Woman's Hour - Gender neutral parenting, Women and high street job losses, Author Emma Donoghue, Late diagnosis of autism

Episode Date: July 21, 2020

As the neutral pronouns they/them start to enter the public consciousness, so too has the idea of gender-neutral parenting. Sarah Davies is a new mum to baby Quinn and talks about her experience of practicing gender-neutrality in a highly gendered society. Prof Melissa Hines from the University of Cambridge and Dr Brenda Scott from City University have both studied how children’s gender identity and behaviour develops over time – and are helping to separate what’s innate about our gender expression and what can be influenced by what our parents teach us. Marks & Spencer has said 950 jobs are at risk as part of plans to reduce store management and head office roles. It was already undergoing a transformation that included cutting costs and closing some stores. Job losses have already been announced at John Lewis, Boots and Debenhams. Jobs at Oasis and Warehouse went in April. So many of these shop-floor, customer-facing jobs are done by women. We explore the consequences of these lay-offs with retail analyst Catherine Shuttleworth and Sue Prynn, deputy divisional officer for USDAW's southern division. Emma Donoghue, the author of the international bestseller Room, has set her latest novel The Pull of the Stars in Dublin in a maternity ward in 1918 at the height of the Great Flu. She explores the lives of a nurse, a volunteer and a doctor on the run, over the course of three days. She tells Jane why she’s mixed fictional with real characters.When Anna Wilson’s father, the man who has calmed her mother for over 40 years, becomes ill with cancer, things become extremely difficult. Her mother has always been ‘a little eccentric’ but in her seventies she becomes increasingly anxious and manic. Anna joins Jane to discuss her memoir, A Place for Everything, in which she talks about the difficulties of getting proper help for her mother, her mother’s late diagnosis of autism at the age of 72, her father’s illness and death and what it was like to care for her parents in their final years.Presenter: Jane Garvey Producer: Dianne McGregor

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hi, this is Jane Garvey and this is the Woman's Hour podcast from Tuesday, July 21st, 2020. Good morning to you today. Are you bringing up your baby to be gender neutral? We've got a great new novel to discuss, The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue. She wrote Room, of course, and this one is set in Dublin

during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. It absolutely gripped me, that book. I thought it was remarkable. And also today, Late Diagnosis of Autism in Women, something we have discussed on this programme before. It is the subject of Anna Wilson's new memoir about her mother, who was diagnosed at the age of 72. I know a lot of people are very interested in this subject. So that's at the end of the programme this morning. If you want to stay around to make sure you hear from Anna Wilson.

First, though, the job losses in the retail sector, that does mean bad news for women. Of course, retail is the second most common sector of employment for women in the UK. M&S made an announcement yesterday about up to 950 job losses, mainly store managers they're thinking about at M&S. But jobs have also gone at John Lewis, at Boots, at Debenhams and at TM Lewin, the shirt makers. Jobs went at Oasis and Warehouse in April. They're also going at Karen Millen, Coast, Laura Ashley, Cath Kidston, Accessorise and Monsoon. And redundancies too at the High Street Coffee, Emporiums like Pret-a-Manger and sandwich shops like Upper Crust. It really is deeply, deeply gloomy. Catherine Shuttleworth is a retail analyst.

Sue Prynne is Deputy Divisional Officer for Usdor's Southern Division. So Sue, you look after people working in parts of London, Kent, the southeast of England generally? Yes, across the south, from south of the Thames down to the bottom of Kent, Sussex, Bournemouth, Dorset and across to Oxford. Right, so a huge swathe of the south of the country. I said it was all deeply gloomy. Should we be this pessimistic? And after all, we're all consumers.

Women are the primary consumers. We're all in this together, aren't we? We're all a part of this story. We are, but if you think about it, 60% of women work in the retail sector. And overall at the minute, with the number of redundancies, I mean, 24,000 jobs already lost this year and the problem is they're also trying to work now and look after their children because

schools and everything being closed it's now affecting their work and whether they'll be able to carry on with the jobs. We have known this was coming haven't we the high street has been really struggling for quite a few years now. Absolutely. Us, we've been fighting a campaign to save the high streets for over two years now, where we've been asking for a minimum wage of £10 an hour, where we've been asking for level playing fields for online shopping, and also for the stores. Because if you imagine the cost of the rates and parking in towns, we need to make it more equal so the stores can start surviving i mean in 2019 we actually saw 1234 stores disappear out the top 500 and 2868 store closures in that year which is 16 a day and that was before kovith. And the business rates, the fact that they are such a problem for stores on the high street, has nothing been done about that?

No, nothing has changed. And we were really disappointed that when the government laid out their recovery this time, that they didn't include retail as well as hospitality to help retail recover. And also that the fact that the Chancellor never made any statement involving retail with his summer statement. Well, in May, we know that the M&S chief executive, he's called Steve Rowe, he said that the impact of the virus lockdown had driven effects and aftershocks in the retail sector that would, and I'm quoting here,

endure for the coming year and beyond. And this is a truth, isn't it, Catherine, that our shopping habits have changed or had to change depending on how you see things? Absolutely. And you know, what's happened is before COVID-19 came along and turned our lives upside down, we were shopping more and more online. And when the stores had to shut and we went into lockdown, there really was only one option outside of food and grocery shopping, which was to shop online. And we've done that. We've taken to it in our droves with real gusto. And some of the parts of the market, perhaps maybe slightly older people who weren't convinced by online shopping, have got into it, found that

it's absolutely fine and will now stick with it. And we're not going back to the high street. And that's where Steve Rowe's concerned and most retailers. So to give you some idea, footfall on the high street at the moment is down about 40%. In London, it's down 71%. People are not coming back to stores because they're quite satisfied with online shopping. And that is in part because we're living different lives now. We're living lives that are much more digitized and retailers have got to respond to it and if you're a retailer and you know 40 percent of people aren't coming back to your shops you do not need as many stores anymore it just doesn't make commercial and business sense and that's why we're seeing all of these stores announcing

quite major closure programs but this does impact on women more than men. So what, if anything, can a woman in retail, one of Sue's members at Osdor, what can they do about it, Catherine? Well, it's hugely concerning for women because, you know, the thing about retail jobs is they're quite flexible, they're very local and they allow you to run your lives, get there on public transport. And there aren't jobs that kind of reflect that, that are easy to replace them. Historically, women have gone into, when this has been happening over the last few years, they've gone into caring jobs, you know, in care homes and looking after people. Of course, you know, that's a difficult sector at the moment.

They've also gone into catering and hospitality, which has also been really badly hit. So it's quite difficult to see where those local jobs will come. There are jobs in the distribution industries that are increasing. So we've seen today that Hermes are creating 10,000 jobs. Well, why can't women do those jobs? They can do those jobs. They're just not as convenient and as easy for them to go to. And they are very male dominated, some of those industries. And I think, you know, that the hours are more difficult. So lots of jobs like night shift jobs, where women used to be able to work when their partners came home,

have disappeared. A lot of these distribution jobs are in the day, and they're not as easy for women to do. So night shifts, they were a useful thing for lots of women. Absolutely, because they used to be able to go to work when their partners came home, the children be home as well. and they could go and do. But many stores now have stopped 24-7 opening and the night shift refills where they were filling up the shelves has now gone to twilights. So a lot of these people can't do those early shifts because their partners aren't always home by then. I think what we need to be doing is investing now and actually equipping and supporting retail workers with learning new skills to do other roles. Do you see that happening? Well I'd like to think that employers are going to

start doing that a little bit more and giving them more skills because you know like we said 24-7 retail has been and it's always been they've been about to work around children and schools and partners the trouble is now companies want them to be 24-7 flexible and that won't work for a lot of people because of the care commitments and the children's commitments. Yeah, I mean, women's lives have changed, but the plain fact is that this lockdown and the crisis generally has revealed that actually, Sue, women's lives haven't changed that much or rather it's exposed the fact that women were going out to work and then coming home and doing another shift at home absolutely and i think the problem with the government and everybody

always sort of looked at shop workers as just you know just menial jobs that women did to get a few quid well actually the shop workers have kept this country going over the time of covid and still we're moving forward and i think we've got to start supporting the high streets again and start going to our local stores because that's the only way we're going to get the recovery going back. What about the social aspect of the high street, Catherine? It's a place where a lot of us, I actually enjoy going out to shop and it's not really because I need three or four bananas.

It's because I quite fancy a walk and a chat to people. That's a huge part of this, isn't it? It's a huge part. I think one of the things that's happened in lockdown is what I would call local high streets. So the high streets very near to where you live have had a bit of a resurgence. And that's a very positive thing. So those greengrocers and butchers and local stores that have served us during this period of lockdown, I think will retain us as customers

because we want to support local businesses. And that's where women actually can have a huge impact in terms of thinking about what their local community needs because they generally know what their local community needs and wants. So at that aspect, I think that's a positive. In terms of the bigger high streets, you're absolutely right. You know, most of us enjoy going shopping on Saturday as a social occasion, don't we? And meeting up with friends, maybe having lunch and just spending time socialising. And in the short term,

that's disappeared. I think in the longer term, what we've got to hope for is there is a rethink about high streets and how we use them for leisure, social and residential purposes. I mean, with respect, I've heard this before and it never seems to happen. And the same, I am one of those people who wangs on about the decline of the high street whilst idly clicking on my phone and ordering stuff. I mean, you couldn't make it up really, could you? No, and that's the problem, isn't it? Is we say one thing and we do another.

But I think the challenge in the short term is councils are not going to have loads of money to re-sort out high streets. We've got to think of something very differently. And I think the government will have to intervene in that in a better way than they have been before. It's far too male. You know, get some women to sort out what the high streets need and start looking at how people really live their lives. We do not all live in Westminster. There are high streets up and down the country that local people need to be able to fix and they need some money to do that. And I think

there has to be a transformation in our way of thinking about it. I imagine, well I have just interrupted you, but Westminster thinking is a world away, Sue, from your average member who's worried sick potentially about losing her job and still isn't earning 10 quid an hour. Absolutely if you think about it the government would have intervened with many other businesses and hasn't done anything for retail if people are being made redundant what i will say is our story is ensuring they're supported and to make sure no one's discriminated through this process and whether it's group consultations to ensure that it's fair and transparent and everybody's treated correctly so we are supporting our members through this

but what we need to do is look at how to revive the high streets you know and also to look at things like if you don't earn 120 pound a week anyone that's off sick from these retail jobs can't get any sick pay so we need to be looking at everything just the sick pay the universal credit and also the redundancies and like i said previously upskilling our members so that they can do other jobs but they've also got to take an account that women should not be discriminated against because at the moment they have care commitments because their children cannot go to play school right school or child care well that's something we are going to be discussing on the programme, I think, on Monday of next week, the fact that the government is now encouraging employers to ask the workforce to get back into work by August the 1st, which, of course, if you have young children at home,

is easier said than done. My thanks to Sue Prynne of Usdor and the retail analyst Catherine Shuttleworth. Catherine, when I talked to her earlier this morning suggested that female entrepreneurs might be a way out of this. So if you are a female entrepreneur with a business idea and you'd like to take part in Woman's Hour, we have got Listener Week coming up towards the end of August

and that's when we dedicate the whole programme to ideas generated by you, ideas from you. You can email the programme via our website, bbc.co.uk slash womanshour. Also an interesting article in The Telegraph today, the headline is Britain's female workforce is the collateral damage of COVID,

which was pretty well illustrated by that conversation we just had with Catherine and with Sue from Usdor. So get your ideas coming to us, please, via the website. We'd really appreciate that. COVID, I think, and its impact has been felt more keenly by women. A lot of people would agree with that. Emma Donoghue is the author of the international bestseller Room, and her latest book, The Pull of the Stars, is set in a maternity ward in a Dublin hospital in 1918, at the height of what we now call the Spanish flu outbreak. The novel explores the lives of a nurse, a volunteer and a doctor over the course of three very hectic days. In this extract read by Emma, nurse Julia

Power is observing life around her as she makes her way into work first thing in the morning on a busy Dublin tram. On a fence, specifics of a variety concert with cancelled stamped diagonally across them. An advertisement for the All-Ireland Hurling Finals postponed for the duration pasted on it. So many shops shuttered now due to staff being laid low by the grief and offices with blinds drawn down or regretful notices nailed up many of the firms that were still open looked deserted to me on the verge of failing for lack of custom dublin was a great mouth holed with missing teeth a waft of eucalyptus the man to my left on the tram bench was pressing a soaked handkerchief over his nose and mouth i used to like that woody fragrance before it came to mean fear.

A man's explosive cough on the bench behind me. Then another. Hack, hack. A tree being axed with too small a blade. The mass of bodies leaned away from him. That ambiguous sound could be the start of the flu or a convalescence lingering symptom. But at the moment, this whole city was inclined to assume the worst. And no wonder. Emma Donoghue reading from her new book, The Pull of the Stars. I talked to Emma yesterday.

She lives in Canada now. And I said to her, the timing of this book is remarkable. She can't possibly have known the coronavirus was coming. So was this novel rushed out? Not in terms of the writing. No, I wrote it in 2018 and 2019. I sold it last autumn and it wasn't due to come out until next year. All the rushing that happened was getting some beautiful cover design and, you know, copy editing and so on. So yeah, we did think it would just make more sense to readers this year. But it's a very peculiar

experience for me because when you write historical fiction, you've always expected to be, you know, subtly relevant today in a kind of thoughtful way, not in such a direct way. So it's very strange. But frankly, I'm glad to have the opportunity to publish a novel all about the heroism of medical workers in the middle of this crisis. This book, I have to be honest, I don't like every single book I am given to read on this programme, but this one absolutely captivated me to the degree that I woke up the morning after starting it worrying about the fate of the characters. And this is partly because I'd stopped reading

at the point in which your heroine, Julia Power, had knocked off shift. Can you just talk a little bit more about the... It's very claustrophobic, this atmosphere. It's set in a maternity ward, set aside for women who also had the fever. The fact that really hooked me about the 1918 flu was that women in late pregnancy or during or just after birth were the most vulnerable to it. They caught it and they had the most horrendous side effects. And I thought that was a really interesting sort of knot of two different medical dramas with two different storylines.

And because, you know, birth has a very different rhythm to an illness. It can go horrendously and then suddenly everybody's happy or it can all be going swimmingly. And then after a birth, a woman can suddenly get a fever. So I thought a maternity fever ward would be the perfect kind of combination of these two dramatic storylines. And yes, I did sort of fret over these women myself. I decided to try and give them very contrasting births and very contrasting outcomes. And in a sort of tiny microcosmic way, I wanted to conjure up all the kind of, you know, atmosphere of the war almost, but a women's war in this case, and a sort of little world of women suffering and trying birth in hospitals in the UK during this period, and their quiet heroism really, really struck me. But we actually truthfully don't celebrate it much, do we? The funny thing about birth is that because it's so common, it's so ordinary,

we all came out through birth. We don't recognise it for the grand drama it is. And when I was pregnant with our first of two kids, it was a book by Naomi Wolf that really grabbed me. And she talks in it about, you know, approaching birth as a kind of a warrior. You know, there's nothing sweet or pink or be ribboned about it. You are about to lose your freedom and lose your individuality and autonomy and, you know, say goodbye to that and plunge into the adventure. So that's the kind of spirit I was trying to conjure up with this novel, and that it's a huge drama, and it's probably the most dangerous day of your life. It's certainly the most dangerous day of the baby's life. And yes, we should look with fresh eyes at the incredible heroism of, you know, growing another human being and managing to push it out to a space

that does not seem to have been intended for that purpose. I have to say the book is brutal and bloody in places and you are really clear in how you feel about the way Irish women of the time were treated. This notion that to prove that you really loved a man you had to give him, and give him is interesting, 12 children. That was real. That actually, people said this stuff, didn't they? Yes, I'm one of eight myself, and my grandfather was the youngest of 21. I think it's fair to say that Ireland has had a sort of remorselessly pro-natalist policy. Perhaps after the famine, or if you just take Catholicolicism to its logical extent really it's not hard to write about Ireland in a way that starts to remind people of the

handmaid's tale Irish medical policies were dictated by this they did fairly brutal operations in Ireland to sort of unhinge the pelvis in order to allow a woman to get a baby out and still be fit to breed next year where a caesarean might have, you know, damaged her chances. So, yes, I think if you're going to be very critical of a culture, it should be your home culture. And I think, as the youngest of eight, I have the right to comment on this. And it makes it a very strange world, because obviously these women have, these Julia's inner city slum patients, they have a huge status from producing all these babies. You know, they're being good women, but it is literally wrecking them long before the great flu ever takes them.

Well, this is your central character, Julia Power, who is the nurse unexpectedly in charge of this ward for this dizzying period of time. She wasn't real, nor is the woman she befriends, Bridie, who helps her out during the course of her duties. But there is somebody in the book who really existed, Kathleen Lynn, who is a doctor.

Tell me about her. I didn't intend to use any real characters because, you know, they're such trouble. You get their great-nephews writing to you to say, she wasn't like that. So I was just looking for models of how doctors might have been living in 1918 in Ireland. And I come across Kathleen Lynn, and you couldn't make her up.

She was a revolutionary involved in the 1916 Rising. been living in 1918 in Ireland and I come across Kathleen Lynn and you couldn't make her up. She was a revolutionary involved in the 1916 Rising. She was chief medical officer for Sinn Féin. She was a suffragist, a labour rights activist. She was working for the poor. She was a Protestant vicar's daughter and she was a doctor who specialised in all sorts of different areas such as ophthalmology and midwifery because no one hospital would take her on. The male doctors didn't want to work with a woman. So I tried to use a fictional version of her in the first draft. And then I thought, you know, I might as well give her a little moment of fame because she's far less well known than she should be. An extraordinary character. And she set up the first

children's hospital in Ireland in 1918, funded by the woman she lived with all her life. And during the flu, she was not only setting up her own free flu clinic for the poor of Dublin and trying out various ill-fated vaccines on them, but she was also on the run and police were trying to arrest her throughout this period. And then when she finally was arrested, the Lord Mayor of Dublin intervened to get her out because she was so needed during the pandemic. So an absolutely extraordinary figure. I couldn't keep her out of the book. Emma, you obviously haven't, I know you visit Ireland regularly, you haven't lived there since the 1990s. In terms of the way women are treated, how much has the country changed in your lifetime?

Ireland has changed out of all recognition in my lifetime. It's gone from being a culture of, you know, discretion and not spelling things out and, you know, verbal tact to a culture where people ring up the radio and tell all. And it's gone from being a culture where, you know, just nobody mentioned homosexuality at all in my childhood and adolescence. And then we suddenly sort of hopped to a point of equal rights protection. It's gone from a culture where abortion was absolutely forbidden to one that passed it by referendum. I think the first country in the world to do that. You know, every time I see a headline from Ireland,

I'm more impressed by how much change is possible. And in terms of dealing with the coronavirus, Ireland has done rather well. Ireland does seem to have done very well since the coronavirus, yes. But there are so many different factors in these different countries and we're always just comparing ourselves to our neighbours. Here in Canada, where I live, we tend to feel we've done wonderfully, but it's because we're comparing ourselves with Trump's America.

As a sort of interested outsider, on every visit home, there's something to astonish me. And I still very much feel part of it because Ireland has so many emigrants that you get to feel sort of part of that diaspora of Irish writers. We actually had a very long conversation, as you might imagine, because she was a great, great person to talk to, Emma Donoghue. And that was just part of the conversation we had yesterday about her new novel, The Pull of the Stars, which I do highly recommend.

Hi to Jo on Twitter, who says that she was slightly alarmed by the talk of unhinging pelvises. Well, that is actually an item we have discussed on the programme before, Jo. So if you look back, you can find the conversation we had about symphysiotomy is the name of the procedure that Emma Donoghue was referring to there. It is something that was carried out, certainly on women within living memory. So just look it up. We'll try and find a link for that perhaps and put it on the website. Now, gender neutral parenting, is this something that you could do? Could you bring up your baby this way? We're going to talk in a moment to Professor Melissa Hines, the Director of the Gender Development Centre at the University of Cambridge, and to Dr Brenda Scott, who is a senior lecturer in developmental psychology at City University in London. Bringing up your child in a gender neutral way is becoming increasingly popular and much discussed.

Sarah is from Liverpool. She is a new mother to a baby called Quinn. And Sarah, this is something that you want to do. So first of all, tell us why you've come to this decision. First of all, how old is your baby? She's just over six weeks old. Right, and called Quinn? Quinn, because it's a very gender-neutral name.

We came to it from a position of feminism really and i'd read a lot of literature around the impact of gender stereotypes and subversion of those and wanted to raise a child in an environment which minimizes those societal gender pressures and gives the child the freedom to develop in a way that isn't in any way limited by their biological sex and is this something that you've done or you're doing as a family because of what happened to you as a child? Or is it something you've just come to quite recently?

I don't think I was in any way limited by my sex, but I think the more you read about it, there is potential there for it to have an impact. And I want my child not to be in any way limited. So the more you can encourage them to think about them and decrease some of the stereotypes that people can make about them it maybe gives them a little bit more freedom to develop into what they want to be

rather than what society expects them to be. Quinn is tiny, nearly seven weeks old but already have you noticed other people trying to stereotype your baby? A lot of the presents that we've received have been quite gendered. And we've had a bit of a mixed response from people that we've told. And I think it's more important to us than it is to other people. So some people have an interest and want to explore the idea further.

Some politely acquiesce when we mention it. But we have had some negative reactions as well and some people feel that and there's a danger in imposing your views upon your child and also some worry that if you make your child different does that make them um subject to bullying and that kind of thing once they go to school right i mean you're some way off that. Quinn is just a tiny baby and she's well, I said she Quinn is female. I mean, she's she's a baby. She's not she's not she isn't behaving in any particular way at all, is she? Not at the moment, but I suppose later on as she becomes more conscious. The clothes that you pick, the toys that you allow them to play with,

the behaviours that you model in front of them do have an influence on how they develop. OK, stay with us, Sarah, and we'll come back to you. Melissa Hines, Director of the Gender Development Centre at Cambridge University. Is there any difference at all between a baby girl and a baby boy? Certainly at seven weeks, there isn't one, is there? Not really, apart from the obvious? Well, gender development begins before birth, even. So behavior, complex human behavior, typically results from numerous factors interacting over time. And gendered behavior is no exception. And in regard to gendered behavior, testosterone before birth and shortly after birth, this is a hormone produced by the male testes, the male gonads, influences later behavior. In addition to that, after birth, socialization is a major factor. And this is socialisation not just by parents,

but also by teachers, peers, society at large. And children themselves, once they know that they are a girl or are a boy, try to do things that correspond to that gender. So they try to fit in with society's expectations, typically. OK, so because what we know of all humans is that we like to fit in with society's expectations, typically. Okay, so because what we know of all humans is that we like to fit in. Most people do, yes. Okay, not all. I mean, that's significant. So perhaps, go on, Melissa. So you can change your parenting, and that paradoxically, perhaps,

might make other factors more important because of the system. So if you make one factor more important, the others become less important. So a child who isn't socialized as much by their parents, socialization by other people might become more important, or they might express those factors that occurred before birth more strongly. Brenda Scott, Dr. Brenda Scott, what can you tell us about the psychology of very young children in terms of when they might acknowledge their own biological sex? Oh, it's Brenda Todd, by the way. Oh, I do apologise. As development occurs, babies become, and we're not very sure about when they first understand themselves as being boys or girls, male or female, because they're not able to tell us that except by their behaviour. So it's still unknown really when they get

a concept of whether they themselves are male or female and of course prior to that they need to be able to distinguish the category of male or female, boy, girl, man, woman, mother, father. Do you think it is a good idea to attempt to do what Sarah and her partner and family are doing? I think it's enormously important to think about those things. But we need to be very careful about what we're aiming at, what we're wishing for and we must accept that the biology of gender differences exists as has been demonstrated by Melissa's research

definitely but also that we can modify our attitudes and expectations and modify those stereotypes. And I think, hopefully, that's happening very much so in the current day, yes. Sarah, can I bring you back in? How do you see this working? And when will you know whether or not what you're trying to do is a success um i suppose when they get to the stage where the parental influence diminishes and they're more when they're a little bit older when they're at school and that will probably reveal how much

of an impact our parenting has had and i know from other people where they've tried to raise gender neutral children at the point where their children have become conscious, some of their preferences, which were against their biological sex, have diminished as the children have gone to school. And I suppose it's just a case then of challenging the child, why they think that way. Yeah, I mean, you've got some interesting views on gender neutrality i know because you think that actually so-called gender neutrality actually skews male just tell me more about that so we encountered it originally in

looking at the names it's really hard to select a name which is genuinely gender neutral a lot of the names are traditionally male but have been increasingly used by females and I think and there's a similar thing around toy preferences and things like that over time the neutrality point of view tends to be more towards the traditional male gender roles yeah I think Brenda Todd you've got a view on this haven't you that you think actually toy manufacturers need to start thinking about how they can make so-called girls' toys more interesting? Well, I think toy manufacturers and marketers have an awful responsibility in this because I think it's probably more, they get more money if they do distinguish

between types of toy. But yes, I think that what we should be aiming for is to produce and use and give to children toys which develop skills of all kinds. And some of the traditional girl stereotyped toys, like dolls for instance, have a limited range of functions, baby dolls perhaps in particular and so girls get bored with them sooner so it's not so much the stereotype of the toy but what we can do with that toy and what skills we can learn I must say however that I do think the skill of nurturing is hugely important. Girls or boys playing with dolls or cuddly toys, animal toys, can develop those skills.

Yeah, and so certainly never be discouraged. That would be awful if it was. I think we shouldn't discourage many things in toy play. No. Play is fundamental to growing up and learning. And toys change because our needs as a society change. So toys can reflect that. Of course.

Sorry to interrupt you. It's tools of the mind and we should expose both boys and girls to those kinds of toys. Thank you very much, Brenda. Sorry to interrupt you there. That was Dr. Brenda Todd. Professor Melissa Hines, how long ago was it that people attempted to bring up a baby in the way that Sarah is doing it or trying to do it? Is this a recent thing or has this in fact been tried long, long ago? Well, I think I first heard about it in this century. I imagine that there were people who tried, you know, over the centuries to raise a child in a gender neutral way. But perhaps I didn't hear about it. But certainly there have been people who have tried this.

I think it's a very hard thing to do because the society is so gendered and the child's peers will be very gendered and children encourage their peers to behave in gender typical ways and discourage them from behaving in gender atypical ways. I also want to say about the movement from male to female. When we watch parents interacting with their children in the lab, if boys play with girl-typical toys, they get a negative reaction. And this is one area where parents do respond negatively to children. Generally, parents are quite positive in their responses to their children's play. And if girls play with boys' toys, that's okay. But often if a boy plays with a girl's toy, a father in particular will say something like,

oh, you don't want to do that, or let's do this instead. Right. And to be clear, that is still happening. It's 2020 and some fathers will still react in that way. I think so. I mean, the research we did was maybe a decade ago. Well, it'd be interesting to repeat it. Yeah. Thank you very, very much. I'm so sorry to have to interrupt you.

That's a fascinating topic, one that deserves more time. Professor Melissa Hines from the Gender Development Centre at the University of Cambridge. You also heard from Dr. Brenda Todd at City University in London. And thanks to our listener Sarah from Liverpool and congratulations to her on the birth of baby Quinn. Now late diagnosis of autism in women is something we have discussed on Women's Hour in the past. It's the subject of a new memoir called A Place for Everything, My Mother, Autism and Me by Anna Wilson. Anna Wilson good morning to you. Morning thanks for having me on. Great

pleasure. Now your mother was not diagnosed until she was 72. Can you just tell me exactly where that happened? Yes, so mum had just been sectioned under the Mental Health Act for extreme anxiety and depression and it was coming out of section that we had to go to some sort of meetings with her psychiatrist and social worker, my sister and I, to sort of find out what we should do to help mum next because my father had just died. So we were concerned about her going home after being sectioned. And we were lucky enough to meet a psychologist who had read all of mum's notes and lots of letters that we and our friends and family had written about mum's behaviour. And he picked up on a lot of traits and said, have you ever considered that your mother might be on the autistic spectrum? And had you? Well, we had

in terms of we'd always tried to get to the root of why mum was so anxious and depressed and why she had certain traits that had seemed to be quite unusual to us as we were growing up. But we'd also considered other things like bipolar and, you know, particular aspects of depression that can come from other mental illness as well. Did she accept the diagnosis? Was she in a position to be able to acknowledge it or understand it? Unfortunately, not really, because she was so severely anxious by that point. She was on a lot of medication and she kept getting up and walking out of the room when we were talking about her. We tried to explain things to her later, but to be honest, she was grieving the death of my father as well. So there was an awful lot of other things that

she had to consider. Now, you've written a blog about why you wrote the memoir. And there's a line in it where you say, I was afraid, I am still afraid of how this book will be received. Why were you so anxious? I think because I was worried that friends and family would think that I had in some way utilised mum to write a book. And I suppose that's because deep down inside, I probably felt a little bit guilty about that. But I've had a lot of time to think about it. And I've had some wonderful responses from friends and family as well that I wasn't expecting. And I think what it boils down to is that, you know, I could say, oh, well, I've written this memoir because I want to be heard. But

actually, it's not all about me. It's about mum as well. And mum actually wasn't listened to a lot of the time. When she was alive, she used to tell people constantly that she felt dreadful. She'd use expressions like, I feel really under the weather. I feel that life has no meaning. She used to say really quite dramatic things like, all I see is misery, or I can't see any point in carrying on. And they were always sort of brushed aside really even by those of us close to her I think you know her mother used to say pull yourself together and we always used to try and get her to cheer up and I mean it just feels dreadful now that you know her deep depression and anxiety wasn't always um acknowledged and I think because

she was so intelligent and engaged in life on other levels, you know, it just didn't seem to be that important earlier on in her life. You make it very clear that your mother was capable of being an immensely caring and capable mother. And you actually got on with her really well when you were a young, compliant child. But then things got harder later. Yes, that's right she was a wonderful mum when we were young she's always incredibly loving and very physical as well very cuddly um and she was also quite strict but when you're young i think that's quite good because you know what the boundaries are and routines are very reassuring she was always there for us you

know she was always there to help us with our homework and cook for us and things like that but when you get older obviously every teen likes to have a few battles with their parents. But, you know, we were growing up in the 70s and 80s when there were no mobile phones. But mum still expected us to call her at every opportunity to say where we were and when we were coming back. And, you know, that was our normal. But then people started to comment on it and say, well, why can't you just stay for another half an hour? Or, you know, why do you have to call when you're on the train or whatever it is? And sort of over the years, you started to sort of question some of this behaviour. But because your own family is your normal, you don't really think

about it until you leave home, I suppose. And your father, they had a very happy marriage. He was an immensely supportive husband. What was he covering up for her, do you think, in retrospect? I think he was. And I mean, I don't think he was doing it out of anything other than love because he absolutely adored mum and was, you know, just completely stuck by her right to the end. Not right until he could really, until the end. But I think, you know, we would sometimes say as adults you know mum's behavior is really off the scale you know she's being very um you know angry about things and and or she seems very depressed what can we do to help and he would always sort of say oh you know don't worry about it that's just your mum she's always been like that you know just forgive her that sort of thing

um and i think it became frustrating as we got older. My sister and I felt that he was perhaps a little bit more on her side than on ours. But, you know, in hindsight, obviously, we can see that he was just doing his best for her. We don't want to alarm the people listening and suggest that everybody who's perhaps anxious and is worried about where their children are in later life needs to get a diagnosis of autism. But nevertheless, it will ring alarm bells with people, I guess, because your mother was somebody who was troubled by physical symptoms, which she, as you say earlier, she would try to get help for and it was not really forthcoming. Yes, that's right. No, I absolutely don't want people to think that because you can be

anxious on many levels and it's often not related to anything else at all other than the pure anxiety. Yes, with mum, she was always very worried about her physical health. She had a lot of gastric problems, which she did go to specialists for to see, you know, to have sort of deeper investigations to see what was wrong. And every time she was told there's actually nothing physically wrong with you, she was sort of turned away, really, even after some really invasive investigative stuff. And I now have access to her notes. And quite often there will be a side note. This woman has nothing physically wrong with her, but she does seem extremely anxious and never seem to be followed through. And I can't blame anyone's door because I would imagine that mum wouldn't necessarily have engaged with anyone.

Hindsight, as you say, is a truly wonderful thing. And I guess you are now reassessing every aspect of your mother's life and your relationship with her. Thank you very much indeed, Anna. Anna Wilson is the author of A Place for Everything, My Mother, Autism and Me. And there are links that we hope you find helpful on the Women's Hour website right now. And actually, you don't have to have a connection to autism to find much to enjoy, perhaps isn't the right word, but much that you can relate to in this book, because it's largely really about the business of caring for your elderly parents when you are

a woman who might have a whole shed load of other responsibilities. So it's interesting. A Place for Everything is the name of Anna's book. But on the subject of late diagnosis of autism in women, this listener has emailed to say, I tried to get referred for diagnosis from the age of 43 to 55 when my psychiatrist retired. Then I tried to get a diagnosis from an autism charity. Still nothing. The psychiatrist consultant repeatedly said she didn't know enough about autism to know if I was suitable to be assessed. How can anybody constructively respond to that? I did my best to acquire and send her the information explaining everything about the differences in autistic traits in women and men.

I've lived with a diagnosis of bipolar since I was 25. Nobody in the psychiatric profession seems to be capable of understanding just how important it is to know why I behave as I do. I know I'm high up on the spectrum, but because I have other diagnoses, I'm able to avoid most challenging situations. Well thanks to that listener it does this is as I said during the program we have discussed this before and it is it does appear to be the case that women are better at masking their symptoms of autism and therefore they plow on but it may mean that their lives are particularly difficult.

This from another listener. Many years ago, I was called upon to mentor a project planner who was in her 30s. It turned out that she had been diagnosed as being on the spectrum in the previous 18 months. I asked her if getting that diagnosis relatively late in life was traumatic. Not at all, she said. It was great. Suddenly people realised I wasn't

just odd and treated me like I had a condition. So there we go. There's an illustration of a diagnosis helping somebody. From another listener, my brother was diagnosed with autism in his late 40s. And I finally realised at that point that my 80-year-old mother had exactly the same traits and so was probably on the spectrum herself. Once I had this revelation, it answered so many questions about her behaviour and why she was so difficult at times to get along with. We then had the best couple of years of our relationship together as I could accept her behaviour and forgive earlier cruelties. Thank you for that. No names there,

but you'll understand why not. Now to the subject of the high street. A says, I am older and perfectly capable of shopping online at the moment, but as soon as possible, I'm going to be back shopping face to face. No courier vans on the road, no tons of cardboard packaging. And I can see what I'm buying. Plus, lots of jobs, hopefully, for those retail workers. A, thank you for that. I am like you, I quite enjoy a bit of shopping. And I don't mean shopping for really expensive clothes. I just mean actually, because I'm essentially part time, despite my commitment to this programme. My colleagues are smirking at that through the glass, which I find very unsupportive. I can shop every day for food, or most days, and I actually quite enjoy it.

Pauline says, surely the best people to work on redesigning the high street are those women who've lost their jobs in high street stores. They may not have degrees in economics, they won't have been to the right schools or talk posh, but they'll know what needs doing. And from Peter, I'm an avid listener, he says. Well, thank you for that, Peter. And this morning's discussion prompts me to suggest that what shop and store owners and their staff must embrace is to model the staff into being entrepreneurial themselves, that is, to better represent the organisation they work for and to project this ethos genuinely to customers. We talk glibly about traders we encounter in the USA, for example, saying, have a nice day. But my experience

suggests that generally they mean it and they're only too interested in serving you and representing their business genuinely to mutual benefit, theirs as well as yours. My experience of some shop assistants in this country, that's England, generally suggests they're just doing a job without offering a service. Well, that's been Peter's experience. I think that's a little harsh.

I've always had rather jolly service in the shops that I go into regularly. Maybe that's because I'm a relatively pleasant customer. I did say relatively. Now, trying to bring up your baby gender neutral. This is interesting from Marie, who says, I was heartbroken to hear my grandson say that he couldn't have a chocolate making toy because it was in the girls pages of the toy catalogue well there you go i mean that this stuff about toys is actually really interesting isn't it and marie's email illustrates that it's still very much a thing that although i think actually brenda todd did emphasize that of course this is rather lucrative this whole idea of

separate toys for girls and boys does help out the manufacturers and possibly allows them to earn more money. Good Morning Jane says, a listener, I've listened to Women's Hour for decades and only now do I feel incensed enough to write to you. Surely it's every child's birthright to the gender it was born with, female or male. To deny a child this right and twist it out of shape

opens the child up to bullying and ridicule throughout its childhood. Because that is what the parent wants. I think it's criminal. For heaven's sake, bring common sense and humanity back. One furious listener from Somerset. Right, Caroline. The whole topic is fascinating, which is why we wanted to do it. Sarah's baby is tiny, not even seven weeks old yet. Who knows what will happen in the future?

But I guess whatever you do and say as a parent, you are influencing your children, aren't you? It doesn't matter what you do or how you behave, your child will pick up all sorts of cues from you not necessarily negative ones and who knows what Quinn's journey through life is going to be um Vicky says I've got two girls they're four and one I recognize the need to redress the balance created by gender bias in society I see that girls can lose confidence or miss out on building skills and experiences through choices we make based on their biological sex. I grew up gender non-binary, although this category didn't exist when I was young. I didn't have a label for my gender and I was confused. I've encouraged my older daughter when she's shown interest in typically female clothes and activities, as I know how hard it is to live

outside of that female-male divide. Outside of expected gender norms, it's still difficult, scary and sometimes a dangerous place to live. I admire, though, the bravery of the woman you spoke to and I hope it all works well for her. Yeah, interesting, your experience, Vicky, and thank you for telling us about it. Another listener says, my daughter is 16 now and she grew up playing with her brother's toys, bricks, dinosaurs, jigsaws, etc. I was conscious of gender stereotyping and deliberately tried not to give her girls toys. However, at one of the first playgroups I took her to, I sat her down on the floor and she crawled over to, what do you think? Well, I'll tell you, an abandoned toy buggy in the middle of the hall. She found a baby doll and

kissed it tenderly. It was a jaw-dropping moment. I held firm and although she did play with dolls, she had other things as well. I did fall out with my mother-in-law when my daughter was two, oh no, as she'd bought her a very expensive wooden toy ironing board and iron. I drew the line, refused to allow her to give them to my daughter and explained my reasons. We are good friends now, but we still don't mention the ironing board. What would I have done if my now ex-mother-in-law had attempted, she wouldn't have done it, by the way, but I've got two daughters. I've certainly, we had a train set, they had building bricks, but they did love baby dolls.

Just a sad fact, and I've told the story before about the day when we took my children's baby dolls in their double buggy to the park. The kids then ran off and I was left in the sole company of both baby dolls and the double buggy, sitting alone and unattended for many, many, well, at least half an hour. And I think people thought I was absolutely crackers, but then I probably am, so that's fine. Here is another side of that exactly the same story. This is why our emails are so fascinating don't need to mention the name but this listener says i listened with great interest today um i've got

two granddaughters one turned three in june and her sister was born this year for one of the three year olds birthday gifts i sent a fun toy item a buggy with a baby doll i got a phone call later saying would i object to the gift being returned I thought perhaps it had been duplicated or was made of plastic but no the answer was very pointed it's because it's gender specific well the new baby was crying in the background so I said I think that baby needs your attention do what you like I put down the phone and I cried. 24 hours later, I was angry and I still am. To that listener, I'm sorry that you were so upset. Such a rich area for conversation this and it's one we'll certainly have again, I'm sure in the future. But keep your thoughts coming on this one.

Because it's interesting. bbc.co.uk forward slash woman's hour. That's how you can reach us on any subject you like. Also, we want you to pitch in with an idea for Listener's Week, which is starting this year on August the 24th. Looking forward to that. We're here tomorrow with another of our how-to guides, tomorrow focusing on how to be a good friend. Hi, I'm Jo Wicks and I'm just popping up to tell you about my brand new podcast with BBC Radio 4. It's extraordinary. It almost turbo charges you. I'm really interested in the links between physical and mental health and what kind of ordinary everyday activities people do to keep on top of things. I keep fit because it's relaxing, because it absolutely relaxes my mind.

And that's so important. So in this podcast, I'm having a chat with some of my favourite people to find out their tips and tricks to staying healthy and happy. For me, it's a full body experience and it's a total game changer. I think you're going to love it. Hit subscribe on the Joe Wicks podcast on BBC Sounds. Let's do this. 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 was 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.