BBC Radio 4 - Woman's Hour - ‘Girl code’ - what is it and should it ever be broken? (2024)

If you’ve been watching Love Island on ITV2, one of the subjects that’s featured heavily this series is ‘girl code’.

“Apparently Maura has broken the ‘girl code’”, Ellen Scott, Metro’s Lifestyle Editor, told BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. “Maura has gone after Amy’s ex, Curtis, and she has gone up to him and said, ‘I fancy you’. And where the ‘girl code’ has been breached apparently is that she didn’t go and tell Amy first that she was going to do that.”

So what is ‘girl code’, why does it exist and should it ever be broken?

What is ‘girl code’?

“‘Girl code’ is the rules of being a woman, especially with regards to dating,” says Ellen Scott. It’s stuff like: you can’t date your friend’s ex, you also can’t date your ex’s friend. If you saw your friend’s boyfriend cheating on them – you’d have to tell your friend. It’s basically just that your loyalty is always with other women – that’s what ‘girl code’ is supposed to be.”

“I think it starts from when you’re in secondary school and you’re just starting to date. Especially for me, I went to an all-girls school so the boys that you could go for were limited. So of course you would have ‘girl code’ like ‘you can’t go out with my ex’, but inevitably people would.”

“I would say ‘girl code’ is a fuzzy set of indeterminate rules that are used by women to police other women’s behaviour,” says freelance writer Moya Lothian-McLean.

“It’s quite an empty word. I would say ‘girl code’ is mostly about pitting women against other women. It focuses normally on heteronormative dating and it’s usually ideas like don’t steal your friend’s man or don’t chat-up someone your friend is talking to and don’t date your friend’s ex. It’s very limited and narrow which is sad. There is so much potential with a phrase like ‘girl code’ – it just hasn’t realised it yet.”

"‘Girl code’ should be broken - you can’t control who you fall in love with"

“I think girl code is silly in most cases,” argues Ellen Scott. “I understand where it comes from; obviously it really hurts to see your ex with anyone, let alone someone who you consider a friend. But the fact of the matter is you can’t control who you fall in love with and who you click with.”

“A lot of times, ‘girl code’ is about regulating what women do and not so much what men do. They’re free to date your friend and there’s no kind of ‘ex code’, which I think is unfair.”

“It’s very possessive. It’s about saying, ‘I’ve dated this man or I like this man so he’s off limits, he’s mine’.”

“I think ‘girl code’ is reductive and not really fair – if I’m your friend, I should support you finding love, even if it’s with someone who I was dating. Clearly if we’ve broken up there was a reason for that and they might not be right for me, but they might be right for you. I should be happy for you for that.”

"We should just get rid of ‘girl code’ all together"

“What do I think about ‘girl code’? I think that it is quite a reductive feminism – the clue is in the name,” says Moya Lothian-McLean. “It’s ‘girl code’, it’s not ‘women’s code’. I think that it mainly focuses on how women relate to men, which is never useful in terms of female solidarity and I think that it tends to put women into small boxes.”

“Women are socialised to see men as a prize, and you’re competing with other women and women are getting picked by that man as a prize. Women are seen as replaceable. In ‘girl code’ the whole fear is that you’ll be replaced and that men can’t control themselves. If a man is dating someone and that’s your friend and then the man approaches you, then it’s up to you to turn it down. There’s no agency put on the man. The onus is put on the women to protect other women through solidarity because the idea is that men are never going to control themselves.”

“So I think it’s redundant in the 21st century and unless we can re-brand it, I think it should be done away with. We have a ‘girl code’, it’s called feminism and I think that’s really important to remember.”

What do you think about ‘girl code’? Join the debate on the Woman’s Hour Instagram account @bbcwomanshour.

You can listen to the full Woman's Hour discussion on ‘girl code’ with Jane Garvey, Ellen Scott and Moya Lothian-McLean here.

Woman's Hour is on BBC Radio 4 on weekdays at 10am and at 4pm on Saturdays. The podcast is available on BBC Sounds.