politics

A big part of the problem with girl scouts, in my opinion, is that a lot of the time the troops are kind of temporary.

Usually group of girls and their parents (usually moms, who may or may not have any scouting experience of their own) start up a troop, more-or-less from scratch when the girls are brownie or daisy-aged, and then that's pretty much it, they don't really do any ongoing recruitment, it stays just those same girls until they all either quit or age out of the program and then the troop dissolves.

Meanwhile, the (boy scout) troop I came up through is going to be celebrating its 100 year anniversary in a year or two. They have a garage full of troop gear, money in the bank, and decades of institutional knowledge of how to be a scout and how to run a scout program. We had one or two kids whose or father and I think even grandfather had earned their eagle from the same troop, the current scoutmaster was in the troop a couple years before me and his kids are in it now, the one before him was already scoutmaster when I started before his kid was old enough to join and stayed on for a few years after his son aged out, and every year we got a new batch of kids joining, some years more than others sure, but there was always new blood coming in

So there's a lot more continuity and something like generational wealth going on with the BSA. Girl scouts generally need to hit the cookies and fundraising hard because they're often kind of starting from 0 (not that there isn't some valid criticism about how the cookie sales work and how the money is distributed and used, but I don't know enough about that to really go into it)

And as far as recruitment, boy scouts made it really easy to find a troop, there's a website you can go on and find all of the ones near you, so if your kid just suddenly wanted to join, or if you moved and needed to find a new one it was dead simple to look that up. At least at the time when I was in, girl scouts didn't really have anything similar, unless you were already in the know about when and where the existing troops met you were kind of SOL if you wanted to join one. I remember one of our leaders talking about some sort of community event they were trying to put together, they had some representatives from a couple other local organizations and other scout troops and such coming, and they wanted to see if any of the local girl scout troops would want to take part, but he just couldn't get in touch with any of them, couldn't find contact info, when he reached out to their local council they basically stonewalled him

And unfortunately just by the nature of it usually being the moms who are the involved parents with girl scouts as opposed to usually the dads, with boy scouts there's often a bit less outdoorsy knowledge to build on (some of my best hiking/camping/fishing buddies are women, but until I was the one who started inviting them out, a lot of them had never done much that kind of thing, and unfortunately that's not a terribly uncommon situation, whereas guys tend to be more likely to grow up doing that sort of thing with their dads)

All that said, I've known a decent amount of girl scouts, and while a lot of them got stuck with shitty programs, there were a handful that actually probably went harder than we did in boy scouts. The odds aren't exactly in your favor of ending up in one of those girl scout troops, but with the right parents, kids, and resources they actually can put on a really good outdoor program (and their campgrounds are usually really nice as well) they just don't have the systems in place to make sure that all of their troops are able to do that to the same extent boy scouts can.