The Conversation

Two exceptional sportswomen who've coached their national teams to victory in major tournaments. England's former netball head coach and South Africa's women's football coach speak to Kim Chakanetsa. South African women’s football coach Desiree Ellis had a nine year international playing career, having to endure discrimination under apartheid and unemployment alongside pursuing her sports career....

What's so important about friendships between women and how do they change over the course of our lives? Kim Chakanetsa talks to two women about making and keeping good friends. How do you maintain strong friendships when you're constantly on the move? Uloma Ogba is founder and CEO of Launch Africa, which offers career advice and mentoring to people wanting to work in international development. Sh...

Bringing women's stories to the West End and Broadway stage - Kim Chakanetsa unites two playwrights who are on a mission to amplify female voices. Morgan Lloyd Malcolm wrote the sell-out play Emilia, an all-female production which re-imagines Shakespeare's mysterious 'Dark Lady' and offers a feminist rallying cry. After appearing at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre and in the West End, it has now been...

Two prize winning documentary makers from Syria and China tell Kim Chakanetsa about using their own lives to explore the issues facing their home countries. Waad al-Kateab has documented her life on camera in war torn Aleppo, Syria. Whilst conflict, death and cruelty raged around her, she fell in love, got married and had a baby daughter. She captures stories of loss, laughter, sacrifice and survi...

Two HIV positive women from Kenya and Italy talk to Kim Chakanetsa about how they overcame stigma to live well with the disease. Doreen Moraa Moracha was born to a HIV discordant couple (positive mother, negative father) and is the only one of her siblings that has the virus. As a young woman she found her status very hard to deal with, and spent some time off her anti-retrovirals. Now 27 and back...

While therapy was once considered the reserve of the rich, it's now part of many people's lives as they deal with trauma, relationship breakdown, and behavioural problems. But it remains relatively exclusive and incredibly private. Kim Chakanetsa is joined by Susie Orbach and Esther Perel, who are both trying to demystify the process without compromising confidentiality. Susie Orbach is a British...

What's it like to provide aid in a war torn country? Two women who work in conflict zones talk to Kim Chakanetsa about what they feel are the most effective ways to make an impact. Irish nurse Avril Patterson has spent the past decade working in emergency situations, from Liberia to Afghanistan to Syria, where she spent four years. In 2018 she moved to Yemen to head the International Committee of...

How to turn a healthcare vision into reality - Yassmin Abdel-Magied speaks to two entrepreneurs from Vietnam and Nigeria who spotted an issue in medical care in developing countries and set about trying to solve it. Nga Tuyet Trang is a Vietnamese entrepreneur who discovered that newborn babies in Vietnam were dying of treatable conditions because of broken medical equipment. At the age of just 25...

Mountain climbing is a notoriously high-risk, high-reward activity. Yassmin Abdel-Magied asks two pioneering female climbers who've scaled the world's highest peaks, if the danger and death toll affect women's participation. Masha Gordon is a Russian explorer who has broken the speed records for the Seven Summits Challenge (climbing the highest peak on each continent) and the Explorer's Grand Slam...

Easing the fear of the dentist's chair - getting teeth fixed can be a traumatic experience for vulnerable patients. Kim Chakanetsa meets two women who use innovative methods to restore smiles. Dr Sharonne Zaks is not your average dentist. In her practice in Melbourne, Australia, she specalises in treating highly anxious patients, many of whom are survivors of sexual assault and trauma. These patie...

Why are so many women not in work? Kim Chakanetsa brings together women from Jordan and South Africa - countries with two of the highest female unemployment rates in the world - to discuss the barriers women face getting into the workplace and how they could be overcome. Ghadeer Khuffash says that in Jordan, most women graduate not expecting to go into work. It's not just because jobs are scarce,...

Migrant cooks serving up stories of home - Kim Chakanetsa meets two remarkable women who have used cooking to forge independent careers and to open up conversations about culture. Asma Khan is an Indian-born British chef whose popular London restaurant, Darjeeling Express, is entirely staffed by women. Asma herself only learnt to cook after she married in her early 20s and moved to the UK with her...

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...