Girls Claiming Their Space: Resilience, Role Models, and Skateboarding Culture

Girls Claiming Their Space

Skateboarding has always been a space for rebellion, creativity, and self-expression - but for girls, it hasn’t always been easy. As the founder of Bluebird, a female-run skateboard company, I’ve seen firsthand how important it is for girls to have safe, skater-led spaces where they can thrive.

Every year, more young women are stepping on boards, claiming space, and quietly adding to what skateboarding looks and feels like.

For girls especially, having regular, skater-led spaces means they don’t have to ask for belonging - they grow into it.
They don’t wait to be invited.
They own their space.
It’s fierce and it’s exciting.

 

Breaking Barriers, Building Resilience

Every girl who skates faces challenges: fear, falling, learning new tricks, navigating a culture that didn’t always make room for her. Yet each attempt builds something deeper than skill - resilience, confidence, and self-trust.

Skateboarding teaches girls how to fail in public and try again anyway.
How to take up space.
How to trust their bodies.
How to find strength in discomfort.

Strong becomes beautiful.
Not in appearance - but in presence.

 

Role Models in the Scene: GRLSWIRL & Female Skate Leadership

Women have always shaped skateboarding - from pioneers like Patti McGee, the first professional female skateboarder, and Peggy Oki, a member of the original Z-Boys, to the many women who pushed forward without visibility or credit.

Skate photographer Terri Craft played a crucial role in making this history visible, documenting female skaters at a time when women were often overlooked from mainstream skate media. Through her lens, she created and protected a visual archive that continues to inspire new generations of girls.

Today, collectives like GRLSWIRL carry that legacy forward.

Founded by Lucy Osinski, GRLSWIRL has grown into a global community rooted in one simple but rad idea: women deserve safe, welcoming spaces to skate, learn, and exist without pressure. What started in Venice Beach has become a worldwide sisterhood built on joy, inclusion, and shared growth. It’s exciting to watch and would be one hell of a chance to join.

GRLSWIRL isn’t about perfection - it’s about presence. About showing up. About creating environments where women support women. A sisterhood. You fall together, laugh together, and keep going together.

Team riders like Val LaForge embody these values through their skating and their leadership - reminding young girls that strength and softness can coexist, that confidence is built through community, and that progress doesn’t have to look competitive to be powerful.

Through GRLSWIRL, girls learn that skateboarding isn’t just about tricks - it’s about sisterhood, collaboration, and building cultures where everyone belongs.

 

Local Leadership: Women Building the Scene

While global movements inspire us, some of the most powerful change happens quietly, at the local level.

Across our region, women are building skate communities from the ground up - not through show, but through care, consistency, and connection.

Groups like Babes Brigade, founded by Stephanie Battiste, create spaces where women navigate skateboarding together - building confidence and skill through shared experience.

Sisters of Shred, a not-for-profit crew founded by Lisa Goldberg and Elisha Muskat, is run by adult beginners for adult beginners. Their philosophy is simple and focal: remove intimidation, replace it with encouragement, and remind people it’s never too late to start.

Girls+ Skate 613 and York Skateboarding continue this work by organizing inclusive sessions, lessons, and meetups where women, girls, and gender-diverse skaters can learn in environments rooted in safety, mentorship, and respect.

These spaces don’t just teach skating.
They create belonging.
They reduce barriers.
They make female-led leadership visible.

They show girls that skateboarding isn’t something they need to squeeze into - it’s something they already belong in. Just give it a chance.

 

Youth Advocacy: Claiming More Than Just Space

Skateboarding isn’t only about movement - it’s about voice.

Young girls are stepping into advocacy through groups like Raccoon Skate Club, through personal platforms like Thrashlynnn, and through community spaces like Siren Section Surf and Skate Club.

They organize. They host events. They build community.
They don’t wait for permission - they create momentum.

These youth-led initiatives prove that skateboarding is also a form of leadership. By advocating for access, safety, and visibility, girls aren’t just claiming physical space - they’re shaping culture itself.

They are showing other youth that their voices matter in a culture that can support them just as much as they can support it.

 

Global Inspiration: ImillaSkate

Across the world, girls are claiming space in deeply powerful ways.

In Cochabamba, Bolivia, a collective of Indigenous women known as ImillaSkate skate in traditional pollera skirts - garments worn by Aymara and Quechua women for generations.

The word imilla means “young girl,” and their skating is both cultural expression and political statement. By riding in traditional dress, they challenge gender roles, reclaim public space, and honour ancestral identity.

Their story, captured in the ImillaSkate documentary, shows that skateboarding can be a tool for resistance, pride, and community leadership - a way to merge movement with remembrance, culture with confidence.

 

Allyship in the Scene

It’s also important to say this: many of the spaces where girls thrive - men in the skate community actively show up as allies.

Skateboarding has always been built on mentorship - older skaters teaching younger ones, sharing spots, lending boards, filming each other, hyping each other up. When men invite women into that same culture of respect and collaboration, something powerful happens.

Not competition - cohesion.
Not hierarchy - harmony.

The strongest skate scenes aren’t divided by gender.
They’re connected by care.

Women bring a fierce energy to skateboarding - creativity, emotional intelligence, leadership, and community-building. And when that energy is met with genuine support, the culture doesn’t dilute… it deepens.

That’s what real progress looks like in skateboarding:
Not taking space from anyone.
But making space for everyone.

 

Visibility Matters

Representation in zines, magazines, videos, and social media matters.

When girls see women owning their skateboards and their spaces, they realize: this is a world they can take part in, shape, and lead. Seeing peers organize events, advocate, and build community inspires both participation and leadership.

Girls don’t just learn how to skate.
They learn how to lead.

 

Claiming Their Space

Skateboarding teaches that falling isn’t failure - it’s practice.

For girls, claiming space means showing up, trying, persisting, and leading - rewriting what’s possible both on the board and in life.

Skateboarding isn’t just a sport.
It’s a school for resilience, empowerment, and self-expression.

And the next generation of female skaters and advocates is already here.
Strong.
Grounded.
Fearless in the quiet ways that matter most. In the loud ways that hype us up.

Strong is beautiful.
Resilient is powerful.
And skateboarding is where girls learn both on the board and in the world around them.

Strong is beautiful. Resilient is powerful. Skateboarding is where girls learn both - on the board and in the world around them.