How Many Girls Earn the Gold Award?

Every so often a topic that makes the rounds on Girl Scout Facebook groups is our higher awards--the Gold, Silver and Bronze awards--and how they compare, at least prestige-wise to BSA's Eagle.  One thing I've noted over the years both by observation of my parish's troop and by on-line conversations, is that a reasonably high percent of boys (now youth) who stick with BSA through high school seem to earn the Eagle, whereas it seems that few girls earn Gold.

Today I got my council's Annual Report, and I decided to do some math.  For the record, I'm a word person, not a numbers person.  I have made a lot of assumptions in my figures and the post will tell you what those assumptions are, but I'll tell you right now I know they aren't super accurate. They are easy, and I think get me close to where I want to be without needing to borrow my daughter's graphing calculator.

Girl Scouts Louisiana East had 10,281 girl members during the covered year.  Of those 24% were Juniors, 12% were Cadettes, 3% were Seniors and 2% were Ambassadors. 

How Far Is Too Far: Adapting GSUSA Programming to Meet the Needs of Your Girls

I've heard it said that sometimes your greatest strength can also be your greatest weakness. I get many of my ideas for posts on this blog by reading the Facebook groups in which I promote it.  I write posts to address questions that are frequently asked, or to address thoughts that run through my mind as I read the groups.  This post addresses thoughts that run through my mind.

A great strength of the Girl Scout program is the ability of leaders to adapt it to meet the needs of your girls.  There are very few "musts" and not even a lot of "shoulds".  In the current program, badges have five requirements (except Daisies have three) and those requirements are quite vague, at least on the Brownie level.  While the badge inserts in the Girls' Guide to Girl Scouting say "Every step has three choices.  Do ONE choice to complete each step. Inspired?  Do more", which sounds to me like you are supposed to choose an activity from the badge packet, evidently people are now being told that the "requirements" are the short phrases on the front of the pack and/or on the Badge Explorer, not the listed activities.  That belief is carried through on VTK, which offers activities which are not on the inserts, and which, in fact, sometimes  has plans that don't even meet the short requirements (e.g. the First Aid badge has a requirement to talk to someone who treats injured people, and the VTK plan for the badge does not include doing so). So, what do you HAVE to do to earn a badge?