The Conversation

What's life like for women in hip hop? Nelufar Hedayat brings together two outspoken female hip hop artists from Guatemala and Yemen, who aim to change attitudes with their songs. Rebeca Lane is a feminist hip hop star in Central America. She embraced hip hop as a form of protest music, and raps about issues that affect women such as domestic violence and femicide. She co-founded Somos Guerreras,...

What does good care look like? Kim Chakanetsa talks to two women who have dedicated their lives to looking after and advocating for people with dementia in different parts of the world. Morejoy Saineti is a specialist dementia care nurse originally from Zimbabwe, now living in London. She has won numerous awards for her work after she pioneered a community palliative care service for people with d...

Do you really know the person you're dating? Kim Chakanetsa talks to two acclaimed female authors whose stories shine a harsh light on the duplicity of romantic relationships. Kristen Roupenian is the author of Cat Person, which became the first short story to ever go viral when it was published in the New Yorker in 2017. It's the tale of a young woman's brief relationship with an older man, and i...

World-class sportswomen combining motherhood with incredible athletic achievement. Kim Chakanetsa asks how they do it, what support they have behind the scenes, and what it means to them to be both a mother and a top athlete. Jasmin Paris is a record-breaking British ultrarunner and the first woman to win the infamous Spine Race, a winter marathon along the UK's Pennine Way which is widely regarde...

Most people's idea of a band 'roadie' is a burly bloke in a black T-shirt, lugging kit around a stage, living hard and touring constantly. Kim Chakanetsa speaks to two women who have broken this mould, living on the road with music royalty, and making them look and sound amazing. Known as the world’s first female roadie, Tana Douglas is something of a legend in her field. She started off working f...

Two women who hear voices and battle with delusions, tell Kim Chakanetsa about the stigma they have faced as women and how they have learnt to live with their condition. Esme Weijun Wang is a Taiwanese-American writer and author of the bestselling memoir, The Collected Schizophrenias. She talks about the long road to being diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, having suffered from poor mental h...

Raising four or six babies at once - what's it like? Kim Chakanetsa brings together two women in very different situations who are experiencing motherhood in its most concentrated form. In April 2012, Lauren Perkins gave birth to sextuplets in Texas, following fertility treatment. Her six children - Andrew, Benjamin, Caroline, Leah, Allison and Levi - are now seven years old. Lauren says the first...

Zero tolerance for street harassment. Two activists in France and India tell Kim Chakanetsa why they won't accept wolf whistles, groping or violent attacks on women in public spaces. Marie Laguerre is a French student who was cat-called and then assaulted outside a café in Paris in July 2018. The moment was captured on a video which went viral, getting nine million views. The man responsible was s...

The way we talk about gender is evolving, but what impact do words have? Kim Chakanetsa meets two women at the forefront of the study of language and asks them whether the language we speak can impact on the way we think. Lera Boroditsky is a cognitive scientist, who moved from her native Belarus to the USA at the age of 12. She has long been fascinated by how the mind works and studies how langua...

Microlending is touted as a way to lift women out of poverty - with stories of small loans transforming lives in developing countries. But is that the reality? Kim Chakanetsa speaks to two women who lead microfinance organisations in India and the US. Julie Hanna is an Egyptian-born entrepreneur and chair of the board of Kiva, a US-based non-profit organisation that allows people to lend money via...

What's it like to be a woman in the airline industry? Flying has undergone great changes in the past few decades, but Kim Chakanetsa asks how far perceptions of female cabin crew have really changed? Heather Poole has worked for a major US airline for 20 years. She's also the author of the bestselling book, 'Cruising Attitude: Tales of Crashpads, Crew Drama and Crazy Passengers at 30,000 Feet.' Th...

Women around the world are still dying unnecessarily in childbirth, and suffering 'violence' in the delivery room.  What can be done to empower pregnant women? Kim Chakanetsa talks to two female obstetricians who are fighting to improve birth experiences and safety for women in Brazil and the US. Dr Maria Helena Bastos is a Brazilian obstetrician who says that women in Brazil give birth in a very...

Two women breaking the mould in maths and computer science talk to Yassmin Abdel-Magied about the significance of their achievements and the wealth of opportunity for women in technology. Emma Haruka Iwao is a Japanese computer scientist who recently smashed the pi record, by calculating the number to a new world record length of 31 trillion digits. The pursuit of longer versions of pi is a long-s...

What happens when women head up workers' unions? Joanna Impey brings together two powerful women in charge of the rights of millions of workers in the UK and Kenya. They talk about how they're trying to tackle the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace and how they're trying to make unions more relevant to younger women. Born to a family of union organisers in Oxford, Frances O'Grady is the f...

176 million women around the world have endometriosis, a condition which causes crippling pain. So why does it still go undiagnosed for years after women first develop symptoms? Two women from Lebanon and Barbados who speak out about living with 'endo' join Kim Chakanetsa. Carine El Boustani is an endometriosis fighter and advocate. She has struggled with the pain from endometriosis for over 10 ye...

How to subvert the negative stereotypes about older women? Kim Chakanetsa brings together two women - both in their late 70s - to discuss how to grow older with purpose, passion, and a certain playfulness. Chilean author Isabel Allende is one of the most acclaimed writers in the world. Her novels, which draw on her own eventful life, tell stories of love, exile and loss, and have sold more than 70...

What happens when you share your family life online with millions of other mothers? And what responsibilities does it come with? An Indian blogger and British vlogger who both focus on motherhood discuss with Krupa Padhy. Louise Pentland is a parenting vlogger who was recently named as Britain's top 'mumfluencer' by Mother & Baby magazine. Her YouTube channel has more than 2.4 million subscrib...

What does your body hair say about you? Can the decision to remove it be a sign of patriarchal oppression? Yassmin Abdel-Magied meets two women who decided to go against social norms and stop shaving and waxing their legs, underarms and pubic area. They discuss what's at stake for women in different parts of the world when it comes to body hair, and the unexpected reactions they got from their own...

Women are still the ones expected to be on top of household organisation, so does that make tidying up a feminist issue? With the 'decluttering' trend going global, Yassmin Abdel-Magied discusses with two women from Kenya and Belgium, who help people to organise their stuff professionally.   Annelies Mentink became a professional organiser in 2016, following burnout from a stressful job in the ban...

Breaking the silence on sexual assault. Two women tell Kim Chakanetsa how they worked through the trauma of sexual violence, and then decided to speak out to help others. Brisa De Angulo supports young survivors of sexual abuse in Bolivia, through her charity A Breeze of Hope. At the age of 15, she herself was raped by a member of her extended family, but when she tried to report the crime to the...

How to break the 'celluloid ceiling' in the movie industry, a term used to describe the under-representation of women in Hollywood? The numbers are particularly shocking when it comes to film soundtracks. In 2018, 94% of the music in Hollywood's highest grossing films was composed by men, according to the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University. Nelufar H...

Discovering how your family was caught up in major historical events...two women from India and Singapore tell Kim Chakanetsa why they started digging into family secrets, how these stories were lost or deliberately forgotten, and the role that gender played. Aanchal Malhotra's grandparents fled what is now Pakistan in the chaos of Partition in 1947. Until she began to research her book Remnants o...

Nigeria is a country where women take leading roles in business, media and the arts yet for many, feminism is a filthy word. The country recently went to the polls and out of a list of 73 presidential candidates just eight of them were women. One of them, Eunice Atuejide sparked a fierce debate when she announced, “I am not a feminist”. She went on to say, “And who is a feminist? So what is Nigeri...

Empowering women with self-defence skills is the aim of our two guests, who have both adapted traditional martial arts to create classes for women. They tell Celia Hatton about the transformation they see in their students when they first realise their own strength, and the power of self defence to change lives. They also discuss the potential danger of putting the onus on women to deal with viole...

Protecting lions in Kenya and grizzly bears in the US - two women tell Kim Chakanetsa about their experiences and achievements in the male-dominated field of wildlife conservation. When Shivani Bhalla realised that lions - her country's national symbol - were in trouble, she established a project in northern Kenya to protect them. She works with the whole community to prevent lion deaths. This inc...