ABSTRACT
Over the past 50 years, girls and young women worldwide have experienced significant gender biases, influencing their spatial practices and perceptions. Despite progress in gender equality and emancipatory movements, these biases persist. Therefore, the authors explore what characterizes girls' and young women's spatial knowledge, what formative influences shape it, and what consequences follow. In this paper, we draw on a qualitative meta-analysis of 60 studies on the spatial dimensions of childhood and youth published from the late 1960s to the present. The chapter's key argument is that, due to gendered parental guidelines and societal attributions, girls' and young women's daily lives revolve largely around the domestic sphere of the private home, with little opportunity for unsupervised play or independent mobility. This restriction negatively impacts their ability to acquire embodied spatial knowledge, with those from lower socio-economic backgrounds particularly disadvantaged. In recent years, access to online spaces has provided girls and young women with new spatial practices that allow for intensive social interactions and the acquisition of mediated spatial knowledge from home. However, although this opens up new possibilities for them, it also harbors dangers, not least because access to media remains unequal along the lines of gender, class, race, and ethnicity.
