism, misogyny and impossible standards? Or, as was our biggest fear, is it actually getting worse to grow up as a girl in the UK? These are the questions we set out to answer in this month’s Stylist. Over the past eight weeks, we’ve travelled up and down the country talking to girls mainly aged between nine and 17. The above scenario was constructed from the testimonies of the girls we spoke to – testimonies which paint a stark picture of a generation buckling under unprecedented pressures.

According to a study by Girlguiding UK, the proportion of girls who feel “unsafe” because of sexism has more than doubled in the past 10 years to 47%, while the action group End Violence Against Women found that a third of girls think schools wouldn’t take them seriously if they reported sexual harassment.

“Sexual harassment in, and outside of, schools is rife,” says Ellie Softley, head of education and interim CEO of young people’s charity Everyone’s Invited. “The girls we work with experience ‘casual’ misogyny both from fellow students and teachers; many report incidents that are much more serious. On a broader level, girls increasingly feel…

Special report by Hannah Timson. Issue 977 First News. 7-13 March 2025

A starry encounter

This week marks both British Science Week and International Women’s Day. To celebrate, we’ve teamed up with Brownies, Guides and Rangers to share their amazing interview with astronaut Meganne Christian. Here’s what happened…

Interviewers: Hi Meganne. So, when do you hope to fly into space?

Meganne: I’m a reserve for the European Space Agency, which means there are no guarantees for me. I might never get to space, but it’s not looking too bad; if the things that are being worked on come off, then it should be in the next couple of years, but no guarantees.

Interviewers: If you had a bedside table in space, what would you put on it?

Meganne: Well, I would have to strap it down very well because obviously things fly around in space, but I would definitely take my knitted penguin. She’s called Pengaroo and I knitted her about ten years ago now… no, more than that – 14 years ago, actually for my husband, and he started taking her with him around the world. So Pengaroo travels around the world. She’s been on my parabolic flights [a way of getting zero-gravity in an aeroplane], she’s been to Antarctica, so next she will have to go to space. I would also have to have a good book.

Interviewers: If you could take any TV character into space, who would it be?

Meganne: I think Buzz Lightyear has a lot of experience, so I’d probably have to take him!

Interviewers: How long is a trip to the moon?

Meganne: Going to the moon is complicated. It’s a long way from Earth compared to the International Space Station, which is only 400km away. To get to the moon it takes three to five days, and then it depends how much time you’re going to be spending on the moon. So not long from now, there’s going to be a station called Gateway that’s going to be orbiting the moon. Astronauts will go to Gateway for probably about a month and then come home, so a trip to the moon might be a month and a half.

Interviewers: What kind of food do astronauts eat in space?

Meganne: We try to eat pretty similar food to what we have here on Earth when we’re in space. Things that we like, because food’s really important for keeping up morale, it helps you stay happy. But the thing is, the things you take to space need to be as light as possible and take up as little space as possible, so what you do is you dehydrate the food and get rid of all the water that’s inside it. You have to put the water back inside it and maybe heat it up when you’re up there in space. But then the kinds of things you eat might be normal meals, like you could have rice and some vegetables and meat or something like that. They’ve had pizzas in space before, sometimes ice cream and biscuits. And then healthy snacks. When a new mission comes in for example, they tend to have some fresh fruit come in with them, and astronauts are always really excited when the fresh fruit arrives on the station.

Interviewers: What’s your favourite planet and why?

Meganne: My favourite planet is Earth. I suppose it’s fair to say I haven’t been on any other planets so I wouldn’t know, but I think there’s something so special about our own planet and that’s why we live here. I would love to see some other planets though!

Interviewers: How long do you have to train to become an astronaut?

Meganne: All astronauts go through basic training, which takes about a year. Then depending on the mission, you’ll have specific training for the kind of experiments that you’re going to be running. For example, if you’re going to be doing a spacewalk you’ll spend a lot of time in the pool. So it can take anywhere from a year to about four years to train for a mission to the International Space Station.

Interviewers: What advice would you give us if we wanted to be an astronaut one day?

Meganne: If you wanted to be an astronaut, I think the wonderful thing is that at this time there are more and more opportunities that are becoming available. We’re in a really special moment. In the 2040s the aim is that we’ll have humans on Mars, which is really exciting. My advice is to do something that you really enjoy doing because you have to be at the top of your game in whatever you’re doing in your life to be selected as an astronaut.

Did you know? It takes several hours to prepare for a spacewalk, including putting on the spacesuit!

Inspiring future generations

Back in February, more than 500 Brownies took over the National Space Centre in Leicester for an out-of-this world adventure, which was made possible thanks to Girlguiding’s partnership with the UK Space Agency. Girls aged seven to ten came together to learn about astronaut training, create sunspot viewers and map constellations. The aim of the day was to inspire more girls to get involved with science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM).