The Conversation

Nneka Egbuna is a Nigerian German songwriter and performer. She grew up in Warri in the Delta region of Nigeria and travels the world performing and writing, but still it is her home country and its problems which move her to make music. She says, "It's pain, mainly pain, that does inspire me". Nneka writes her songs on her own and plays guitar and drums as well using various computer applications...

Chika Anadu is a self-taught film-maker who wrote, produced and directed her first feature film, the acclaimed B for Boy, in 2013. After studying law in the UK she went back to her home country Nigeria to shoot her film - a contemporary drama which reflects the tension between modern and traditional values in middle-class family life in Lagos. Its central character is a female TV producer who is u...

Irish striker Stephanie Roche fell in love with football from an early age. She went to matches with her dad and brothers and played on boys' teams before joining girls' sides from the age of 13. Her opponents were surprised to see a girl on the pitch and says she would sometimes get a bit of abuse from players and parents "but nothing too bad". The insults didn't bother her though, she just focus...

Aowen Jin is from China but has lived and worked in the UK for 18 years. Originally trained as a lawyer, she swapped a life at the bar for a life at the easel and now her work is in the Queen's private collection. Before the civil war Sara Shamma was a star of the blossoming Syrian art scene. She carried on painting in Damascus for as long as she could - starting on a series called Diaspora. By th...

Salima Ikram was born in Pakistan and got hooked on ancient Egyptian artefacts through the pictures in a childhood book. Her fate as an Egyptologist was sealed when she came face-to-face, aged nine, with mesmerising statues in the Cairo museum; she decided then that finding out more about them would be her life's work. "Archaeologists are people who never grew up" she says. When not lecturing at t...

Annise Parker is the mayor of Houston, Texas, the oil and gas capital of America. She once worked in this industry, but says her day job was supporting her "volunteer habit" and eventually gave it up to serve her community full-time. Annise climbed the rungs of local government to become the first openly gay mayor of a major US city in 2010. Her election caused an international media frenzy becaus...

Naamah Kelman was the first woman to be ordained a rabbi in Israel in 1992. She belongs to the liberal Reform movement in Judaism and so her office isn't recognised by Orthodox Jews. She says, "women in our family were supposed to marry rabbis ... and give birth to rabbis" but her father gave her the support she needed to break the mould, study for years, and eventually become a leader. Naamah was...

MC Melodee is a rapper from Amsterdam who grew up listening to cassette tapes of De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest. From a young age Melodee says she loved playing with language and creating rhymes. Melodee says she went to university to please her parents, but when she graduated she chose a career in music, rather than a steady office job. That decision paid off and now MC Melodee has rocked ve...

At the age of 28 Ky Furneaux swapped her job as a guide in the Australian outback for stunt work in Hollywood. "I don't think I really realised it was gonna hurt," she says of this sometimes "brutal" industry. Now aged 41 Ky is a veteran of more than 60 films including Catwoman, X-Men: The Last Stand, and Thor. She has a reputation for taking "hard hits" but admits that the first time someone punc...

Mexican conductor Alondra de la Parra has been described as a 'rock star' of the classical world. At a concert as a child her father asked her what a conductor does - "nothing" she replied. So he enlightened her and explained that the conductor does "everything". This ignited a curiosity, which soon led to an unstoppable passion and in her early 20s Alondra set up the Philharmonic Orchestra of the...

When Houriya Kazim became the United Arab Emirates' first ever woman surgeon in the late 1990s she chose to specialise in breast surgery. Accusations of immodesty and even pornography followed as Houriya's educational pamphlets fell foul of the authorities' restrictions on language and images of women's bodies. Despite making progress in encouraging women to check their breasts for signs of cancer...

When celebrity chef Farah Quinn first appeared on screens in Indonesia, people were not quite sure what to make of her. Viewers were used to male chefs, so making her mark was not easy. Critics quibbled about her talents saying they lay in her looks rather than her culinary achievements, but Farah says this is unfair and she has worked hard to get to where she is, starting at the bottom and runnin...

Two women in the field of psychiatry discuss the demands and satisfaction that comes from working in Uganda and Pakistan, where there is still a stigma around mental health and mental health professionals. Dr Margaret Mungherera was the first African woman to be elected president of the World Medical Association, a role she held from 2013 until quite recently. Dr Mungherera was one of only six psy...

Amatalalim Alsoswa was Yemen's first female minister before becoming the country's first woman Ambassador. Her mission to the Netherlands began serenely in 2000 but, she tells us, she had to deal with a dramatic change of attitudes towards Yemen after the September 11 attacks the following year. Amat's recipe for success is a mixture of outspokenness and openness - a combination which helped her c...

Ericka Huggins attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963 and decided then to devote herself to social action. She was 19 when she became a leader in the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s. In its own words the Party wanted "the power to determine the destiny of the Black and oppressed communities." As well as the political struggle Ericka had to co...

As the chair of one of South Africa's largest agencies, Ogilvy and Mather, Nunu Ntshingila is among the highest ranking women in world advertising. Born in Soweto in the 1960s, she learned her trade under Apartheid, when both the working environment and the marketplace were racially divided. Later she had the job of marketing the 'new South Africa' as a tourist destination and has since overseen c...

What is the universe made of? Is there life on Mars? And how do you get more women interested in science? These are the big questions which preoccupy today's guests. Minal Rohit is a systems engineer with the Indian Space Research Organisation, currently working on India's Mars mission, and Dr Tara Shears is a particle physicist who works for the European organisation for nuclear research, known a...

Dr Ngozi Kennedy works as a health specialist for UNICEF which is one of the organisations supporting the Government's response to Ebola in Sierra Leone. From her home city of Freetown she talks about its impact on women, children and adolescents and how just as her workload increased, her children have to be at home, bored and frustrated, as a result of the school closures. Sierra Leone-born Fred...

A triathlon is a three-part sport that requires competitors to swim, cycle and run. This week we speak to two triathletes who are at opposite ends of their careers. Paula Newby-Fraser seemed unbeatable in the 1980s and 1990s, and was nicknamed the 'Queen of Kona', home to the ultra-triathlon the Ironman, and Shirin Gerami is the first female triathlete to represent Iran in a world championship. Pa...

Bangladeshi clothing manufacturer Rubana Huq, who employs over 5000 women in eight factories, talks to British retailer Kim Winser who has been responsible for some major fashion brands. What do two women leaders in the global fashion industry have to say to each other? From how they got into the world of fashion to factory-floor culture and leadership, Bangladeshi factory boss Rubana Huq and Brit...

Kim Chakanetsa hosts a conversation between two explorers who both grew up in the mountains - Sarah Marquis in Switzerland's Jura mountains and Reena Dharmshaktu in the foothills of the Himalayas. Both women felt the pull of the outdoors from an early age and knew they couldn't be confined to an office. Sarah Marquis recently walked 10,000 miles in three years from Siberia to the Australian outbac...

Kim Chakanetsa hosts a conversation between one of Saudi Arabia's only female comedians and a Kenyan comic who performs her stand-up routine in the UK. Both love to laugh and to make people laugh. Hatoon Kadi took up comedy when she got bored of her office job. At the time she says the internet in Saudi Arabia was booming with comedy shows, but they were all fronted by men, so she decided to fill...

Kim Chakanetsa hosts a conversation between Judge Khalida Rachid Khan, Pakistan's first woman judge, and Justice Mandisa Maya, the first black woman to be appointed to the Supreme Court of Appeal in South Africa. Judge Khalida Rachid Khan was appointed to the bench in Peshawar in 1974, a place still known for its conservative values. She describes how people would try to get into court to witness...