The Case for Evidence-Based Outdoor Recreation Interventions for Girls: Helping Girls “Find Their Voice” in the Outdoors

Abstract

Females’ participation in outdoor recreation is often limited for a variety of reasons including social gender norms, a lack of exposure, and fear. Research has uncovered a wide range of positive outcomes for those females who do participate ranging from enhanced self-esteem and confidence to improved body image, indicating the importance of opening the outdoors as a welcoming place for all to experience. Finding Your Voice is a recreation intervention created with the focus of introducing middle school girls to outdoor recreation to increase the participants’ self-efficacy and self-empowerment. Empirical research focusing on participant experiences has demonstrated promising results and the best practices from Finding Your Voice and the broader research on female empowerment in the outdoors are presented.

Keywords

• outdoor recreation
• female empowerment
• single-gender
• adolescent programming
• adolescent girls
• outdoor camp