Woman's Hour - Naomi Campbell, Equality at home, Susie Dent

Episode Date: June 20, 2020

Naomi Campbell the model, icon, and activist, who’s been at the summit of the fashion industry for over three decades tells us how she believes the fashion and beauty industry needs to play its part in bringing about change when it comes to racial equality.Who is doing the most when it comes to childcare and chores in heterosexual couples, and how might lock-down be changing things? We hear from Ali Lacey, a PhD researcher from Sussex University which is looking into this subject, Mary Ann Stevenson of the UK Women’s Budget Group and Francine Deutsch Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Education at Mount Holyoke College in the US. The Science journalist Debora Mackenzie tells us about her book: COVID-19: the pandemic that never should have happened, and how to stop the next one. As two black British women writers - Bernadine Evaristo and Reni Eddo-Lodge - top the UK fiction and non-fiction bestseller charts for the first time, we hear from best-selling author of Queenie, Candice Carty-Williams and Sharmaine Lovegrove founder of Dialogue Books about the way the publishing industry treats black writers and readers.We hear why self-employed women are receiving less government support during coronavirus if they’ve taken maternity leave between April 2016 and March 2019. This is because maternity pay isn’t taken into account when calculating payments under the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme. The group Pregnant Then Screwed is threatening the Chancellor with indirect sex discrimination. We speak to founder Joeli Brearley and the freelance journalist, Alex Lloyd. Susie Dent is a lexicographer, etymologist and linguist. She has appeared in Dictionary Corner on Channel 4's Countdown since 1992. She tells us how language has evolved and about her new podcast with Gyles Brandreth. Presenter: Jenni Murray Producer: Rabeka Nurmahomed Editor: Jane ThurlowInterviewed guest: Naomi Campbell Interviewed guest: Ali Lacey Interviewed guest: Mary Ann Stevenson Interviewed guest: Francine Deutsch Interviewed guest: Debora Mackenzie Interviewed guest: Candice Carty-Williams Interviewed guest: Sharmaine Lovegrove Interviewed guest: Joeli Brearley Interviewed guest: Alex Lloyd Interviewed guest: Susie Dent

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Good afternoon. In today's programme, the equal or unequal sharing of household tasks and childcare during lockdown. Who is doing the most? How comparison with other authors can mean a black writer can be paid less than another. If you're a black writer, you don't have comps if you're writing about race and Britain. And, you know, there's not

that many people who've been given the space to be able to do that. And then when they're exceptional, like books like Candice or Bernardini-Varisto, then we're not allowed to really use those as comps because they're considered exceptional. The science journalist and the book that feels like a must read. Deborah McKenzie's COVID-19, the pandemic that should never have happened and how to stop the next one. The woman from Dictionary Corner, Susie Dent, on some of her favourite words and the way language changes and develops. When Shakespeare was coming up with words like laughable, he was laughed at because everyone said, no, no, it should be laugh-attable. What are you talking about?

And Keats loved to create verbs out of nouns, something we hate today, but we've always, always done it. And the allocation of the self-employment income support scheme. Why so many women who've had maternity leave in recent years have lost out. Naomi Campbell is a model who's been at the top of the fashion industry for more than three decades. When the international makeup artist Pat McGrath signed her up to be the face of her beauty brand, she said of Naomi, she's an inspiration to women, especially women of colour. She demonstrates that anything is possible. I spoke to Naomi this week from her home in LA about her career, racism, the impact of the death of George Floyd, and the part she and the fashion industry as a whole have to play in bringing about change. How did she manage in the early days to get the right kind of makeup for her colouring?

I had my mother's makeup line that she used to wear, that my mother got me a colour that was right kind of close enough for me but I got a lot of um I remember showing up to one job in Italy and the basically the makeup artist said to me oh we didn't know you were black and he said he didn't have the foundation for me and he therefore had to mix some colors that he had of foundations to try and make up my color and that consisted of a lot of gray and I remember when that cover came out I just cried because it really for me was I wanted so much to be on the cover of this publication. It was Italian Vogue actually but I didn't want to be grey. You know I went through that for many many years. I think Pat was one of really very few black makeup artists you've worked with

throughout your career. I can count on one hand how many makeup artists I've worked with of colour in 34 years. So what difference did it make to your confidence in your look to have someone who just got it? Well, I'm not saying because I've worked with the most incredible makeup artist in the world, and Pat McLaughlin is one of those makeup artists. And I was lucky and blessed enough to be able to but what was great is I just could sit in the chair and close my eyes and get my makeup done and know that I was going to come out looking

myself or looking like the right color skin or not having to worry at all which you know it's based on trust you know and bonding with the other person so I had that with Pat I also had that with Francois and ours that both took the time to really look at my skin and say, OK, we're going to make a colour for you. Because they knew during the late 80s, early 90s, it was just impossible. How easy was it in your early days as you began to become a real success to travel around, to be accepted as a model? How much racism did you encounter? I encountered racism from school, which we all go through, but I dealt with it. I was raised to be proud of the colour of my skin and I would not be bullied, even in school. And I mean, the thing that I felt that I had to fight for was a lot of people in the beginning

of my career wanted to make me look like try to put me in a maid's outfit try to put me as like stereotype with dreadlocks and you know a hat they wanted to make me, they were, not all, not all, but there were some jobs that tried to dress me in this way. And that's where it came of me saying, no, I will not be dressed like this. I'm not a gimmick. And opening my mouth, then you get called difficult. So that's why I've never really bothered or to feel bothered why I was given a label because I opened my mouth. Why should I accept that when I could see my white counterparts look glamorous and beautiful and gorgeous in the magazines? Why did I have to be like dressed in a stereotypical way?

So I spoke up about it. I've never kept silent about it. Anna Wintour apologised last week for giving too little space to black people at Vogue. I'm not commenting on what Anna Wintour said because I didn't get to read the whole letter. So I don't want to comment on what I don't know. But I feel that in general in the fashion industry that we have not had the seat at the table that we deserved.

It's not just a habit when there are hiccups and not just having us for diversity boards. We are capable of being across the board and should have that seat at the table. And that's the insult. Have you still not got equal pay across the board? It took me decades to get equal pay. Took me decades to get it.

I'm not complaining. I'm just stating a fact. I mean, I'm going to be quite honest. To see the girls out there working so hard, the professional models today, and then you get to see these Instagram girls who don't care about our business, who slam doing fashion shows, which fashion shows has bought and helped many girls by their mothers and themselves, their homes, then if you don't care about the business, then don't be in it. Because it's obviously your privilege in another way. But this business, for those who are really

true fashion models, they should be paid the same. It shouldn't have to be that they're paid separately because they have numbers of followers. It's ridiculous. It doesn't define who they are as a profession in their profession and how professional they are and how hard they work. I hope that all changes. What role does the professional fashion and beauty industry have, would you say, in bringing about change, both here in the UK and in the US? I mean, everybody is talking about racism since the death of George Floyd. What contribution can your industry make to really bringing about change? I feel it's as I said just before giving the seat giving the same equal opportunities Bethann and I started the diversity coalition together and we we've done rounds in our business of speaking to designers. And yes, that did change and it got better.

I've always said for many, many, many years, we are not a trend. I feel all that I'm seeing now and reading now, it's wonderful that everyone's finally speaking out. But as everyone will know, it's not new for me to say what I'm saying to you now. They've heard me say it before. I don't want to have been in this business for this long and have not made it easier for the next generation. That would really break my heart.

I know you appear on the catwalk sometimes with children of your friends how do they respond to the great Naomi Campbell they're so sweet that's funny but it's it's they're sweet normally I don't tell people when I'm going to do a show I mean just it's just me the way I am so I like it to be kept quiet and then I just appear and do my thing and I'm out. But backstage is so sweet because when I get off the catwalk and I come back around to join the lineup, I always come off in there clapping like Kaya, Cindy's daughter, and then my surrogate baby daughter, Adut, that I love, and I call her my daughter, and Adan, Katusha's daughter.

And it's really, it made me the first time it happened. It was, I kind of was very emotional about it because, you know, it's just like doing a 360. I worked with their mothers and then I get to walk with their daughters and I'm just like, and I'm very honored to be walking with their daughters honored that the designer thought that I could still do that so um it's a very happy feeling emotional one but um blessed to be able to work with the next young generation didn't know that I would be able to do that. And that they're not too frightened to

maybe not be quite as good as you? Why would you say the word frightened is just a catwalk? Is it not at all frightening, the catwalk? I think any type of appearance of live brings nerves for anyone. Everyone doesn't realise when I walk, I'm nervous. I try to use my nerves to get over my fear and doing what I need to do. But them frightened of me? No, they know me. As I said, they know they can approach me. It's not always in work. I see them outside of work. Are you telling me that you're still nervous when you're on the catwalk after all this time? I get correct.

I do. And I feel the day that I don't feel nervous is the day that I will not be on the catwalk. Naomi Campbell, who's a member of the Diversity Coalition, a group founded by Bethann Hardison, a former model and casting agent who advocates equality in the modelling industry. And we had an email from Joy who said,

Naomi is inclined to generate a very negative press into which many people buy. Since the Black Lives Matter campaign in England this summer, as well as Brexit and Meghan, I truly see how I believe it is in England for many, many of its black citizens. And it is tremendously sad. Naomi is a passionate but direct speaker who manages to clearly assert what she's saying. Often certain cultures deal with this type of conversation less well.

But to me, she's simply setting the record straight. saying, often certain cultures deal with this type of conversation less well. But to me, she's simply setting the record straight. Now, the sharing of childcare and housework between men and women has become something of a hot topic during this period of lockdown. On the one hand, you see headlines like back to the 50s as childcare left up to women. Then in advance of Father's Day, we see the Fatherhood Institute claims COVID-19 has led to a dramatic 58% increase in unpaid childcare being undertaken by men. Could we be facing a revolution in equality in the home or are we going backwards? In early April we asked you to become involved in research into how lockdown is affecting families with the University of Sussex. Well they now have their first results. Marianne Stevenson is the director of the UK

Women's Budget Group. Francine Deutsch is Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Education at Mount Holyoke College in the US and the editor of a new book, Creating Equality at Home. And Ali Lacey is the PhD researcher from Sussex. What do the results show so far? What we're looking at in families with a father and a mother is that things have fallen very much down gendered lines in terms of the distribution of domestic labour and childcare in particular. And we've been looking particularly at this notion of the default parent. So which parent is it that takes up the majority of the mental load to have to drop other responsibilities, other commitments, including work, in order to carry out childcare? And this sort of default parent we've seen has been overwhelmingly mothers. 72% of women in our sample said that they were a default parent almost all the time,

and that only dropped to 67% when mothers were trying to work as well. So that sort of indicates that women are really trying to juggle a second shift, really, work, other commitments, and childcare, and it's gone so much down those lines. Mary-Anne, what do you make of these results from Sussex? They're shocking but not entirely surprising. They're in line with a lot of other research that's been done. The Institute for Fiscal Studies, for example, did a big poll of 5,000 heterosexual couples which found that mothers were doing 50% more care than fathers. And one of the things they looked at was uninterrupted work time. So where both partners were working from home, for example,

70% of father's work time was uninterrupted compared to just over half of mother's work time. So it's not just about care separate from work. It's trying to do care while you're also trying to do work. And one of the things in the IFS study that's really stuck with me was that in couples where the mother was still working and the father had been furloughed or lost his job, he was doing half an hour more childcare a day than she was. So where you had the mother not working and the father working, the mother was doing the vast, vast majority of childcare over 11 hours a day. But where the father wasn't working and the mother was working, the father was doing half an hour more childcare a day than

the mother. So working mothers have got a real second shift on their hands at the moment. What did you make about the data from the Office for National Statistics, which the Fatherhood Institute has publicised, seeing evidence of fathers doing the highest proportion of childcare since records began? It's a move in the right direction, isn't it? Two things can simultaneously be true. Fathers are doing more childcare than they've ever done before, but they're still doing less than mothers and mothers are doing vastly more childcare than they've done before. So there is a move in the right direction. And I also think you've got different patterns in different couples. So some couples at the start of this will have sat down, worked out a fair division of labour and maybe sharing childcare in a way that they never

have before. And in other couples, as we can see from the results Ali was discussing, women seem to be doing it all. But what's the potential, Marianne, of equality if men are stepping up their involvement? Well, I think the thing with childcare is we need to do three things. And Diane Elson has talked about this a lot with unpaid care, where she talks about recognising, reducing and redistributing. So recognising is understanding that women are doing more childcare and taking account of that when you're thinking about protections against redundancy and so on. Reducing is about having childcare provision, nurseries and so on. And redistribution is about getting men to do more. And that is really about the policies that we have in place when children are born, you know, looking at our maternity, paternity and parental leave policies. So we don't start from the point at which a couple first become parents with the idea that women are the default parent, that we actually build in equal sharing from the beginning,

because couples who are sharing childcare more equally before the crisis are probably going to be in a better position to negotiate sharing childcare equally during the crisis. Let's bring in Francine here from America. Francine, you study equal sharers, that's the term. How much might COVID-19 bring more of that about? Well, I think what COVID-19 does is create opportunity. It doesn't necessarily change the average, but there's a lot of variability within that average. And I think what's happening is there's a lot of disruption in people's work lives. Now, this creates an opportunity for people to actually redistribute, to sit down and think, okay, now

we're in a totally different situation. Is there a different way we can do things? And yes, it would be better if things had started from the time their children were born and policies were in place to promote that kind of equal sharing. But it is possible for people to change. And when there's such a disruption in the work life, I think it creates an opening. It doesn't ensure it, but it makes it possible. What have you found is essential to enabling a couple to achieve this kind of equality? So several things I think are really important. One is very direct and open communication. Couples who are able to sit down and really talk about what's going on. I think that's very important.

Second, I think people's identities are very tied up with the roles that they have in paid work and at home. Men's identities are often very strongly tied to their sense of being providers or achieving at work, women's being the sole important parent at home. And I think people have to let go of some of those gendered identities in order to be able to share. One of the things I've noticed in my research is women who feel entitled to equality are more likely to get it, but only if they have husbands who are really committed to having a fair division. Marianne, this question of negotiating equality and assuming that you have the right to equality if you're a woman, how easy is it, do you reckon, for women to do that negotiation? Well, it very much depends on the relationship that you're in. thinking about these debates around childcare and work is that we keep them almost completely

separate in our mind from what else we know about relationships and particularly the prevalence of violence and abuse within relationships. So we know that in the UK, one in four women experience domestic violence or abuse. And so when we're thinking about that idea of negotiation, we have to factor into that, that there will be large numbers of women who aren't in a position to negotiate how they share care, who may be frightened to raise this issue as a discussion with their partner. And we talk about these things as though they're almost entirely distinct, but it's the same situation. It's the same couple. In one case, we're thinking about violence and abuse. In another case, we're thinking about sharing childcare. We have to factor in the high level of abuse

that some women experience when we're talking about how easy it is to negotiate. Ali, how much have you found class matters here? To what extent is this a middle class concern? People that fill in questionnaires tend to be largely middle class. That has been a problem with psychological research throughout time. And I think over this period, what has been really worrying me and the people that I'm working with in our research team, the sheer numbers of invisible families, the families that haven't been going to school, that haven't been completing questionnaires,

that have, we expect, been suffering. I think we need to do a lot more work, a lot more to understand unpaid labour, to audit and record and manage and really understand what families are doing so that we can work properly. Because at the moment, I don't think we have that data and we don't understand people's situations perhaps as well as we ought to. So I think that's really important going forward. I mean, our example, like many others, is largely skewed towards similar class families with resources and wealth. I was talking to Ali Lacey, Marianne Stevenson and Professor Francine Deutsch. hardly be a more intriguing title for a book at this time than COVID-19, the pandemic that should never have happened and how to stop the next one. The author is the science journalist Deborah McKenzie who's been writing about emerging diseases for three decades. In early January

this year she began reporting on a cluster of atypical flu cases in Wuhan in China. During lockdown on the border between France and Switzerland, she sat down and wrote her book. Why does she think the pandemic should never have happened? Because we knew this particular group of viruses was a threat. Scientists had been warning about it explicitly since 2013. Scientists in general have been worrying about this threat, you know, the threat of emerging viruses and pandemics for longer than that. But we knew about this specific group of viruses. We knew they were in bats. We could have taken steps to develop a few countermeasures, like reviving the work on vaccines for viruses like SARS that got dropped after SARS was beaten back in 2003. We could have taken steps in China,

people in China could have taken steps to avoid contact between bats and humans. What is it? We knew this was coming. Deborah, what is it about bats that seems to be so significant in so many of these conditions? Well, bats are the only mammal who actually fly and they have extremely high metabolic rates because you need that to fly, takes a lot of energy, and therefore they can't have the normal kinds for various complicated reasons of immune responses to viruses that you and I have and all the other mammals. So what they do is they have these amazing rapid responses where they just shut viruses down and tolerate them. You know, they carry them around.

So a lot of viruses have adapted to live in this situation in bats. And they're particularly virulent for that reason. They've got to be fast to live in a bat. Once it had spread beyond China, the World Health Organization gave out clear guidance as to what would contain the disease.

Why did different governments just cherry-pick the measures they thought, oh yeah, we'll do that. We'll do that. I heard one Italian official say, you know, we just watched what was happening in China. And it just, we never really thought it could happen here. I think there's just disbelief. You know, scientists have been mourning that this sort of thing can happen. But as societies,

we've lost the habit of having out of control infectious disease. We beat most of them long ago. The last time we had a seriously lethal flu pandemic was 1918. We stopped having polio epidemics every summer in the early 50s. I think people just didn't believe this was happening. And, of course, it's pretty economically disruptive to do what you have to do. I mean, China certainly took a cut to its economy by launching the containment efforts that it did. And I think governments that were more focused on the stock market than on medical well-being

might have been a little slower to do that than others. Fears about potential epidemics since the 1990s. Why has nobody been listening to you? Well, the other scientists have been. When this started, a few of my colleagues said, well, Deb, you've been predicting this for years, you know, because I cover infectious disease and I've been talking about the scientists saying this was going to happen. The thing is that in order to respond to a warning like this, you have to really believe that this is going to happen. And like I say, we've kind of lost the habit of being afraid of infectious disease. You also have to make pretty thoroughgoing changes to a society.

We're a complex society. You have to change a lot of things in a coordinated way to really put in good defenses against this. For example, we knew we should have stockpiles of ventilators. Some places did. Toronto, which had a bad SARS epidemic in 2003, had a stockpile of ventilators. California also made one. Interestingly enough, under Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, he made a stockpile of ventilators.

Later on, under the next Democratic governor, they had a bit of a financial crunch in the States, and they got rid of the stockpile because it cost money. And they thought, well, why do we have this? You know, you just have to have follow through. I think after this pandemic, possibly the silver lining will be that we now understand this is real, and we really have to take some serious precautions at all levels. What are you most worried about for the future? Nipah virus. Okay, give me some details.

Yeah, well, what happened was I went to an emerging diseases conference and we were all talking about each scientist had their pet virus that they were talking about enthusiastically. And I asked all of them, look, of all these viruses we're hearing about here, what's the one that scares you? And almost all of them said, oh, Nipah. Nipah's starting to learn to transmit between people and it's got a very high death rate. So people are worried about that. Yeah. Okay. What can we do to prevent it? Well, we could start working on Nipah vaccines. You know, we could set up surveillance. That's the big one.

If we could somehow institute surveillance, it's already set up in this international treaty called the International Health Regulations. We're all supposed to be doing this. Each country is supposed to be watching outbreaks and then telling people if one comes up that's kind of unexpected and might be a bit of a threat. And, you know, we're supposed to be big and honest and open about it. That's the part that seems to be missing now. And then, you know, go in very quickly and try and contain it. That would have certainly slowed down COVID-19. I'm not sure. And the scientists I talked to are not sure we could have stopped it completely because it's a very slippery virus. But what we need to do is watch more carefully

and respond more quickly. If it had happened this time, it would have been a lot better. And, you know, that's what we need to stop things like Nipah, to stop things like the next flu pandemic, that and work on a lot of like vaccines and stuff. Even if we don't have a market to sell those products now, now a company cannot work on a vaccine or a drug if there's no market, because that's just, it's not mean and nasty. It's just the way it's set up. We need to get around that. We need to find ways of developing countermeasures, whether or not the disease is there and already constitutes a market for the product or not. I was talking to Deborah McKenzie. Still to come in today's programme, the self-employment income support scheme and why women who've been on maternity leave have lost out.

And Dictionary Corner's Susie Dent and some of her favourite words. Now, two black British women writers, Bernadine Evaristo and Renée Eddo-Lodge, have topped the UK fiction and non-fiction bestseller charts. It's the first time women of colour have jointly had such phenomenal success. But the hashtag Publishing Paid Me has just shown that in many cases globally, black women were paid smaller advances than their white counterparts. So, might the recognition of these two writers mean there's a real moment of change? Well, Candice Carty-Williams is the author of the best-selling Queenie, which you can listen to on BBC Sounds, and Charmaine Lovegrove is a publisher and the founder of Dialogue Books, part of Little

Brown and Hachette. What was it like for her when she got her first job in publishing? I think something happens to the psyche when you are in a room with no one else who is like you. And so I spent many years in those spaces in my head, and quite literally, and not realising the damage that that was having on me, you know, to not have anybody who looked like me or represented what I

did or stood for. And what about the books that were published whilst you were there, the writers who were chosen, the money they were given? What would you say about that? It reflects what we're seeing today still, smaller advances, not in the case of one really well-known author. But apart from that, it was the same situation, the same attention given. So very little attention given in terms of marketing, publicity and all of these things I recognised were quite unfair. And I never, I mean, I did understand, but I could never quite understand the logical reasoning behind that. I know it must have been very difficult because you did feel alone, but did you challenge this? Yeah. So about a year in, I started the Guardian Fourth Estate Short Story Prize,

which was a really amazing thing and something that's still going. And that was to redress the balance in some way, because I didn't really understand why we weren't even seeing these voices come through and be heard and understood as being part of a literary space. And the hashtag publishing paid me. Were you surprised by what that revealed? I guess not. Not slightly at all, because this is something that I've been in a position to see for such a long time. And now it's kind of just coming to light. And also just, I guess, some of the authors who shared, I'd already known because I'd met them and spoken to them

and I'd been amazed by how much money they'd received for what went on to be a really amazing body of work. So, I mean, Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist was reprinted maybe four or five times in the UK. And the advance was?

I'm going to say, was it less than $10,000, I think? I guess here it was much smaller. Yeah, I mean, the plain fact is, I guess most of us wouldn't have a clue what a reasonable advance for a book would be. What would you say about that, Charmaine? I think it's a really big issue that we have a system called comps, where we look at what books came before and how well they did to work out what we should pay.

If you're a black writer, you don't have comps if you're writing about race and Britain. And, you know, there's not that many people who have been given the space to be able to do that. And then when they're exceptional, like books like Candice or Bernardini Veristo, then with Girl, Woman, Other and with Queenie, then, you know, we're not allowed to really use those as comps because they're considered exceptional. So it's a really challenging situation. But there's also a point of it about author care. And the point with author care is that authors aren't about the money, it's about the knowledge of the process and being left behind and not being led to publication carefully. Of course, writers are often rather delicate, creative flowers. And I say that with immense respect, because writers have brought me more pleasure than just about anybody else on the planet, I should say.

They need nurturing. And somebody like Bernardine Evaristo has been a good writer for a long, long time. But seemingly, Charmaine Little celebrated until recently. I've been a huge fan of Bernadine for the last 20 years. I think she's absolutely exceptional. And as a publisher, I like to follow in the footsteps of her publisher, Simon Prosser, who is at Hamish Hamilton, where it's all about that sort of nurturing. And I'd like to think that my authors, so say, for example, Paul Mendes with Rainbow Milk or Arunasana Koji with Nudibran, you know, some of these authors, I can really nurture them to have long lasting future careers and not just be a one hit wonder or one hit obscurity.

And I think that's really important. Right, which brings us on to the situation where we are at a point where we have this, and it is extraordinary, it's an overused term, but Bernardine Evaristo and René Eddo-Lodge heading both the fiction and nonfiction bestseller charts, first time it's ever happened. Candice, what do you think of this? And who do you believe is buying the books? And does it matter? So I think it's important to say that this conversation wouldn't be happening if it wasn't for, I mean, I wouldn't be on the radio now if it wasn't for George Floyd's murder. So that's sad, you know, just makes me upset that we're here because of that sole incident, which contributes to incidents in the UK and the US and across the world.

And so I find it very hard to celebrate this and I won't celebrate this and I won't publicise my own book or market my own book off the back of. I think it's appropriate. So, yeah, just makes me feel really sad. So, OK, well, Charmaine, go on. I know you want to say something. So I have a book called The Vanishing Half that's being by Brit Bennett. And she didn't have a publisher in the UK with her first book, The Mothers. So I took it on and it's absolutely incredible. It's one of those books that will be on the shelves forever. That she's being published in this moment is an absolute coincidence.

So on adversely, like I can't not publicise her because we've had this set up for over a year and a half. You know, my team, Celeste and Millie have done an absolutely incredible job. But you would say that you do share some of the qualms that Candice expressed there. I'm really angry that black people are still dying, being murdered brutally on the streets in the UK and in the US. And that that's the moment in which we are sort of looking at black voices. You know, I am really angry about that, but I don't want the books that would be coming out anyway to be getting lost. And what we're seeing is that books that were published before are now taking the fall. But there's also there's lots of work that's been done, being done alongside that with new authors.

And that's what we need to sort of highlight, that not all the books that are coming out now are part of a part of the this. I really hate to call it a trend. It's heartbreaking what's's happening it's really difficult for all of us as black people no i mean to call it a trend is obscene and um i absolutely understand why you'd have more than misgivings about saying exactly that but i would like to know from you candice who you think is buying these books and is it the how can i put it is it people who would normally buy books and now realize there's an almighty gap in their knowledge i think it's the people who have seen these books and they've maybe thought it's that these books are not for them um and now in this movement in this time um in this time that seems

to be something of a revolution white people are trying to engage in in in these books and engage in how to be supportive and i've seen that a lot on social media i've seen lots of people asking how do i support how do i engage how do i learn more and this is the way that they're doing this and so it's no surprise that rainy edo lodges book um why i'm no longer talking to white people about race which addresses this exact thing is number one in the non-fiction paperback charts, because it's people trying to learn. Candice Cardew-Williams and Charmaine Lovegrove were talking to Jane. A group called Pregnant Then Screwed is threatening the Chancellor of the Exchequer

with legal action, claiming he's employed indirect sex discrimination in the allocation of payments under the self-employment income support scheme to women who've taken maternity leave between April 2016 and March 2019. What effect is the allocation of funds having on them? Alex Lloyd is a freelance journalist and copywriter who has two young sons. Jolie Brearley is the founder of Pregnant Then Screwed. How is the scheme supposed to work? The scheme takes a calculation over the last three years of your average earnings and then you are given a payment based on those average earnings. The problem is they don't exempt periods of maternity leave. So if you've had one child in that time, then your grant will be reduced by

about a third. If you've taken two periods of maternity leave in that time, it'll be reduced by about two thirds. The government has the data which shows which self-employed women have accessed the maternity allowance scheme in the last three years. That data is actually published on their own website, which is how we know that 75,000 women are directly affected by this. But what about these schemes in place which people hopefully should be able to access that she mentioned? She's talking about universal credit, which is 90 pounds a week that's not going to help a single mum with two children survive and pay their rent and pay their food bills these women deserve this payment Rishi Sunak's response when questioned on it was that everybody has ups and downs in earnings and

he correlated this to sick leave which is frankly insulting giving birth and raising the next generation is not an illness it is critical work for the well-functioning of our society so these women need the payments that they deserve sorry to jump in there but alex what effect has having taken maternity leave had on your claim for support um well I took maternity leave with my first son in 2016 straddling into 2017 which is the first year of where they calculate it so I only worked the last two months of that financial year as self-employed and I earned a very small amount of money the following two years I was back to full strength I was working four to five days a week and earning significantly more so when they averaged it it brought my total right down and I worked out that had they based it on two the two full years of trading I would have got nearly 50 percent more than what I actually

received because of the you know the tiny amount in that first year. And when you've been paying quite a lot of tax, the national insurance, and you feel really hard done by because we're taxpayers, we work hard, we do really unsocial hours. I mean, when you're self employed, if you don't work, you don't get paid. So you often sit in bed, you know, the cold typing away on the laptop to hit a deadline. And it really sticks in your throat when you hear the Chancellor saying no one's going to be left behind but as a mum you were doing really important work raising a baby and you're penalised for it. Julie what have you heard from other women who've been in contact with you how has it affected them?

I mean we've had some heartbreaking letters from women for whom this drop in income is not just inconvenient, it's absolutely infuriating. And for some, it means the difference between paying their rent, putting food on the table. You know, some of them are worried about losing their homes. Just the other day, I heard from a single mum who is a musician and her regular freelance gig with the West End show disappeared overnight. And she will get less than a third of what her male colleagues will receive just because she took maternity leave. And we already know that the gender pay gap amongst the self-employed is 43%. Inevitably, this is only going to increase that gender pay gap and increase child poverty because these are vulnerable new mums.

So Alex, what are you actually getting in your pocket now? I worked out that if I'd received the amount based on the two years, I'd probably get about £6,000, which is to cover three months of lost earnings. But I'm actually receiving nearer to £3,000. So it's a good amount of money, and I'm very lucky to get something, but I think it's the inequality and the fact that you are still allowed to do some work if you can get it. And I've managed to pick up bits and pieces.

I have two children at home because there's been no childcare, but I've fitted it around them and around my husband's job. But we just don't know what the future holds. I work in publishing, copywriting, and we don't know. We keep being told that the economy is tanking and we don't know if their work will still be there in six months' time. So everyone's tightening their belts and every penny counts. I've spoken to lots of women in the same boat and I own fairly good money. But I know women who run a baby groups

and they're all closed indefinitely so they have no idea when you know they'll be getting any income the one woman told me she her grant was going to amount to one month of pay but it's supposed to cover six so that's a significant drop. Jolie how confident are you that you can claim that this is indirect sex discrimination? It's so clear that it is. It's not only indirect sex discrimination, it's a breach of the public sector equality duty. The government has a responsibility to assess their schemes to ensure that they don't discriminate and quite clearly they have not done this here and if we just allow them to get away with it without scrutiny then we open the door to women and minority groups facing government sanctioned discrimination in the future. This is

about defending our rights and showing the government that they cannot ride roughshod over the Equalities Act. Let me just tell you what someone from the Treasury said to us. Our self-employment income support scheme, which has been extended, is one of the most generous in the world and has helped more than 2.6 million people so far. We understand the challenges for new parents who are self-employed. The scheme already supports people who saw a dip in profits last year due to taking maternity leave by calculating the grant on a three-year average of profits. This ensures what they receive better reflects their usual income.

What do you make of that? It's just absolute nonsense. They're trying to cover up the fact that they have made a botch up of this scheme, but they've had plenty of opportunity to rectify it. They've just announced a new tranche of the scheme and they haven't rectified the problem. I mean, the issue really is where are all the women, Jenny? Where are all the women sat around that table making these decisions and saying you need to consider different groups in these schemes they're just you know they're ignoring the problem and we're not standing for it. Jolie I know you're a very small charity how are you going to afford a legal process?

We are a tiny charity there are only two paid members of staff everybody else is volunteer we are very confident we're going to win and if win, it will not cost us any money to do this. Of course, it is a big risk for us to take on this case, but it is absolutely worth it. If we do not defend the rights of these women right now, then when are we going to? So we believe we'll be successful. And Alex, just just a final question to you. How are you and your your family, your two little boys and your husband, managing financially? It's not just sort of me.

It's my husband's company in force to pay cut globally when this happened for three months. So he's earning less. I mean, we're one of the lucky ones. We have some savings. We have professional jobs, so we earn a bit more anyway. We have families that will help us out. But I just worry about if we don't take a stand on this what happens to the single mums the low earners you know women aren't

always self-employed through choice it's often circumstance and it's often because of our gender and the inequalities that exist when once you have a baby I felt it was the first time for me that I really felt unequal and how women were treated differently to men. And I'm the self-employed one. I'm the one that fits around the kids because my husband earns more than me. And I can't do anything about that. But hopefully I can do something about this clear discrimination in this government policy. Alex Lloyd and Jolie Brearley.

And Louise emailed, I'm a self-employed freelance copywriter and took maternity leave from September 2017 to September 2018 to care for my son Toby. Because this maternity leave period spans two of the financial years which HMRC are using to calculate my average earnings, this means only one of the years they use actually reflects my real pay. I have calculated I'm almost £2,000 out of pocket on this basis, which is huge as a freelance. Susie Dent is a lexicographer, etymologist and linguist. She's appeared in Dictionary Corner on Channel 4's Countdown since 1992 and can also be seen on 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, or Catsdown as she calls it. She's also one of the hosts of the podcast Something Rhymes with Purple, together with Giles Brandreth.

She took Jane back to those early Dictionary Corner days. I first sat in the corner, absolutely terrified, in 1992. But there were quite a few of us at that point. So we rotated in the corner. And I'm sure there are some people who long for those days when they don't have to see me every day. Oh, but you've obviously made it your own. How did you do that? Well, it wasn't my decision, decision I have to say I was on with Richard Whiteley and Carol Vorderman and they very much wanted to create a sort of full-time team so I genuinely I'm not being modest here I was there at the right time and it was perfect for me I had a young child and it meant I could be at home a little bit more so it worked out well. All right

now you are someone who you just love words and I think I remember as a kid if I couldn't read anything else I'd be reading the back of the cornflakes packet and that was also you wasn't it really? I'm so glad you said that because people think I'm very weird when I start reading the label on a keg. I'm exceptionally weird so we're both weird. Go on. One of my earliest memories is reading what must have been the most boring ingredients on a shampoo bottle in the bath but also looking at the different scripts saying that one of them may may have been Cyrillic or Arabic and just thinking wow I really want to decode that and so words found me pretty early on and then you know vocabulary books were my literature of

choice literally I would just dive into them and it wasn't for any particular end in mind. I just got lost in that world. And were you a linguist? Yes. So early on, somebody at school, you were thought of as being good at languages. I think so. I think I just found German, which was my first love and remains one of my biggest passions. I think I found that at exactly the right time I had a brilliant teacher I'm not a very logical person actually but

everything was sort of written down which I think I've realized the written word for me is very important I find immersion in just oral language quite hard unless I can actually see things in print and and yes and I was you know other subjects were didn't like me quite so much and and so that that became my world. So French and German is what I did for a long time. But why German? Oh, Jane, it's just the most beautiful language in the world. And I know that flies in the face of, you know, every general assumption about the language.

But it's so lyrical. It's so deep. I think the writer Goethe said that French was like a park and English was of course like a beautiful country garden but German was this dense forest that you just get lost in and as I'm a dendrophile tree lover that just kind of fits me perfectly because it's just I don't really know where to start I mean it's vocabulary is amongst the richest in the world and also it's like lego isn't it you can just build up linguistic pylons for for um german and it's it all sounds perfect and makes sense to me so english i actually

discovered quite late in the day only when i was working at oxford university press um and and then started looking into english etymology and the origins of words and and then again i got lost so for the the age-old row about how standards are they're falling everybody's language is everybody's speaking in a horrible way and I don't like it and I can't bear it this has been going on for as long as we've all been speaking and writing presumably. Yes every single age has thought that the golden age of English was in the past so when Shakespeare was coming up with words like laughable, he was laughed at because everyone said,

no, no, it should be laugh-attable, what you're talking about. And Keats loved to create verbs out of nouns, something we hate today to this, you know, just all the time we're saying this is a horrible American supersizing. But we've always, always done it. And by the way way everything that we tend to lay at the feet of North America actually probably was ours to begin with of course Shakespeare used honor without the u and he used i z e quite often or at least his compositors did

and um yeah just just so many things that we blame the Americans on we used to call autumn fall we used to call pavement sidewalks. Hang on a second. Did we? We called autumn fall. I love that because people are going to hate me by the end of this interview, but it used to be the fall of the leaf and the spring was the spring of the leaf, which I think is quite poetic.

And then the Normans, of course, changed all that. And we had 1066 and all this French came flooding in and we took on the French Lausanne or our kind of Anglo-Norman hybrids of it and yeah and then and that's why we got autumn but we used to call it fall. Do women and men differ in the way they use language or throw it out there what would you say about that? Yes I think so certainly the language surrounding men and women is has been totally different I mean if you just look through a historical dictionary, you'll prove to yourself that our words are entirely predicated on male power.

So we're often the subject of the male gaze or the subordinates. If you think about a governor, that's a man with a kind of dominion, whereas a governess is someone of low social status who looks after children. You know, you've got bachelor and spinster bachelor's quite cool the spinster had to spin for a living because she had no man to help her um you know earn money you've got courtier and courtesan master and mistress i mean you know it goes all the way back and actually during your discussion i was thinking about um i'd seen both sides of the argument actually have been called you know hysterical and that actually ironically it goes back to the Greek for womb which also gave us hysterectomy because hysteria

has been put down to a woman's menstrual cycle and you know disturbance of the uterus so the kind of move to reinterpret the language surrounding all of this I think language is actually probably struggling to keep up but it's you important that it does. Anyone who loves words, and I think a lot of people will come into that category if they're regular Radio 4 listeners, I do recommend the podcast you do with Giles Brandreth, which is Something Rhymes with Purple. Oh, thank you.

I was listening to an episode yesterday which was about cabby language. I don't even remember that. But can you just remind the listeners what black cab drivers call Broadcasting House? Oh, Broadcasting House. Now, that is either the tripe shop or the gasworks. I think it's the tripe shop.

It's the tripe shop. Yes. I had some great times sitting in the back of a cab listening to all of these, including with a couple of the very few women drivers, actually, of black cabs and how they'd sort of experienced what was exclusively a man's world for a very long time. I love their vocabulary you

know bilker is somebody who runs off without paying they have quite a lot of those um a cock and hen is a man and woman in the back of the cab um the gas works actually as a house as a parliament i think but they have this this tribal lexicon that nobody else can penetrate and that's the whole idea of it um and it's banter but it's also steeped in history it's brilliant suzy dent was talking to jane and carol said in an email how great to hear suzy on the program today always fascinating as a writer i love words too and created pasta e peroli evenings with friends at my home we meet with word origins in a theme to discuss over a drink, followed by a pasta supper. This is now in its fourth year and it's a real joy, this discovery of words which have perhaps also changed in their meaning over the centuries.

We've learned a lot and continue to meet online at present, but the day will soon come to return to my home. You might like to suggest this idea to listeners and it's a cheap evening too. Words, pasta, salad, wine. That's it. Keep the group small is my advice. We are four. Now next week Radio 4 will launch Rethinkers, a series of essays and discussions across BBC Radio

that ask how the world might change after the pandemic. We begin on Monday with an essay from the Sterling Prize winning architect Amanda Levitt, asking how we could design the world around us differently. Do we want different things from our homes after being stuck inside for so long? How will more remote working change what we want from our workplace or office space? And how can we start to build for better societies?

Do let us know your thoughts and ideas through the Woman's Hour website or, of course, on Twitter. Join Jane then on Monday morning from me for today. Enjoy 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 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.