Radio 4 explores what it means to be a girl

Catherine Carr is an excellent audio journalist with a couple of great podcasts: the award-winning Relatively, where she talks to siblings about their relationships, and Where Are You Going?, in which she asks that question of passersby. Both are a delight because Carr is a delight. She interviews sensitively and without pushiness, and her interviewees, often unused to talking into a microphone, find it easy to be candid. Where Are You Going? was my top show of 2023.

She also, in 2024, made About the Boys, a Radio 4 series that went out in the daily 15-minute early afternoon slot. Here she talked to boys about all sorts of stuff: playing video games, muffling their feelings, being unsure about sex. It was interesting as well as heartwarming (one young lad sang to her), and last week she did the same for girls in About the Girls. Topics: education, friendship, sex and relationships, mobile phones, “becoming a woman”.

The girls she speaks to are lovely: reasonable, honest and clear. Despite their chaotic reputation, teenage girls are often kind and emotionally astute. Carr doesn’t have a daughter of that age, so she finds some of the teen slang unfamiliar; there’s something very sweet about her asking: “What is a ‘beg’?” Or: “What’s a ‘pick me’?” Both are labels for girls who want too much attention. Young women are constantly surveilled, by adults and by each other, informed when they’re being too aggressive or too flirty, told they’re doing it wrong (whatever “it” is); negotiating, as one expert said, “several different identities at once”. Though every episode had its joy and its pain (one girl talked about an abusive relationship she was in when she was just 11: she made me cry), the sex episode was undeniably bleak.

We heard schoolgirls discuss the difference between consent in theory and in practice. One described friends who “don’t want to be thrown into a wall and smacked about” but who can’t say no, because such brutality is apparently what their boyfriend desires. Violent pornography, widely watched, easily available, has changed everything. “Obviously, porn puts pressure on boys to perform as well as girls,” said one girl. “But the way men perform keeps the power with them and the way women perform does the opposite.”

A young woman describes a time she consented to choking during sex, only to lose consciousness almost immediately: an intensely frightening experience, not just for her but for her sexual partner too. The situations the girls find themselves in are so extreme that, when a boy sends an unsolicited picture of his penis on, say, the third Snapchat message, it’s not considered worth worrying about. As Carr says: “What does consent even mean if you can’t complain about being sent a dick pic?”

The relationships the girls had with each other, though, were heartening, whether they were Girl Guides, netball players or just everyday school pals. The world is not kind to young women (has it ever been?), but their friendships made everything lighter.

To tie in with the series, Radio 4 also scheduled a couple of other girl-centred programmes: on Monday, Currently took an in-depth look at why girls are starting puberty earlier. Over the past half-century, the age that British girls begin puberty has dropped by several years, and now some girls are getting their periods and experiencing body changes  as young as eight or nine years old. The reasons why aren’t entirely clear, but as health presenter Laura Foster discovered, it’s probably to do with obesity, and maybe tiny plastics that the body absorbs and which act like hormones. Whatever the causes, schools have had to move their lessons about puberty down from year 5 to year 4. Some of the children spoke about it on the show: their high-pitched primary school voices were a shock.

And on Tuesday evening, File on 4 Investigates with Hayley Mortimer reported on why working-class white girls are falling behind at school. In some areas of England, their average GSCE attainment has dropped three grades since the pandemic: just 38% of these girls passed their English and Maths GSCEs last year. “The challenge is that the boys are still doing a little bit worse,” said Tom Campbell, the chief executive of a multi-academy trust, “and therefore this problem is creeping up on us year on year. Over time, the decline is stark, and unless we come up with a better response, it may be a decline that we’re never going to be able to arrest.” White working-class girls have stopped going to school, and those that do are disengaged, ending up suspended and excluded, with suspension rates in their cohort second only to Gypsy and Roma children. “The data is flashing red,” said Campbell.

As I said, some of this is bleak. There was a sense, even in Carr’s programmes, of these teenagers’ lives being examined by grownups and found wanting.And yet whenever the girls themselves spoke, every one of these programmes lifted into hope. Next time it would be great if a whole show – maybe a whole day – was handed over to actual teenagers, so we could hear their challenges, humour and resilience absolutely on their own terms.

Photograph by Getty