Woman's Hour - A 'Green' Christmas lunch, Raising bilingual children, #FreePeriods

Episode Date: December 7, 2019

The U.N. Secretary-General issued a dire warning this week. He said that the international effort to stop climate change has been “utterly inadequate.” What are you doing to have a greener Christmas when it comes to the food you eat? Are you considering a more sustainable alternative to turkey for Christmas lunch? We hear from the food writer and campaigner, Jack Monroe, the journalist, Nina Pullman and Jenny Costa from Rubies in the Rubble.The President of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, Professor Lesley Regan, is calling for a bold approach to transform women’s health services. She tells us about her ambitions.Dr Jessica Wade, a British physicist, tells us why she's made it her mission to include more women in Wikipedia. She's added pages for more than 800 women in STEM and tells us about some of the obstacles she's faced.Four leading women politicians debate the ongoing problem of child poverty in the UK. We hear from Helen Whately from the Conservatives, Laura Pidcock from Labour, Dr Sarah Wollaston of the Liberal Democrats and Deidre Brock from the SNP.How difficult is it to raise your children as multi-lingual when you’re the only person who speaks your mother tongue? We hear from Mercy Haruna, the presenter of the podcast Parentland who's trying to teach her children Igala and from Gbemi Isimi the founder of Culture Tree, who's got a Nigerian Yoruba background.After a long campaign by #FreePeriods, the government has agreed to fund a scheme providing free sanitary products in primary and secondary schools from this January. Gemma Abbott, a campaigner for #FreePeriods, tells us how the opt-in scheme will work and Nadia Collier, a family support worker at a London primary school, tells us how The Red Box Project has been working at her school.Presented by: Jenni Murray Producer: Rabeka Nurmahomed Editor: Siobhann Tighe

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2, and of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme, peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Good afternoon. In today's programme, women versus Wikipedia. The female physicist who spotted a huge gap in the online encyclopaedia and did her best to fill it with women of science. How to be greener when it comes to Christmas lunch. If we all make a few small changes to our diet then they add up to quite a big difference globally so I'm not saying that people need to go vegan full time

that would be hypocritical because I'm certainly not but we could all incorporate more plant based stuff into our diets and that's quite simple to do So that's an OK to the sprouts, the spuds and the plum pudding, I guess. In January, the long campaign to end period poverty in schools will finally happen. Why is it so important to get free products to junior and senior girls? There are lots of homes that you don't talk about periods. I mean, in my home, it wasn't something you discussed.

You discussed it with a cousin more so than your parents. So yes, in an ideal world, it'd be something that parents would talk about, but we know that it doesn't always happen. Raising children to speak English and your mother tongue. How difficult is it if the second language is one that's rarely spoken? And you might have noticed there's to be a general election next Thursday. You had a chance to question five candidates from the major parties. What did they have to say about child poverty in the UK? Now, we all know that women throughout our lives tend to see the doctor far more than men. There's menstruation, contraception, pregnancy and then the menopause. And the Royal College of Obstetricians and

Gynaecologists says women are often struggling to get the basic health care that's needed and are facing what they describe as unacceptable barriers. Well the college is calling for a new and bold approach to transform women's health services. Professor Lesley Regan is their president. Most women are wanting to access services in the NHS for general body maintenance. They're not ill much of the time and they're finding very, very difficult

to get an appointment with the doctor. An appointment with their GP, a regular appointment. With a GP or with a local clinic to access contraception, which is so important. And what we discovered was that the unplanned pregnancy rate now in the UK is 45%. That is a stunningly high figure. It's a stunningly high number. It's stunning, isn't it? And, you know, it's not difficult contraception. It's very simple. It's been there for about 60 years, one of the best researched

aspects of medical care. And yet it's so difficult for women to get hold of it. And I think you probably know of friends or members of your family who've found difficulties getting contraception or abortion care or menopause help. Just extraordinary. And the other big thing, of course, is cervical screening. We are justifiably proud of our cervical screening, reducing cervical cancer rates. But at the moment, only about two thirds of women are able to get their smear when it's due, because again, shortage of appointments. I want to come on to that in just a moment. Let's just stick with contraception for a moment. Because one of the proposals that you've come up with, which many people I'm sure listening, many women will think this sounds very easy, is that you could buy

the contraceptive pill and indeed the morning after pill at the front of a chemist. I mean, I know you can do this in lots of other countries, but at the moment, a woman normally has to go back to her GP every three months to get another prescription. Do you think that could be done away with and you could just pick it up the way you can pick up condoms? Yes, it's quite simple because as I was saying earlier very, very well researched incredibly good safety track record and I think that if you give women the opportunity

to look after themselves and give them the right information that they will do this very well And so without a consultation it means that if you are having any problems then you would go to your GP. Yes, but there's also lots of pharmacists in pharmacists and chemist shops, and they are also very well qualified to help with the problem. But certainly, you may want to have an initial consultation if you want a particular type of contraception or advice about another medical problem that you have, but not going back every three months to waste everybody's time sitting there to get another repeat prescription. And maybe not being able to go back and therefore

having a danger of having an unplanned pregnancy because you've actually run out of your prescription. And we know that unplanned pregnancies have so many more complications. So if you can plan when you're going to become pregnant and how many times, then the outcome for you and for your baby is so much better. And our abortion rate is now the highest that it's ever been. Yes, it is. And interestingly, not in young women. This is in women in their late 30s and early 40s, who I think, again, are falling through the cracks because they're not able to access contraception. Now, you mentioned cervical smear tests. And I did want to talk to you about this, because one of the interesting things, I know the take-up is very low, one in three women

missed their last smear. I also noticed that it is much higher in women earning less than £15,000 a year. It's, I think, about 42%. Do you know why that is and what can we do about it? Well, I think, once again, it's about women falling through the cracks. And if you're on a low income or you're in a rather deprived area, it's much more difficult for you to access those appointments. And if I ask you to come to three different doctors to get your contraception and your smear sorted out and an STI check, then it's likely that one of them is going to fall off the radar. And if you can't access it or you have an unpleasant experience while you're there, you're not likely to go back.

And you're not going to miss a shift, are you? You know, a paid shift somewhere. Exactly. Because you've got an appointment. It's not just as easy as being able to take time off. So you need to be able to go to somewhere, a one-stop shop effectively, and do all those things quickly in your lunch hour or after work so that you can get on with the rest of your life. Now, let's talk about these one-stop shops, because this is what you're proposing. And it does sound quite radical. And I'm sure for a lot of people listening, it sounds like a really simple idea, actually, which is that you can go to one place and maybe have an appointment with a nurse or a health care professional for, say, 15 minutes, where you can talk about, depending on what age you are, whether if you're young, you might be talking about heavy periods, contraception, maybe getting STI advice.

You can talk about all these things at once. This is not rocket science. This is just common sense. And I'm sure that if we get all our stakeholders together, they will want to help us make this happen. It sounds like common sense. It hasn't happened. Obviously, setting up one-stop shops isn't cost-free. Where are we going to get the resources to do this? Well, at the moment, I think we're wasting an enormous amount of resource

so commissioning of these basic healthcare services are in three tranches with NHS England, with local authorities and with clinical commissioning groups and of course when you're only commissioning for a bit of it or you've got the pot of money that basically services one type of care you may not see the benefits of when you do that very well so I think what's happening now is that women are falling through the cracks and what we've got to do is try and get somebody in charge of this, preferably a single provider or perhaps we can co-commission.

But we need to put women at the centre of the problem and cater for them, not cater for all the institutions and the silos. Women, I suppose, have often deprioritised their own health, partly perhaps because they're incredibly busy. And very often the times when they need to be looking at their health are the times when they are the busiest. For example, women with very young children. You talk about the postnatal six week check as a missed opportunity. I have to say, I've three kids and I don't actually ever remember having a six week check. I mean, maybe I didn't have one. Maybe I had one and it just wasn't very

memorable. There was a lot of other things going on. Why is that a missed opportunity? What should we be doing there? Well, I think it's absolutely crucial for many reasons. Firstly, because we know that when women are pregnant, they effectively go through sort of a road test for their future health. And we know that often things that happen to them during pregnancy, both physically and mentally, are, if you like, a taster of what they might have later on. So if you've had a bit of high blood pressure

or you've got gestational diabetes, it's almost like writing a certificate for yourself, I'm going to have this problem later. So the six-week check is such a great time for them to sit down with a healthcare professional and talk about what's happened to them, check that the baby's fine, check their physical and their mental health, and then if they've put on weight or they've had some other problem in pregnancy, talk to them about how they really need to tackle this

so that they don't have problems in the future. And of course, number one in that check-up list needs to be talking about contraception again. Because many, many women find that they are missing out on postnatal contraception. And we know the really good data to show that if you space your pregnancies by 18 to 24 months, the outcome for you and the outcome for your baby is enormously improved. So it's just a no-brainer. Long-term health outcomes for women can actually be affected quite greatly by this kind of intervention.

Is that what this study really shows overall? I think so. And I think it's showing that what we can do is prevent ill health by empowering women to do what they need to do. I mean, we number 51% of the population, but we influence the healthcare behaviours of everybody else too. And I think if we can educate and provide women with the information they need to look after themselves and look after their families,

we'll have a vastly increased workforce in the NHS. We've actually seen some big banks, some city institutions who are really, let's face it, motivated by profit, putting money into menopause services for their staff because they've been convinced that it actually is good for the bottom line. I mean, the simple fact is that money talks in these situations. Do you need to convince the government in the same way that these services that you're talking about are going to give better outcomes to women, but actually they would be in the end more profitable for our whole society. I mean, I'm just trying to work out how we actually make sure this time that we make a change, because although this report seems to be full of really good intentions, I can't help thinking that we've been here before.

That's a fair point. And I think what we've got to do is ensure that all of those people at the NHS and in government really, really help us to implement this. Because it's not complicated, but we are going to have to do a little bit of service reorganisation to get the very best out of it. But I think it's possible. And you make the example of city firms that have found that it's incredibly beneficial for their productivity. If they don't have women going off on sick leave or umpteen different hospital or doctor appointments, that if they can provide them with these simple services in-house or close by or just at a fixed time when they can do everything, that productivity increases. And I think our leaders are listening. And after all, I think this is a fantastic

opportunity for the NHS because 70% of the employees in the NHS are women. So let's make that really front and centre and show everybody how well it can be done. Professor Leslie Regan. The United Nations Secretary General issued a rather dire warning this week. He said that the international effort to stop climate change has been utterly inadequate. He went on to say the point of no return is no longer over the horizon. It is in sight and hurtling towards us. Well, with that in mind, as we approach the season that for most of us means some sort of excess, how can we make Christmas greener? Well, today we look at food. Jack Munro is a food writer and campaigner.

Her latest book is Vegan-ish. The journalist Nina Pullman is the editor at the online magazine WickedLeaks.com. And Jenny Costa is from Rubies in the Rubble. We work direct with farmers and take fruit and veg that would be rejected or otherwise discarded to turn them into a relish as a way of raising awareness of this need to value food as a precious resource and it's something that we should be cherishing and especially around Christmas time Christmas time is such a time of like celebrating but it's also a time of thanking and being appreciative of what we've got but the food you use might have come from anywhere in fact it's just that it's

being discarded because it's not completely perfect in shape or colour or whatever it might be. Yeah, and chutneys, relishes, pickles, they're a perfect way of preserving things. And Jack, do you feel that this year perhaps even those people who in the past might have been resistant to all this are beginning to twig and get the message about food? Yeah, I think that people are starting to realise that, you know, that there's so much surplus food that goes to waste that could be used in other ways there are supermarkets doing their own wonky veg boxes and i think we're all just i mean i speak for myself but you know i think we're

all just a bit at the end of our tether with this obsession with perfection people are getting closer as well to understanding where food comes from and remembering that it's natural. It's governed by the weather. It's going to come out of the soil, all shapes and sizes. We're all shapes and sizes. Food should be cherished and enjoyed just as, you know, the shape and wonkiness that comes out. Well, I'm going to say the word organic because nobody's mentioned it so far. Nina, obviously, Riverford is all about delivering organic veg, but it does come at a price, doesn't it? Yeah, no, it's true. And there's no getting away from that, really. I mean, I do think that organic is probably the strongest kind of guarantee

of a sustainably produced food. And, you know, wherever possible, if possible, it's a great way to eat sustainably. But not everybody has that option. So there's other ways to eat sustainably as well. And I think a really good way is to even just start with a really basic question which is where does it come from? So that idea of provenance is a really good kind of entry point.

Well actually you do say, don't you, on your website where everything has come from? Yeah, I think it's a really interesting question. I mean I'm really interested in it. It takes me ages to do any kind of food shopping. I obsessively look at packs and you know the country of origin i think it's really fascinating but that's a kind of a good way into to being able to buy and eat sustainably you know food miles is part of it and that's a basic thing to work out but i mean middle-class customers because that's who let's be honest that's who

riverford are supplying and there are many many of them out there who are able to afford this stuff maybe it's up to those people to actually say you you know what, I can't have fennel this week because it just isn't produced in Britain and I'm not going to be prepared to pay for it. Yeah, I mean, the idea of choices is something that we can all sort of get our heads around. I mean, having reducing your own choice and using and buying what's there and what's available and what's in season in season you know might have to adapt what you're planning to make that night for dinner um i mean that's something i've had to do at riverford we're really lucky so there's a lot of um veg that's left over from the boxes and that's given to to staff for free at the end of the day and it is it's amazing it's great but you have to kind of change your mindset a little bit because you go into this room and it's not so much what you you want you choose. You know, you don't choose based on what you want. You choose based on what's there.

And it's quite a mindset change, actually. So you're suddenly like, I've got all this veg, what should I make with it? Rather than I want to make this meal, what should I go and buy for it? Well, that's where I want to bring you in, Jack, because first of all, that would be great. I mean, perhaps those of us who've got electricity or gas and can heat our homes and maybe even know how to cook would be able to conjure something up with some leftover veg but if you don't have the the power in your home or you're worried about it and you don't have the necessary skills through no fault of your own what do you do then?

Well I was just thinking actually as Nina was talking about going into a room and it's not what you want it's what's available to, that there aren't that many sort of differences between the Riverford surplus fruit and veg that they give away to their staff and my own experiences of being a food bank user, although mine was sort of dented tins of beans, not like bulbs of fennel, which I would have sold my nan for at the time. Sorry, nan. It comes down to food being about choices and for a lot of people they don't have

choices about what they eat and at christmas that seems to be hammered home more than ever like you get all the adverts on the telly of people's like glossy christmas spreads and there's this societal expectation that we're all going to sit down to a massive roast dinner but for some people that's not an option because they either don't have the food available don't have the money to buy it or don't have the like power to stick your oven on for three hours to cook this great big bird and um i've been in that situation myself and i can say it it's not doesn't make for a pretty or newsworthy christmas day it's quite grim and miserable sorry no i'm sure it is we have to bear that in mind that is the reality for some people um meat is all meat necessarily bad and should we just stop

eating red meat in particular I'm of the mindset that if we all make a few small changes the changes that the UN may well describe as inadequate but if we all make a few small changes to our diet then they add up to quite a big difference globally. So I'm not saying that people need to go vegan full time. That would be hypocritical because I'm certainly not. But we could all incorporate more plant based stuff into our diets. And that's quite simple to do if you just make a few simple switches. And you have to, meat presumably varies. I mean, British red meat would be better

for the planet than white, I don't know, a chicken brought from somewhere else, presumably. I mean, it's all about food miles, isn't it? It's like you say, and I agree with Jack, it's definitely not binary. I would never say that meat is bad and plant-based food is good. It's true that there is a need to reduce intensively farmed meat consumption overall but within that it's hugely complex. Other than food miles I'd say what the animal is fed is really important and that's probably the biggest kind of environmental impact for a lot of the meat that we consume here in the UK. So white meat for example, chicken and pork, if it's intensively farmed it's often fed on GM grain or soy that's grown in the Amazon. So

it's not as simple as switching away from red meat. And it's true that in Britain as well, there's a lot of sustainable red meat farmers. Personally, I'm not a vegetarian, but I eat meat maybe once a month, if that. So pretty much veggie. And if I do eat it, I try and buy organics. I do think it is the highest guarantee you can get.

And if you aren't going to eat it that often, you can sort of use it as a treat. Just a couple of comments from the listeners. Laura, we are keen to do a greener Christmas, but the wider family, not so enthusiastic. Definitely facing some resistance to anything other than the Christmas Eve ham, egg and chips and then the traditional turkey. I think tradition plays such a large role that people struggle to omit some foods from the menu. I would rather make veg the main player. What do you want to say about that, Jack? I mean, aren't we all crying out for an excuse to shove the turkey off the Christmas table

anyway? It's ghastly. It really is. Like, I would much rather have like two good sized chickens than a turkey any day of the week. So if you can make a decent plant-based substitute for it then by all means i would much rather have a really good juicy nut roast that's nice and crispy on the outside and nice and juicy on the inside than some dead dry old birds in the corner um waste i was only saying yesterday i thought of you jenny because i had a really slightly rank looking cauliflower in the fridge and i didn't put it in the bin, although I nearly did. I stuck it in the oven and I roasted it and it was all right. That's what we should all be doing.

Roasted cauliflower is coming back. It's great. But what are the things you can do with, I don't know, say you've got, I always have celery left over, parsnips, couple of carrots. What honestly can you do with that there's so many things i think um christmas time is a time to get creative as well with leftovers there's often you finish your christmas dinner and no one's wanting to look at another bit of turkey or or another roast veg but you can easily blend them up put them in create a nice winter soup with them um freeze them for another time, everything from the Christmas meal.

And I actually love the Christmas meal because it's so seasonal. Most of the things that are in Christmas meal are at least in season. You can buy from a good local source if you can. But there is ways that you can create a soup, you can create a nice stew from things. I'm a big fan of using your freezer.

And if you're like me and your freezer's chock-a-block most of the year, making sure that now in the lead up to Christmas, you're making space in that freezer, taking some of it out, utilising it now, so that when you come to Christmas Day, if you have got leftovers of turkey, pop it in the freezer. If you've got leftovers of all those vegetables as well, create a soup, blitz them up, put it in a Tupperware for later on.

Jenny Costa, Jack Munro and Nina Pullman. Dr Jess Wade is a physicist at Imperial College in London. She noticed how few women appear in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia who are notable in the STEM subjects, science, technology, engineering and mathematics. In the last two years, she's added more than 820 profiles. But last week, a wiki editor tagged 50 of those women as not notable enough to appear. Why was she so determined that they did have a place there? So I was inspired by thinking about how important Wikipedia is. We're familiar with it in trying to settle debates in pub quizzes or maybe trying to cheat on a crossword.

But it's also really important in schools and education, maybe in making a healthcare decision, maybe in media, selecting experts to go online or speak on the radio. So I was increasingly aware of how important Wikipedia was. And then I learned just how biased it was because of the lack of diversity in people who write the content for Wikipedia. So we all rely on it. But about 90% of the editors of Wikipedia are white men in North America. And that impacts what's on the site.

And how does it impact what's on the site? I mean, just in terms of how many women and how many men's profiles are up there, can you see a difference? Sure, of course you can. So in English-speaking Wikipedia, which is the biggest of the languages, which has about one and a half million biographies, 18.04% are biographies about women. We don't have the stats on people of colour or different kinds of backgrounds because that's harder to pull from the data, but we know that less than 20%, so less than one in five of the biographies are biographies of women. So you decided to try and change that.

Tell me a bit about the kind of women that you created profiles for. Sure. So I've written about people from all different kinds of backgrounds, from all different parts of the world and all different aspects of science. They do the most incredible research in really different and difficult circumstances. One of the most memorable and one of the most disheartening for this campaign and this journey of editing was a phenomenal woman chemist called Clarice Phelps.

She works at Oak Ridge National Lab and she was probably... In the States. Yeah, in the States. She is probably the only African-American woman ever to contribute to the discovery of an element.

She discovered element 117, which is tenosine, and she separates the isotopes. And she's kind of got this incredible legacy and incredible story similar to Tash, who came on earlier. So she went through the Navy nuclear program, which is incredibly competitive. It probably

has a fail rate of 90%. She's the top of her game. And I wrote her biography. So she was not on Wikipedia? She was not on Wikipedia. And she's, you know, phenomenal. I wrote her biography, I put it up, and then instantly it got tagged for deletion for this person not being notable enough.

So some other anonymous Wikipedia editors in some part of the world were deciding this story, this person's profile, isn't important enough, we don't need this on the site. Actually, at times I've been told that I'm diluting the site by putting these stories up. Let's go back a step then and just explain to people a little bit more about how Wikipedia works. Who decides what's included? Who creates these profiles? So I think probably you're not aware when you use Wikipedia, but every single word you read on it is written by volunteers. So

people like you or I sit at home at night after their day jobs and write content for Wikipedia. As I mentioned before, the majority of those editors are men. You say you or I, but actually most people don't look like us it's it's it's me so um so everyone's editing people are editing as volunteers and in general they do a pretty good job right we read about all different kinds of stuff on there the editing community then selects a few administrators who are given special privileges to make decisions about what should and shouldn't be on there but but to kind of get onto wikipedia particularly for a profile there are a set of notability criteria that we have to fulfil.

And that's, again, written by a community of volunteers who put themselves into positions of leadership on the encyclopedia. So it's written by members of the public and they decide what is and isn't notable. It's also anonymous. So the people that tagged these women whose profiles you wrote, did you get to know who they were and what their problem was? I didn't get to know who they were and I don't know what their problem was.

But you can see it's kind of, in this case, the case that happened last week, it was incredibly systematic, right? They went through all the profiles that I'd written recently. They decided a few of them who are completely notable and completely justifiable for the site, they decided they'd put one of these horrible tags along the top saying they're not notable. Whilst I don't know who they are, you can you can kind of imagine if 90% of the editors are men, and this person has selectively gone through and taken profiles

of women scientists, of women policymakers, and then, then that's something that kind of flags to me that they're not someone who's thinking constructively about how we can make this encyclopedia better. There's someone who's just saying that these stories don't have a place online. Now, Wikipedia have said that they are trying. They say that it's tough to have an open source forum. And Catherine Mayer, who is the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, had this response. Let's just hear it. You can understand why with circumstances like this, it is frustrating for women who do decide to edit Wikipedia to remain involved when their efforts to deliberately undermine their work. At the same time, I think that the response that we immediately saw within the Wikimedia community was one that was very supportive of Dr. Wade, both on Twitter, where she initially posted this, but from the editing community writ large.

So it sounds like they do acknowledge that there are some issues. You did get a lot of support on Twitter. Sure. And I love the support on Twitter. And it's really fantastic. I just wish that that would translate into more diverse people helping to write these biographies and helping to keep championing these stories. Because what we really need is all of this positive momentum and enthusiasm to translate into people really contributing their time and insight into making the encyclopedia a better place. So what do we need to do? Because I can imagine that, you know, stories like this, although they do highlight the fact that there are not very many women profiles on Wikipedia,

it doesn't, may not really make a lot of women listening think, oh gosh, I need to take up that role. Is that what you'd like people to do? I'm hoping everyone does. I mean, everyone sitting at home now listening to this has some particular piece of insight. They know about one fantastic woman. They know about one fantastic fact that isn't on Wikipedia and other people don't know about. And it is the most simple thing in the world to edit. It's a really, really great opportunity to share those stories and to communicate. You know, it's used 32 million times a day, English-speaking Wikipedia. So if you write something on there, it's going to be viewed by hundreds of thousands of people.

It doesn't take that long to learn how to edit it. And I really hope that everyone can take this opportunity to think about the people they want to celebrate and to write those profiles. Because there are the most staggering, phenomenal women out there who don't have them yet. And I really think that the world needs to know those stories. You've put a lot of women's profiles on there. What have they said to you? Have you had a response from them about the difference that it's made to them to be on Wikipedia?

Yeah, I think it's really cool. Sometimes you get people who are a professor in a university and suddenly they get a profile on Wikipedia. And potentially that's used when people are introducing them at conferences or when they're going on the television or the radio but it's also used by prospective PhD students when they're looking who to look for for a supervisor or trying to identify and apply to a different position. Sometimes it's used by people in policy so when you're trying to establish that something's notable and important. One of the really exciting profiles I wrote recently was a young woman called Rhianna Gunwright who was a Rhodes Scholar and a kind of political scholar in the United States, who was headhunted by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to join the Democrats and to help write the Green

New Deal. So it's kind of these inspirational stories of people taking their research, taking their activism and knowledge and then applying it to changing the world. And yeah, I really, I hope that it makes them happy to be on Wikipedia. Dr. Jess Wade was talking to Andrea. Still to come in today's programme, the campaign to end period poverty. How well will proposals set to take place in January serve girls in junior and secondary schools? And raising a child to speak English and your own mother tongue. Difficult if the second language is not a common one. And of course a reminder that you can always enjoy Woman's Hour any time you like. If you can't, join us live at two minutes past ten during the week. All you need to do is subscribe to the daily podcast.

It's free and you can find it at BBC Sounds or, of course, on the Women's Hour website. Five days to go to the general election on Thursday. So what do the main parties have on offer for female voters? On Wednesday, we invited a group of candidates to take part in a debate answering questions posed by you. Laura Pidcock is the Shadow Secretary for Employment Rights and the Labour Party candidate for Durham North West. Dr Sarah Wollaston is the Liberal Democrat candidate for Totnes. Deirdre Brock is standing in Edinburgh North and Leith

for the Scottish National Party. And Helen Waitley is the Minister for Arts, Heritage and Tourism and the Conservative candidate for Faversham and Mid-Kent. She explained how her party proposes to tackle child poverty. Our approach has been all about making sure that somebody in a household works because we know the best way out of poverty is through work. And there are fewer children in workless households now. And then we're also helping wages go up and supporting

working parents but in really simple statistical terms i think the figure is 2 000 food banks set up in the last decade why well we know that under preve's labor government they basically wouldn't allow referrals to food banks so now we know we do let food banks do um and food banks are providing really important doing an important thing but we don't want to continue to let food banks do... I'll bring you in, Laura. Hang on. And food banks are providing really important... doing an important thing. But we don't want to continue to see food banks having to support families. We want people to have more money in their pockets.

That's one reason why we've got the national living wage and why that's going up to £10.50, because, unfortunately, lots of women are on relatively low wages. So that's been really important. It's already been boosting wages for women, but we want to do more of that so that there's more money in people's pockets keep clearly taxes low that's really important so that you can afford to put food on the table you're a sensible person and i'm sure a sensitive one too that there's a food bank in your constituency isn't there

i mean it's a pretty why why is there a food bank why are over a million food parcels being handed out in one of the richest economies on this planet? I've spent time in my food bank and trying to understand the individual reasons for people going there. They're often really complicated. Sometimes it's to do with complications around benefits. Because they haven't got any food. I mean, it's not that uncomplicated, is it, really? Well, sometimes people's situations are complicated with family breakup or or for instance, sometimes they're just not being paid enough. They're in work, and in-work poverty is absolutely something we should be concerned about. And we want to see wages going up so that people don't have to suffer. The other big problem we have as a society is the cost of housing.

And the cost of housing has been going up. I don't doubt we'll get on to the cost of housing. For many years, not enough houses were built. So we're trying to build houses so that people's housing costs are lower. I don't think the record on building houses has been terrific either, to be honest. But Deirdre, listening in Edinburgh from the SNP, what about food bank use in Scotland? Well, actually, I'm just going to quote a figure from the Trussell Trust. They say they gave out over 210,000 food parcels in Scotland last year.

But, I mean, I hear Helen, frankly, defending or trying to defend the indefensible. The Trussell Trust itself cites Tory welfare reforms that include universal credit, benefit sanction and the benefits freeze as a key driver of that food bank use. In terms of what the Scottish Government is trying to do about it, I mean, we would be urging the UK Government to follow our lead in introducing benefits that do reduce child poverty.

We have the new Scottish Child Payment for those families that qualify. It's going to be made by Christmas of 2020. That is a practical benefit that will lift 30,000 children out of poverty once that's fully rolled out. And we would also call on the UK government to match our ambition on child poverty by reintroducing UK-wide child poverty targets because they repealed, the UK government repealed large parts of the Child Poverty Act 2010 that included income-based child poverty targets.

And we would also ask them to follow our lead on setting up a Poverty and Inequality Commission them to follow our lead on setting up a poverty and inequality commission because the the commission that we've set up actually provides Scottish ministers with independent advice on poverty and inequality right it's an invaluable I mean we don't want to paint Scotland as some sort of idyll under the SNP because that wouldn't be right I mean we know for example that targets are being missed in the NHS that there have been real problems at the the children's hospital in Glasgow for example and that targets are being missed in the NHS, that there have been real problems at the children's hospital in Glasgow, for example, and that you have a shocking death rate through drugs and public health is a massive issue for Scotland. These are things that we are trying very hard to address. And in terms of the situation in the hospital in Edinburgh, for example, that's certainly something that our health minister has got to grips with very quickly. She's called for a public

she's arranging a public inquiry into those issues. No, of course it's not. But one of the, I mean, the Trussell Trust says itself, it's UK government policies like universal credit and the benefit sanctions that have got people so terrified

when they come to the surgeries I've held over the last few years, that, you know, many of them aren't even wanting to go for assessment to see if they can improve the amounts of money that they get on benefits. These are disabled people, so terrified they don't even want to go to those assessments. That is wrong. Of course, of course that's wrong. I don't think anybody around the table or any voter would want that kind of situation. Well, then why is it happening?

Right, no, fair enough. Thank you. Laura Peacock, I think you're intending as a party to end food bank use or try to end it. You know, the Liberal Democrats were co-authors of austerity. There have been no attempts by any of the other parties to talk about how they would eradicate in-work poverty. You're quite right in talking about 9 million people currently in poverty in work and households. That's over 4 million children in households. So million people currently in poverty in working households.

That's over 4 million children in households. So we have to look at a few things. We have to look at the minimum hourly rate of pay and making sure that that lifts people out of poverty and not entrenches poverty. So we think that rapidly moving a £10 as quickly as we can get that through Parliament, not by the end of a Parliament. And then there should be recalculations on the minimum hourly rate of pay and guaranteed hours. Because as you know, one of the main things that leads people, it's not like, you know, not mismanaging budgets.

It's about not being able to plan over the certainty of income that they get. So we are saying that we would ban zero-hour contracts, that we would make it a right that people have in their contracts minimum guaranteed hours that reflect what they have on average been working. So they can plan so that cancelled shifts are paid for. All of these things that bring an element of certainty. You know, 19,000 food parcels were handed out in County Durham. And this idea that that is an individualised problem.

Of course, there's thousands of food parcels handed out across County Durham. This idea that that is an individualised problem. Of course, there's thousands of food parcels handed out across the nations. This idea that that's an individualised problem is absolute nonsense. This is a structural problem with the embedding of poverty pay. And we need to move to a more organised system for the economy. And I keep coming back to sectoral collective bargaining. By the way, I mean, sectoral collective bargaining doesn't exactly trip off the tongue for most people. What is it? I know. So this is the idea that by sector, I'm so glad you asked me, by sector, that we are saying that there are a process of negotiations for terms and conditions for sectors.

Basically, it means pay rises for everybody. I mean, how is that going to be achieved? What it means is that rather than terms, conditions and fundamentally pay being imposed on people, that that's a process of negotiation and then that is binding upon that sector. So you want the solutions for in-work poverty. Lots of countries that have taken people out of that relative poverty have

this system where there is a negotiation about a value for the job, about how much people are paid but also the uplift in the minimum rate of pay and certainty over hours is absolutely crucial helen waitley uh on uh well you can answer laura pigcock first of all but also a lot of people are wanting to hear about child poverty and how you can possibly defend some of the decisions made around universal credit for example but first of all, just respond to what Laura said. Well, just one thing I think is overall, actually, with what Laura said,

but also with Labour's manifesto and offer at this election, is the problem is that it might sound lovely having all this money spent on tons of things, but none of this is any good if you destroy the economy in the process, if you go on a reckless spending spree if you have to put on tons of taxes if you're borrowing loads more if businesses um if investment leaves the country and actually then the problem is so though you had a great ambition the reality is much more poverty many more people out of work and many more children poor as a result and that's what we've seen before every single time with previous Labour

governments have left the country worse off. So we've had to make some really difficult and actually difficult decisions. No, you haven't had to make difficult decisions. Conservative governments and the coalition government between 2010 and 2015. Let me just finish my sentence. Unfortunately, Conservative governments keep having to come in and pick up the pieces left

by Labour, make some really difficult decisions, get the economy back on track. I have to say, right now, I think we're in this fantastic place where we've got a strong economy, and now we can start investing properly in public services and education, NHS, police, all that. That's what I want us to be able to do. Laura?

I mean, it's a really inadequate analogy. Who is the economy doing really well for, Helen? I've just said that there are 14.3 million people in poverty, 9 million of which are in working households. Even people who are higher earners, not on the minimum rate of pay, have seen their pay is less now than it was 10 years ago. We have not recovered from the global financial recession, which would of course not made in the Labour Party in Westminster. This was a global financial recession. I cannot believe you do not have a plan for inward poverty. Your actual response was that your actual response.

You don't have a plan to take people out of poverty who are inward. Increasing the minimum wage. Wages are now going up. By the end of next parliament, there has been pay has stagnated. People are poorer now than they were 10 years ago. People are fewer people living in poverty than in 2010. You're talking about absolute poverty, aren't you? Not relative.

Well, yes, the best way to reduce relative poverty is to have a recession, which is what you guys like to treat. I mean, this is just fear-mongering, isn't it? Like, what we are... You know, the OECD, the IMF have said that you are just entrenching austerity, actually, and that there will be a continuation, too, of austerity under the Liberal Democrats. We need an absolute break from this. That's actually not true. The Resolution Foundation have said that our manifesto would do the most.

You were co-authors of the current situation we are in. Looking at what's happening going forward, Laura, is that it would be the Liberal Democrats that would do the most for low-income families. How would you eradicate in-work poverty? Well, one of the things that you have failed to mention is that we're recommending that there should be a 20% increase for those who are working in the gig economy in their minimum wage. What about the security of contracts, their terms and conditions? Indeed, but for some people,

that is something that they wish to have the flexibility for. Dr Sarah Wollison, Laura Pidcock, Helen Waitley and Deidre Brock. And you can hear interviews we've done with four party leaders on BBC Sounds. If you live in the UK and you have children, obviously they will speak English. If you're

originally from Spain or France or Germany it might not be too difficult to make sure your children speak your mother tongue as well. There'll be plenty of people around them who also know those languages. But supposing you were raised to speak a language that isn't taught in schools here and where there's no one else around you who also speaks it. Mercy Haruna is the presenter of the podcast Parentland. She's originally from Nigeria and has raised her children to speak

Igala. Bemi Isimi is also from Nigeria. She's the founder of CultureTree and her mother tongue is Yoruba. We live in London, so I knew that it would be a challenge to get them to speak Yoruba, which is the language that I speak. It's the West African language from Nigeria. So I always knew that being in London, it would be a challenge. And that's why I set up Cultratree. So tell me a little bit about it, because of course, you know, in order for your child to grow up speaking that language, you need to be speaking Yoruba at home, I guess, all the time. Yeah. How hard is that to do? The challenge is that you're not in an environment where it's spoken. So as for me, it's a case of I'm the only person, my husband and I are the only people who my child will learn Yoruba from.

So I need to create an environment where she hears other people speak in that language. So what you find is in London, a lot of second generation Nigerians weren't encouraged or weren't taught to speak Yoruba. So growing up, they didn't speak it themselves. Mercy, there's a lot of this because I know this a lot amongst quite a lot of friends of mine who've come from different places. So your parents arrived from Pakistan or from China or from Nigeria, and they had a desire for you to fit in, right? And they sort of thought the best thing they could do for their kids was not teach them the language of their background.

Is that still a problem? I think it's still a problem. I think more and more, though, people are realising that teaching their children these languages will keep them rooted and connected to their heritage. And so it's changing slowly. But yeah, it's still an issue, I believe.

Bimi, you took a really proactive approach. Tell us what you did. I set up Culture Tree. So what I did for my younger child is I started doing animations. So we did Yoruba Nursery Rhymes and we put those on YouTube. And it was really, did you find that they weren't there already? No, they weren't.

That's why I set up because I looked for resources and content to teach my child and I couldn't find any content. And that's where we started doing the nursery rhymes and we started doing stories and then we set up the classes as well for parents. I was just echoing what Mercy said. There is a change and a shift. A lot of parents do want their kids to speak their mother tongue and have that connection to their roots. as well for parents. I was just echoing what Mercy said. There is a change and a shift. A lot of parents do want their kids to speak their mother tongue and have that connection to their roots

because there is things about identity as well. Even though you're British, you are Nigerian as well. It's not just about the language, it's about the food, the way we're dressed, the way we show respect to elders, different things that you can identify to show who you are, really. You live, Mercy, in Kent, as opposed to living in London, which at least has got on, you know, it's so multicultural. There's people in London who can speak almost every language.

I'm sure if you can have access to them and find them. A little bit more difficult where you are. How hard have you found it to actually get your kids to speak a gala all the time? Honestly, it's been really difficult. And I think for me, why it's harder is because my partner doesn't speak the language. And so it's literally just me speaking by myself. And I find it very unnatural to just speak the language alone. So we do try to speak with my parents on FaceTime and things like that.

But it's not enough to get them to master the language. And your parents aren't here? No, they're in nigeria because a lot of people say that the very best way to get their kids to uh to speak another language so is is actually the grandparents that's how i learned to gather as well i mean my mom was um speaking english and igala simultaneously but then my grandma would come over and she spent a lot of time with us and she didn't speak a word of English. So I had no choice but to learn. But they don't have that. My kids don't have that now.

And I'm finding it actually very hard to speak as much as I thought I would. It's just not coming as naturally as I thought it would. And so unfortunately, they're not benefiting as much as I would love them to. I suppose some people do wonder or worry that if they're being taught, if they're kind of immersed in another language at home, that they will have problems perhaps when they go to school speaking English. No, it's a misconception. I mean, the child's brain is amazing.

It's a sponge. You can learn, I don't remember exactly how many languages, but a child definitely has the capacity to learn more languages than two. So it won't be an issue if at home they're speaking one language and everywhere else they're speaking English. They have it they'll have english and schools schools do actively actually promote that now before it used to be in the past where they will tell you that you shouldn't like mix the languages but now schools actively promote you being bilingual at home yeah that was ignorance yeah i didn't know and are you struggling uh you know um mercy you

were talking about the fact that uh it's very difficult at home. Do you feel like, oh God, maybe I should just give up? I mean, I know quite a few parents who have tried very hard at the beginning and who it hasn't worked for long term. I haven't given up yet. Like Wemi, I'm actually trying. I think I'm going to start making some materials just because it just doesn't exist. And for Wemi speaks a bigger language than I speak.

And so there's actually more resources. She has more of a community in London. That doesn't exist for me because my tribe is a lot smaller. I don't know any other Ingalit people around, unfortunately. So I'm going to have to be more conscious about how I do. And I think I'm going to have to teach them the way they would learn it at school, which is to print out flashcards and take a real good hour in the day and say, OK, this is what we're going to do right now.

It just has to be a little bit more... It's very difficult, especially when it's a minority language and a lot of people are speaking it, but you have to be proactive. You have to be proactive about it, really. So, Bimi, tell me about that. You set up Culture Tree and actually you started off by just putting these resources onto YouTube. What happened after that? After that, it went on TV. It was on a channel on Sky TV.

And then I had a lot of requests from parents who wanted me to do classes. So we started doing classes, face to face classes. We now have online classes. And these were the adults learning as well as the kids? Yeah, so the adults wanting to learn as well as their kids. So we do adult classes for young, like I said, second generation, between the age of 20 upwards. We have parents who come to our toddler classes with their kids. And we have a centre in Peckham as well, a culture tree centre,

where we do the classes and we do arts and crafts. It's not just about language, it's about the culture as well, as I said. So, yeah, we do Skype classes because it's a lot of demand from international, like all around the world, really globally. The kind of cultural heritage and identity issues come when you go back to Nigeria, but then find that you actually can't communicate with maybe wider friends and family. Yeah, there is an identity issue as well. And that's it's a it's a deeper issue here, especially here in London, where, you know, we have a lot of young people who don't feel like they belong. They're not quite British and they're not quite Nigerian because they don't speak the language.

And they're not quite British because they feel like they're obviously at home. They're not in the way that we eat, the food we eat, the way you talk to your parents, the things that we do. So there is an identity issue there. And I think that can be solved with just having more done. I think it's a personal thing for parents, but also maybe the government can encourage it a little bit more as well, especially in schools. Marcy, you brought this up on your podcast Parentland, and you got a huge response to it, I know, and not just from Nigerian families, but from people all over the world. And actually, as well, you know, from a lot of people who are living in England, what were some of the concerns that they brought up when they were trying to teach their kids to be multilingual? So it's things like having access to classes,

materials online, books. It's always very challenging, especially for minority languages. I think it's easier with languages like French or maybe Spanish. Yeah, exactly. Something else that we've heard quite a lot that one parent should only speak one language. Is that a good idea, Pime? No, no, some people do practice that. It's called OPOL, one person, one language. And there's a lot of different methods that you could use. That is one of them.

But then that presumes that that parent is fluent in that language. What we find with non-European languages or people who are from the African descent is that we didn't actually learn the language because we were born here in England. So we only learned English growing up. So you can't teach something that you don't know yourself, really. So our challenge is different.

I just like to say that even when you were born in Nigeria, you still had that challenge. I have lots of cousins who grew up in the cities like Lagos or Abuja who don't speak the languages just because they weren't immersed as much as us. And, you know, because, for example, in Nigeria, the lingua franca, the official language is English. Most people will just speak English because that's the way you communicate with the wider community. There's a lot of languages in Nigeria as well. There's so many, there's 500 different dialects or more. So how do you communicate?

Mercy Haruna and Bemi Isimi. And Inga sent us an email. She said, I'm a mother of two bilingual kids. They speak English and Icelandic. They're born and raised in London and their father is British and speaks no Icelandic. It was very important to me that they spoke my mother tongue. So I put in a lot of effort to make sure they could converse properly. And I'm very proud of their fluency.

They only speak Icelandic to me and most of the time with each other too. But it wasn't always easy. It required a lot of work and incredible patience. Icelandic is not a very common language so they rarely hear it in London and the UK. Now period poverty is something we've discussed often on Women's Hour. After a long campaign, hashtag free periods, has managed to get the government to fund the provision of free sanitary products for girls in schools and colleges who sign up to the scheme from the new year. It was supposed to begin in September,

so it's happening a little later than expected. Nadia Collier is a family support worker at a London primary school and Gemma Abbott is from Free Periods. Period poverty describes the situation that some people experience where they're unable to afford or access the menstrual products that they need. We have stats from Plan International UK that tell us that one in ten girls are unable to afford the period products that they need and that really impacts upon their ability to attend school to participate in their education once they get there and really just to live in a healthy and dignified way and so we asked the government to provide funding for these

free products and that's what is is coming from January of next year. Now up until now Nadia before the government provided funding there was a charity scheme in place called the Red Box Project your school was involved in it can you tell us a bit about the kind of impact that it had? Since we joined up the Red Box Project we introduced it to our girls through an assembly because we felt it was something that was really important that they had awareness of and felt comfortable to talk about. So since introducing the Red Box project, introducing the space for our girls to have access to these sanitary towels, we've seen an increase in girls requesting products from the Red Box.

And that's from year four up to year six. So it's really had a big impact on them having it available to them and feeling comfortable to talk about periods and so these are very young girls these are girls who are just starting their period these are very young girls that are starting their period from as young as eight and nine which in itself is a difficult time so being able to talk about it comfortably and feel secure and safe that it's not something that they can't discuss and if they ever needed the product it would be available whether they spoke about it or not now that they can't discuss and if they ever needed the product, it would be available

whether they spoke about it or not. Now, look, this is a really basic question, but I'm sure a lot of our listeners will be thinking, but surely their mum or a carer at home should be talking about this. Well, I wouldn't say it's a basic question. I feel like it's a very important subject because there are lots of homes that you don't talk about periods. I mean, in my home, it wasn't something you discussed.

You discussed it with a cousin more so than your parents. So yes, in an ideal world, it'd be something that parents would talk about, but we know that it doesn't always happen. Now, you have first-hand knowledge of this because you actually suffered from period poverty yourself when you were younger. Just tell us a little bit about your own experience. Totally. I mean, I grew up in the 70s in a household with six children, low income family. So there were times when I knew that my parents didn't have the money to buy sanitary products. And for me, it would be simply a matter of, OK, this is my situation. I'm going to have to find a wad of tissue or improvise.

And you also didn't want to put that pressure on your parents so you wouldn't talk about it. So you'd improvise or you would simply miss school. If your parents left early enough, you could just stay in the house rather than go to school with that shame. Gemma, when you hear these stories, you realise how very important it is that this is funded.

The Department of Education has now stepped up, but it's only available in schools and colleges who are going to opt in rather than it being available to all. Why is that? In an ideal world, it would be mandatory for all schools and colleges to provide these free products. I think practically speaking, you know, we don't expect there to be a problem with schools ordering sufficient toilet roll or soap, right, for their schools. The schools take that on themselves and we don't worry that they'll be there when we get there. Hopefully we will get to a stage where the same is true of these essential menstrual items. But schools do have to opt in. So it's incredibly important

that we raise awareness of the availability of these products. The scheme is due to start on the 2nd of January next year and yet we haven't had any direct communications from the Department for Education or from the PHS group who are running the contract about how schools can order. OK, so in terms of actually raising some awareness, if you're a school or college out there listening today, what do you do? What should you be doing? At the moment, the best advice I can give is to visit the redbox project website which is redboxproject.org and we have a sign up page on that home page where we will provide updates as

soon as they're available to direct schools and colleges to be able to order the products that they need okay i'm just looking at this because this is supposed to be, it was originally supposed to be rolled out in September. Then it was put back until January. You know, we're coming up to the Christmas period now. There's obviously Christmas holidays and schools are incredibly busy with all the things that they do in the run up to Christmas. Is this really going to be rolled out in January? You know, we are pressing the Department for Education

and PHS group for updates all the time. And we are continuing to be told that it will be rolled out in January so we have to take them at their word on that. You also asked how should students go about asking for these if their schools haven't signed up yet and I would just urge any students to be as confident as they can

if they don't feel able to articulate it verbally, to send an email to their head teacher, to whoever's in charge of safeguarding to any teacher and we know from you know our work with the red box project that teachers care so much about their students and they will do whatever they can to support them in this sort of area so i think just reaching out to anyone that they trust and feel able to have the conversation with and we really hope that that staff will take that forward and get the products ordered.

Gemma Abbott and Nadia Collier and Carrie sent an email. She said at grammar school in the 1970s I started my period unexpectedly during a gym lesson green knickers and t-shirt. I was bleeding but when I tried to ask to leave I was

told I couldn't. Finally I was sent to sit outside the headmistress's office until she could see me. I was by then crying and bloody. Eventually, she handed me a huge pad. I was left to clean myself up and walk through the school to the girls' changing room. I can't believe it's taken this long to properly support girls in this country with their periods. And yes, I have also had to stuff my knickers with loo paper because sanitary protection was too expensive. Now on Monday we'll be discussing sexual violence against women in India. A woman was recently gang raped and murdered there and we heard this week of a woman who was set alight

on her way to give evidence at her own rape trial. We'll also be talking about how to have a green and not-too-costly Christmas when it comes to entertaining gifts and decorations. Do send us your questions and your tips, if you have them, on Instagram or Twitter, at BBC Women's Hour or of course through the website. That's all from me for this afternoon. Enjoy the rest of the weekend. Bye-bye.

I'm Sarah Treleaven and for over a year I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who's faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now.