Critical components for advancing young women's leadership

Chapter 2 reflects further on the study introduced in the previous chapter to examine critical components for advancing young women’s leadership. It presents our findings on effective ways to support young women’s leadership and barriers they may face. The chapter then provides a detailed exploration of one key theme regularly cited by young women as central to their leadership practice and development: safe spaces. We argue that young women need and deserve safe spaces where they feel respected, heard, and can discuss challenging or sensitive topics that affect them. To explore what that might look like, we critically review existing literature on the concept of safe spaces and integrate existing knowledge and gaps with what we have heard from young women about what safe spaces mean, why they are important, and how they may differ in theory, form, and function across diverse spaces and at different times.