[2] Scholars within girl studies examine social and cultural elements of girlhood and move away from an adult-centered focus.
In the 1970s, some feminist scholars brought to attention the unbalanced focus of boyhood in comparison to girlhood in youth research.
[6] Girl studies emerged in the 1990s, a time when there was an increased interest from the media and fashion and beauty industries in young women.
[2] Jackie Kirk et al., discuss how terms that are meant for unity and empowerment such as ‘girl power’ are often used for marketing purposes rather than considered in policy making.
There are a lot of factors that can go into being a girl such as economic status, race, age, class, gender, sexuality, religion, environment, and ethnicity.
In 2008, scholars Claudia Mitchell, Jacqueline Reid-Walsh, and Jackie Kirk established and launched Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal after recognizing the emerging interest in the field at the 2001 "A New Girl Order: Young Women and the Future of Feminist Inquiry" conference at King's College London.
[2] In a 2016 article, Claudia Mitchell acknowledges the presence of girlhood studies in Africa, referencing a South African video project called Vikea Abantwana (Protect The Children: A Story about Incest).
On the topic of insuring an intersectional and transnational approach in girl studies, scholar Oneka LaBennett commented “Black schoolgirls and college students have engaged in protests across the globe.
Girls themselves have drawn attention to the negative impact of things like white beauty standards, the intersections of racial and gender violence, the problems with police brutality and the school-to-prison pipeline.
Due to its preoccupation with Japanese youth and schoolgirls, Cool Japan has become a topic of girl studies, branching out into many areas.
[14] Barrie Thorne, Sociology and Gender and Women's studies professor at The University of California Berkeley, described the four interpretations of the term play.
Thorne points out how it is common for men to invade verbal space when a woman is talking by interrupting, just like they dominated on the playground when they were younger.
[16] Orenstein concluded that no matter economic status, geographic region, education, or race, girls still received the same messages and experienced the confidence gap.
Along her study, she noted that it was common for girls to experience eating disorders, sexual harassment, and therefore a decrease in academic performance, specifically in math and science.
Orenstein discovers that the reasons girls undergo the confidence gap, is because of gender bias and sexism in school, family relations and friendship rooted in societal norms, and cultural standards.
Sex abuse is often normalized in highly urban areas and girls do not have the access to sexual education to teach them about consent and protection.
[17][18][19] Popular culture oriented toward girls and young women often reinforces very limited depictions of desirable girlhood.
For example, people often obsessed over Serena Williams' hair, clothing, and body because she was not white and skinny like most women role models in the media.
These texts examine Black girls’ complex racialized, gendered, and age-based cultural realities as they navigate and resist multiple forms of violences.
Janie Victoria Wald and Beth Cooper Benjamin have found that connections between "girls' psychosocial development and persistent issues in adult women's lives" are not as present in recent scholarship as they were during the advent of the field and believe they should be in order to explore intergenerational relationships.
[6] Mary Celeste Kearney, a scholar who does work in girl studies, notices that though there is a focus on intersectionality within the field, "non-white, non-Western girls remain vastly understudied as result of such research being conducted primarily in Canada, Australia, Great Britain, Northern Europe, and the United States.
[28] Kirk, Jackie et al. discussed how they experienced dishonesty in studies and self-censoring from girls to adhere to societal norms.
As mentioned in the text History and Popular Culture at Work in the Subjectivity of a Tween, the author's daughter was scared to become an adult because of the concerns of others.
[30] With girls having these types of ideas rushing through their minds as they get older – we are not helping them grow in a safe space, instead, we are raising them to fear the outside world and not want to be a part of it.
Kearney claims that some factors that contributes to the lack of scholarly attention that girl studies receives includes adult-centric feminism, male dominance in the public sphere, and the ambiguity that surrounds the field.