Last week, Boy Scouts of America officially said girls will be allowed to join their organization and receive the Eagle Scout award beginning in 2018. Since the announcement, there has been tremendous backlash from Girl Scouts of America and others who believe expanding Boy Scouts to young girls will not be beneficial to the organizations. This decision to integrate females into the BSA may not be the solution to uniting boys and girls in the scouting experience.

Allowing girls in Boy Scouts may seem progressive however the first question that comes to mind is, isn’t there already Girl Scouts? Yes, there is already an organization for girls. Even though Boy Scouts are not affiliated with Girl Scouts, there is a lot of overlap regarding activities that troops do.

Not only do girls already have their own organization, research have shown young women benefit from being in an all female environment, according to girlscouts.org. Both organizations have had their systems for over a century. Allowing girls into BSA would create a lot of expenses, such as having to create female facilities at the camps Boy Scouts attend.

Girls looking forward to scouting with their male peers will be disappointed to learn that Cub Scout dens are going to be divided by gender, according to nbcnews.com. Families planning to have sons and daughters in the same den will have to find a separate den for their girls. Instead of finding new troop leaders and starting new dens from the ground up, it would be more beneficial to enroll kids in previously developed Girl Scout troops and work on improving their groups and community outreach.

A better solution for unifying the two branches of scout and leadership would be more collaboration between the two groups. Both organizations could benefit from each other. Boys could benefit from the Girl Scout organization because the need for abilities labeled as “female skills,” such as caregiving and collaboration, are on the rise, according to huffingtonpost.com.

Prospective female scouts can ultimately choose whichever group they want to participate in. However, both organizations need to start communicating better, and the growing leaders within their communities should create the change they want to see in their groups. Instead of arguing about what group girls should join, focus should remain on giving kids, teens and young adults a healthy outlet to have fun and develop leadership skills.

Wanting to include girls in Boy Scouts is admirable, but one can only wonder why there is a sudden need to include girls in BSA after over 100 years of the two organizations running separately and in some cases clashing with each other. In 1920, Boy Scouts sued Girl Scouts for using the name scout, claiming they feminized the word, according to theatlantic.com.

One motivation for the addition of girls to Boy Scouts could be increasing the number of scouts in their program. BSA membership decreased by 7.4 percent last year, according to chicagotribune.com. This type of change should not be based on a monetary value.

While change is usually good when it comes to more inclusion, girls benefitting more from Boy Scouts than Girl Scouts is unlikely considering the non-inclusive history of the male organization.

It took BSA until 2013 to permit openly gay scouts in the troops and lift the ban on gay leaders two years later. Along with allowing girls, in January BSA announced scouts who identify as male would be allowed to join the organization as well starting in 2018, according to theatlantic.com. Girl Scouts on the other hand has always been committed to inclusivity despite backlash the organization has received from conservative groups, according to cnn.com.

With girls’ new privilege to join Boy Scouts, they should carefully consider whether they want to embark on a new path with BSA or join the all female girl scouts. Boy Scouts also needs to be conscientious when it comes to integrating girls in their community and have the proper resources to create a smooth transition, assuming they are adding girls to the organization for the right reasons.