Woman's Hour - Periods, Caroline Criado Perez, Simran Kaur, Cook the Perfect... with Tom Kerridge

Episode Date: March 2, 2019

A film about the stigma of menstruation in rural India has just won an Oscar – we hear from three British Asian women about the stigma in the UK. Psychologist Dr Sunny Kleo, journalist Poorna Bell and the writer Sonal Sachdev Patel. The world has been built by men, for men and, according to Caroline Criado Perez author of 'Invisible Women', we’ve struggled to do anything about it because we’ve been using biased data that excludes women. She explains why and what she thinks we can do about it.Seventeen year old national youth champion boxer Simran Kaur has just won her her fifth consecutive National ABA crown. What does she love about the sport? Elli Radinger gave up her legal career to study wolves. She's written a new book 'The Wisdom of Wolves'. She tells us about the wolves she’s encountered and why she-wolves make the key decisions in the pack. Getting a business started if you’re a black, Asian or minority ethnic woman – how difficult is it to find investment? Charmaine Hayden, senior partner at GOODsoil Venture Capital and Mariam Jimoh, founder of Women in the City Afro-Caribbean Network discuss. A new play 'The Son' is about a teenage boy whose parents have separated and he is skipping school, self-harming and is depressed. How accurate a reflection is the play of a troubled teenager? We speak to the actress Amanda Abbington who plays the boy's mother and to Dr Bernadka Dubicka, Chair of the Faculty of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry from the Royal College of Psychiatrists. The Michelin starred chef Tom Kerridge who famously lost 12 stones - Cooks the Perfect Roasted Winter Sprout Curry.The violinist Madeleine Mitchell found some of the unpublished work of Welsh composer Grace Williams who died in 1977 - why has she put together an album of her Chamber Music?Presented by Jenni Murray Producer: Dianne McGregor

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

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Good afternoon. In today's Weekend Woman's Hour, a new play called The Sun and a playwright who's keen for parents to recognise the symptoms of distress in an adolescent child. The young boxer who became a champion despite her family's objections to her sport and the woman who gave up a legal career to travel the world studying and apparently kissing wolves. It's a kind of like a greeting and acceptance from a wolf pack if they lick your face and that's what they did. The alpha wolf kissed me and then I was accepted by the pack and then I could work with them. A film about the taboo of menstruation in rural India has just won an Oscar. We hear from three

British Asian women about the stigma in the UK. Getting a business started if you're a black, Asian or minority ethnic woman, how difficult is it to find investment? The Michelin-starred chef Tom Kerridge, who famously lost 12 stones, cooks the perfect roasted winter sprout curry. And the violinist Madeleine Mitchell plays

previously unpublished music by the Welsh composer Grace Williams. Caroline Criado-Perez has become something of a feminist hero. She led the campaigns to get Jane Austen on the £10 note, Millicent Garrett-Fawcett into Parliament Square, and Twitter to revise its procedures for dealing with abuse. Her latest publication is a somewhat hefty tome called Invisible Women Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men.

What does she mean by data bias? Essentially that the vast majority of data, the vast majority of information that we have in the world is based on the male body, the male lifestyle. And that we just aren't collecting data on women. And that goes from women's travel patterns to how women have heart attacks to databases that algorithms are trained on to the economy, you know, how we measure the economy, not counting in women's unpaid work. It's just sort of in every sort of area of life that you can think of, the way things have been designed have been designed on what men need rather than what women need. So what do you reckon is behind it? Is it conspiracy or cock-up?

Is it designed to leave women out or are we just forgotten about? You know, I can't look inside the head of the person who decided to design, I don't know, the phone that's too big for my hand. But in general, I would suggest that it is not conspiracy. It is just simply a product of the way that we think as a culture, as a society, and that is to default to the male. There is so much evidence showing that when people hear gender neutral terms like person, they think of a man, you know, that's what's at the heart of it. No one's sort of deliberately setting out to make sure that women are less likely to have their heart attacks diagnosed. No one is deliberately setting up to have women be more likely to die if they're in a

car crash. It's just that we are so used to thinking of a man when we think of a human, that we kind of forget to think about women unless we specifically mention them. Let's look at some of those specific examples then. Why is it that women tend to have more serious injuries in a car crash? Well it's basically because car safety has been designed around the male body. So for decades the car crash test dummy, the most common one that was used, was based around the 50th percentile male and that is too heavy and too tall and has the wrong muscle distribution and all sorts of ways in which female bodies differ from male bodies and as a result all the things from seat belts to how firm the seats are to where the pedals are so women have to sit you

know quote unquote too far forward in order to be able to reach the pedals and see over the steering wheel and as a result if they're involved in a car crash they're more likely to be able to reach the pedals and see over the steering wheel. And as a result, if they're involved in a car crash, they're more likely to be injured, 47% more likely to be seriously injured and 17% more likely to die. There has been in recent years a sort of acknowledgement that women exist and women travel in cars as well. And so a quote unquote female dummy has been designed, but it's basically just a scaled down male dummy. And it's not even used in the vast majority of the regulatory tests anyway. In the EU, the only test it is used in is in the passenger seat. So there's just not really any data at all on whether or not female drivers are safe, for example. Now, the algorithms raise their heads inevitably. How does technology disadvantage women?

Oh, Jenny, we need a whole programme to talk about that. It again comes down to the data gap, that algorithms are being trained on databases that are heavily skewed towards male data. So, for example, voice recognition software has been trained on voice corpora which are 70% male and as a result these voice recognition devices don't recognize women's voices so women have to lower their voices for example to be understood by their car and I mean I had had that with my mum you know

she was driving trying to get her car software to call her sister I suggested because I it was funny because I'd just been researching that bit. So I said, why don't you try lowering your voice? And it worked first time. Everyone knows about how Apple designed a quote-unquote comprehensive health tracking system that didn't include tracking for a period, but did include tracking for all-important copper intake,

which everyone needs to know about. You know, the examples from the tech world are legion. And I think that it's largely because the workforce is so heavily skewed towards male. And this comes back towards the idea of cock up. It's not a conspiracy. It's just men don't really tend to have periods. So they're not going to need to count them. Now, we have known some of what you write about for really a very long time. I mean, for example, that women don't experience the same symptoms as men when they're having a heart attack. How come that info is still being missed after such a long time? Yeah, that one is extremely frustrating. And it does sort of make you feel a

bit like maybe not that there's a conspiracy but there's just a lack of care it's not just a failure to think it's just a failure to care almost um and the excuses that you get in the medical world are basically well and actually everywhere is that women are just too complicated to measure so for transport women have a more complicated way of traveling and so they don't want to measure that. And women have more complicated bodies. Please be aware I'm using square quotes very, very heavily here because we have menstrual cycles. And therefore, you have to you can't just sort of test at one point during the month. You have to test at different points during the month.

And lots of researchers use this as an excuse. Oh, it would be too expensive. Well, but the reality is that those bodies are going to be taking these drugs. And those drugs are going to interact with the menstrual cycle. And so you're going to have to deal with that. You can't just exclude women. I mean, you can and that's what people have been doing. And that's why women are more likely to suffer adverse side effects from drugs, drugs not work for them. Sometimes during a woman's period, you know, a drug could be too strong the dose and then later on it could be too weak. There's one in particular that is meant to prevent a particular kind of heart attack.

And at a certain point in a woman's menstrual cycle, cycle is more likely to actually trigger that kind of heart attack. So that's the kind of thing that will happen if you refuse to test in women. Now, I know you've had a lot of criticism, particularly on Twitter. And I wondered, why do you suppose so many men don't seem to recognise the existence of a gender data gap, which you have researched, I think, for three years? Yes. I mean, I think that it's, again, a case of not seeing it. If you don't experience it, you don't know about it. And I think that one of the examples, a case of not seeing it. If you don't experience it, you don't know about it. And I think that one of the examples that I sort of used to highlight how this is a case of if you don't experience something, you don't know about it. It was Sheryl Sandberg in her book Lean In talks about how she became pregnant when she was working at Google and she was struggling to walk across the car park.

And she went to the head of Google because she was in a position to be able to do that and said, you need to put in pregnancy parking. And the head of Google said, yes, of course, it had never occurred to me. And she said she felt bad that it hadn't occurred to her until she got pregnant. But actually, the fact that both of them hadn't thought about it just really exemplifies the whole point. You need to have diversity of representation in positions of power so that everyone else can benefit from the experiences that we all share. I was talking to Caroline Criado-Perez and Watch the Grass Grow tweeted us, I have never managed to get my car to respond to my voice and make a phone call. But now I know all I have to do is talk like a man with a deep voice. In one sense, irritating, but if it works, I will be pleased to get it to

function. The critics universally have raved about a new play which opened at the Kiln in North London. It's called The Sun, and it's the third in a trilogy about family life by the French playwright Florian Zeller. And whilst it's beautifully directed and performed, it's not an easy play to experience. The son is an adolescent, his parents have separated, his father has a new relationship and a new baby, and the boy, it's discovered, has been skipping school, self-harming, and is deeply depressed. How accurate a reflection is the play of a dangerously troubled teenager? Well, Dr Bernadke Dubicka is Chair of the Faculty of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry from the Royal College of Psychiatrists and joined us from Salford.

Amanda Abbingdon plays the boy's mother. What's it like to play the mother night after night? You know, theatre as an actress is not therapy so you're telling a story and so we try not to take it off stage but yes it's hard going but I think it's a play that needs to be seen certainly. Bernadka I know you haven't seen the play but knowing what you know about the play, where a child is not going to school, is not seeing friends, is being

destructive, throwing things around, is self-harming. How accurately would you say the play portrays a child's growing despair? I'm really struck by how much it resonated with me and hearing the stories of so many young people over the years.

The young people I've seen in the units where I've worked have had particularly troubled backgrounds and difficult experiences, but most young people will come through these difficult transitions of parental divorce and separation, and they'll be fine and they'll do OK. But some young people, depending on their circumstances, may struggle like the boy in this play. Amanda, the mother's response to his expression of suicidal thoughts, which he does say, I want it to end.

Her response is, oh, you should never say that. You know, you have your whole life in front of you. How true do you reckon that is of what the average mother would say? I was thinking because I've got a 13-year-old son and a 10-year-old daughter. And I was thinking, you know, I just want them to be happy. And so the idea of them being anything other than happy just makes me feel like I've been a redundant parent or I can't reach out to them. So I think, you know, there is that kind of suppression of, like, no, you have to be OK. You have to be OK.

I don't think she has the coping skills to help him. And we talked about whether she suffers from depression as well, because it is a kind of... One third of depression is hereditary, apparently. So we talked about whether she's actually... Her coping mechanisms aren't working, and so the only thing she can do is say, I love you, please don't say that to me, you're going to be fine,

because that's the only way she can really cope with it. But she's also very unhappy because she feels she's been betrayed by her husband. Yeah, I think she's quite lost. She's a lost character and she just wants to be with her son and when her son moves out, she feels like she doesn't have anything left. And I think that spirals her a bit, and she finds it very difficult. She starts to find her life very difficult and challenging. Bernadka, as Amanda says, the boy goes from his mother's home to his father,

where his father is living with his new wife and little baby. And there is a strong indication, I felt in the play, that his despair is a result of the break-up of his family. How common is it for a teenager to be so distressed by divorce? I think it depends very much on the individual circumstances. From what I hear, what we don't know in the play is what happened in his early life, so we don't know anything about his development.

We don't know about vulnerability factors, for example. Was he always a very anxious child? We don't know what his factors, for example. Was he always a very anxious child? We don't know what his parents' relationship was like in the early years. What was he exposed to? Was there a lot of trauma? So it very much depends on what's happened throughout a child's lifetime. And we would ask about that in detail as psychiatrists. But can I just pick up on a really important point that Amanda made? It's so, so important that we think about what's going on for parents as well. I use the same analogy, for example, when you're sitting on the plane, they talk about making sure the parent puts the oxygen mask on first and then looks after their child. And it's the same with

depression. If the parent's struggling, if they're not coping, they really need to get help for themselves. Otherwise, they're not in a place where they can help their child. And the second point to make from what Amanda was saying was that often it is difficult for people to hear what their children are saying. Sometimes it's hard for professionals, and it's really important that we do listen to what's going on for them. We ask them about self-harm, and ultimately if they're self-harming, we do need to ask them have they thought about taking their lives as well, because there's no evidence to show that that actually distresses a child,

but it can really help them to open up and talk about their feelings. And Bernadka, the father, when he realises his son is still not going to school, just loses it with him and screams at him and says, you know, you have to go to school. How absolutely wrong is that? If you discover your child is having those kind of problems, you don't shout, you don't scream, you don't push? Obviously, it's not a good thing to do. However, I guess you can understand his frustration and despair as well.

And, you know, parents live day in, day out with the feelings they're struggling with, but also feeling desperate and unable to help their children. And sometimes they do explode in those sorts of ways. And that's obviously not helpful, but it's important to move on from that. And it's important they seek professional help so professionals can help them to negotiate their feelings and learn how to best help the young person.

And we do see that response sometimes when young people serve harm. Parents are so desperate and so upset and traumatised, their first response is often anger, and obviously that's not a helpful response. So the best thing that parents can do is just listen and ask and find out why this is happening and then seek help. The playwright, Bernadke, has said that he wants people to question what young people might be going through as a result of seeing this play.

And you have to wonder, you know, when we talk about the mental health of young people so much now is it still common to just think oh they'll be all right let them cope on their own i think it's becoming less so but certainly you know everybody used to talk about it's the hormones the teenage hormones it's normal to feel depressed when you're a teenager and certainly it's absolutely the normal experience of part of human life for all of us to have bad days when we feel fed up and irritable but that's a very different thing to being depressed that takes over your life impacts

on everything going on around you so it's really important to make that distinction and unfortunately as we know from numerous surveys that there does seem a lot of evidence now that depression is on the rise in our young people, but so is self-harm, particularly in older adolescent girls. We've had an absolute escalation of self-harm in older teenage girls, but for boys, they're still at greatest risk of completed suicide,

although thankfully that's still a rare event. Amanda, what are you hoping, as you perform this play night after night, that the slightly shattered audience sitting in front of you is taking away from it. I think people coming to see this play leave feeling that they want to go home

and hug their children tighter and make sure that this doesn't happen in their family. I was talking to Amanda Abington and Dr Bernadke Dubicka and there are links on the Woman's Hour website where you can ask for help and advice. And the song continues at the Kiln Theatre in North London until Saturday 6th April. Remember the days when boxing was considered an unsuitable sport for a woman? Well, not anymore.

Simran Kaur is 17 and a boxer, andurprisingly at first her family did not approve of her choice of sport and then she became the national youth champion and they became her greatest fans. She's now won for the fifth time. I box at 51 kilo, flyweight. Flyweight, okay. So how did you start Simran? I mean, surely you tell me what your family make of it, you can get onto that in a minute. But what was your first trip to a boxing gym like and how did it come about? So like before boxing, I didn't really do much. So me and my brother, we tried out different sports. We did football, gymnastics. I just didn't like any of it. And then like one he was like, oh, let's just go to a boxing gym. So we went. And we didn't go there thinking,

oh, we'll get this far, we'll go this, we'll do that. We just went there for fun, and then, no, we just love it. To many people, and particularly for young women, that would have seemed like a really alien environment, but you took to it straight away, did you? Yeah, but my family didn't really like it, like my mum and my nan, they didn't want me to do it. So my brother had to, like, sneak me off.

I've got to be honest, I might be with... Well, on paper, I might have been with your mum and your nan. I might worry a bit about my daughter doing that. How do you calm them down and stop them worrying? Yeah, so they didn't come to my first fight, but once they came and then they saw me one day, like, crying with tears, like, happy, and, like, now they love coming to my first fight, but once they came and then they saw me one day crying with tears, happy. Now they love coming to my fights. They always come to every single one.

Do they? And where do they sit? They don't sit right at the front. No? Yeah, no. And in the videos you can hear my mum screaming. But they sit in the middle and then afterwards when I go up to them and I win and show them my trophy, they're always crying. What's next for you? Because, well, I don't want to heap pressure on, but the Olympics are next year.

Do you fancy that? Yeah, that's the goal. So I have GB Championships in May, which is against Scotland and Wales, and then in September I have European Championships again. I've been there before. And then hopefully I have I have European Championships again. I've been there before. Yeah. And then hopefully I have a GB assessment soon.

So if I do good there, I should get on the GB team. And then hopefully that's the road to the Olympics. Be honest, when you're last thing at night, when you're lying there in bed, are you already having those Olympic dreams? Yeah, that's all I think about. That's all I want from boxing is the Olympics. Yeah, why is it so... I can understand, I guess, but is it just the appeal of the...

Well, you've watched Nicola Adams and you just think, oh, that could be me with the gold medal sometime. Yeah, her exactly. Like, she's been to two Olympics, won two golds. That's what I want to do. That's my dream. Just make sure your mum's not on the front row.

Yeah. Because that would be too much for her and for you I suspect well um Simran we're going to keep an eye on you and follow your progress if that's all right um it sounds like you're really on the road to a lot of success so um in terms of fitness what would you say about the difference between getting fit for a boxing for a fight and getting fit for I don't for a fight, and getting fit for, I don't know, for the gymnastics that you mentioned earlier? I think it's completely different

because for boxing, you're getting punched in the face. And, like, I have to wake up at six to go for a run, and then I go home and go sleep. And then I have to train again at, like, two o'clock, and then I rest, and then I have to train again in the two o'clock and then I rest and I have to train again in the evening. So it's a lot and you have to cover everything. So you have to cover running, strength, you have to spar, like everything adds up to that only like three, three minutes. Do you know how casually you just mentioned getting punched in the face?

You do actually, we should say in amateur boxing, you wear headgear, don't you? Yeah, headguard, yeah. Yeah, and there's no way that's ever going to change. You'll carry on. All amateur boxers wear that headguard. Yeah, so females wear headguards no matter what, unless you're professional. But males, once you go over 18 years old, then the headguard comes off. But for females, it will stay on as an amateur. Simran Kaur.

There's something about a wolf that inspires great passion in people who get to know them, unless, of course, their farmers worried about their stock. Ellie Radinger was a lawyer and gave it up to study wolves. She spent years among the animals in the Yellowstone National Park. Her book is called The Wisdom of Wolves. I was frustrated as a lawyer, very, very simple. And I always loved wolves. I've been, I had a German shepherd dog that I grew up with. So that was kind of my wolf at home. And I always loved wolves. And so it kind of like when I gave up my profession as a lawyer, that was the next thing to do. Yeah, you say that that's an entirely logical move to make.

But when you told your friends and family, this is it now, it's wolves all the way for me, what did they say? Well, they rolled up their eyes and thought, well, okay, again, she's doing something different. You have spent a lot of time at Yellowstone National Park in the States. What is so significant about that place?

Well, it is a special place from the landscape and the area. And it's the only place actually in the world where you can watch wolves. So in all their social behavior, they're hunting, they're raising pups, and all of that. That's the only place I've never found a different place where you could see that so close. We can see the wolves from a distance of about, like sometimes when you're lucky, three meters, but most of the time usually 500 metres or more. Okay, and that's a safe distance, is it? Yeah, yeah. Well, do they attack humans?

No, no. Never? We are not in their prey, we are not their prey species. They never attack humans. They try to avoid us. They don't mind living next to us or close to us, but they avoid us most of the time. And have they always flourished at Yellowstone or were they reintroduced at some time? They were reintroduced in 95, 95 and 96. They had disappeared about 100 years and then they

were reintroduced. And I was there right from the beginning. I was able to watch them right from the beginning. Why did they become extinct? People killed them probably because they wanted to have more elk to raise the elk population. They killed the wolves off and that's what they did. And I think it was 70 years they got extinct. And then they came back and then they definitely flourished. And what did you notice about the role of the females when you're observing them? That's amazing. I mean, the female, I love the family life of wolves because females are so strong

and you have to have strong leadership in a wolf pack to succeed and usually it's the parents who are the leaders and the females are the ones who most of the time make the final decision. How do you know that? You can't possibly know that, or can you? Oh yeah, I mean you watch them for such a long time, you make notes and everything and then you notice which one takes the lead and it's the females and it's the older ones because you need experienced animals and also with humans, you need experienced people to lead a group of family or a company or whatever.

And this is what wolves show us. Now, the wolves mate presumably with any number of different partners? No, usually they stick together for their life and the family. But sometimes when the situation is right and when they do need, sometimes they breed different, they have several different breedings and they breed with different men, sorry, wolves. And the male wolves will happily look after the cubs, will they, and play an equal role in pot-breeding? That's the trick of the females.

You know, if you mate with several guys, with several male wolves, you have a lot of potential parents, fathers for them to take care of. That could be a trick. You had, I think, a favorite, a male wolf, Casanova, is that right? Casanova, yeah. How did you, how do you get to give them names? That's the bit I was boggled by. That's just what we do. We wolf watchers, we give them names. Usually they do have numbers. And Casanova's number was 302. we give them names because he was such a he really was a Casanova he was a handsome uh dark and dark color uh coated guy and he was and his behavior he was so charming he charmed all the girls really uh you have kissed a wolf haven't you

I did yeah what what does that what does that feel that was my introduction into the wolf world, actually. I had to go to wolf casting because I wanted to work at a wolf facility to get to know wolves. And so the first thing was, of course, to get to know captive wolves. And you cannot kiss a wild wolf, so you go into the captive facility. And that's how I got to kiss a wolf. It's kind of like a greeting, an acceptance from a wolf pack. If they lick your face and that's what they did. The alpha wolf kissed me and then I was accepted by the pack and then I could work with them. That is, it's remarkable the way you describe

that in such a everyday sort of, oh yes that happened, a wolf came up to me. What are their dimensions? Because i don't think i've ever seen one in the flesh are they enormous the well they are big it's like big german shepherd dogs and the one that i met was the first one that i kissed was about 50 kilos and it's kind of like when they're standing in front of you and putting your their paws on your shoulders and their big teeth are just inches away from your mouth. It's different, yes. Now, we know that in a lot of fiction, there is a sort of a peculiar link between women and wolves.

And I think when you give talks, the audience is overwhelmingly female. Definitely. Lots of authors, I think Angela Carter, the author, is one among many who's taken real inspiration from wolves. Why is that? I think women have a different approach to wolves, to nature also, and to wildlife. They are more laid back. They are more observing, more empathetic. And they don't need to conquer like men.

They're always men. I feel like now in general, men like to conquer nature and wildlife. And women don't do that. They don't have to look good or whatever. They just sit and watch while men starting. They take photos. They do this. They do that. They want wolves to come towards them and so on. And I've never watched that with women. You do say in the book that you think way back, way, way back at some point,

a woman might or must have fed a wolf pup. Yeah, there are several theories on how dogs got domesticated. And one of them is that maybe, well, one of them, one of the big wolf researchers, Eric Seaman, said that probably there once were some wolf pups whose mother had died, and maybe one caretaking woman took them. And to feed them at that time, we did not have any cattle or we did not have any sheep because they got domesticated after the dog. And so to feed them, they probably breastfed them. And that's how kind of like the dog got domesticated.

And we still have this in some African cultures. They do feed their pups that their dog pups also breastfeed. Incredible. We don't have wolves in Britain, do we? No, you don't. But there's talk of reintroducing them, I think. There's always this talk about reintroducing them. Scotland, of course.

Would it be a good idea? I personally don't think so because Britain is so isolated. You cannot have any gene mixture because there could be a problem of inbreeding them. That's my personal opinion. Ellie Radinger was talking to Jane.

Still to come on today's programme, Tom Kerridge cooks the perfect winter sprout curry and explains how he changed his lifestyle. British, Asian women and girls and the stigma surrounding menstruation. And the violinist Madeleine Mitchell plays previously unpublished music by the Welsh composer, Grace Williams. Now, don't forget, if you miss the live programme during the week, you can catch up by downloading the BBC Sounds app. All you have to do is search for Woman's Hour there and you'll find all of our episodes. Click on an episode to listen straight away, or of course, you can download it for later. Now anyone who's trying to set up a

business needs some sort of financial backing. Venture capitalists are the people you go to if the bank, as is often the case, says no. But there's evidence that black, Asian and minority ethnic women are having difficulty getting any kind of financial support through the usual routes. Why? Well, Charmaine Hayden is a senior partner at Goodsoil Venture Capital. Mariam Jimo is the founder of the Woman in the City Afro-Caribbean Network and she's an entrepreneur trying to raise funds for a new technology company. What sort of business is Mariam trying to set up? A tech-enabled marketplace that would allow people to access international and ethnic groceries from across the UK.

So pretty much London is kind of focused, a very multicultural hub. So what, delivery? Exactly. Make the food and then deliver it. Not necessarily make the foods, but utilise stores that already exist in the UK in different pockets of London and make that accessible across the UK. So if you're in Chelsea, you can still get foods that you may only be able to get in, say, Peckham. So that's kind of the concept. And how has the search for funding gone? So I managed to do quite a small friends and family round um so i raised amongst people i knew and then now i'm kind of looking for a pre kind of pre-seed before i go into um my seed what's a pre-seed come on this is this is business you have to explain um so a seed

round would be something you need to kind of start your idea and get your idea off the ground i guess a pre-seed would be something that you would need to sort of get to the point where you can do that. So some businesses are a bit more complicated, they need a little bit more funding. For me, it's my business is app based. So development and so on and so forth takes you need some cash to get to the point where you could start. So Charmaine, how does somebody like Marianne go to get the cash? Well, in an ideal world, she'd just go and pitch to some angel investors or some venture capital firms. Otherwise, she'd raise the revenue organically through her company. But in reality, there are a number of challenges that she may face.

What sort of challenges? Specifically, if you're looking at something that's focused on an ethnic group, it may be frowned upon because it may be looked at as a niche, even though the number of people that it would potentially buy are huge. It's still kind of seen as a niche in the same way that Pinterest was initially kind of fobbed off because people thought, oh, it's just targeted at women. This isn't a problem. This isn't something that people care about. Let's not pay attention to it.

And in fact, that's like one of the world's unicorns and a unicorn being a company valued at over a billion dollars. So, yeah, just kind of an example of that. A lot of work and research, Charmaine, seems to have been done about this question in the United States, but not in the United Kingdom why do you suppose that is well I think that it's a relatively new space here I think that Europe and the UK are a lot more rigid in the way that they do stuff in the way

they fund opportunities there's so few senior partners that are from ethnic minority backgrounds to be able to have a voice enough so you know you have to be in a backgrounds to be able to have a voice enough. So, you know, you have to be in a position to be able to say, actually, I'm going to call you out and you have to feel psychologically safe in order to do that. So if you're a token person that's been recruited as a VC member, especially where, you know, diversity is such a hot topic,

sometimes people recruit just for the sake of it and don't actually give people real powers in the process. And if that's the case, then that makes it a lot more difficult to kind of inch your way to having a real conversation. Mayim, what happens when you go to pitch for money? What sort of response do you get? So, I mean, I'm quite early in my process. I've only experienced it a couple of times.

But I think often you're asked, you quite intense questions and I feel like what sort of intense questions um you might be grilled a bit more on like your business model and you know you know the general things that you're supposed to be asked but probably just a little bit harsher with some undertones or microaggressions and the questions like how do you feel you could build a team which really means okay will people listen to you or will you be able to command a group of people who aren't also black women? And I think that's a really touchy point that there is this structural bias that people have before you've even opened your mouth as soon as you've entered a room. And they use that to kind of judge how hard they're going to be on you. They kind of see you as much more of a risk because they're not familiar with you.

So that definitely controls the narrative in terms of how they question you or get you to pitch. Charmaine, from what you've written, there are very few black women in senior positions in the venture capital area. Why? Well, there's a number of great reasons. I guess typically the VC network comes from an old

boys club that started with Harvard graduates. When it came to the UK, it would be kind of largely like Oxford, Cambridge graduates, if you're not like a fellow graduate there, which the likelihood is it's kind of minimal of someone from that background. And then people just generally aren't willing to give opportunities. then you know when raising funding because obviously a VC has to raise funding also it's very likely that they're going to if they're a senior partner and they want to raise a fund to distribute that they're going to face difficulties because generally VCs start with family money so they'll be like from a rich family or have rich friends and friends in their network who contribute towards their first fund to be able to build a track record if you don't come from

that background then going to institutional investors and saying hey we need money to be able to invest in people so that we can increase diversity you're likely to kind of meet a lot of hurdles if you don't have that initial funding So what are the consequences for women like Miriam of facing these kind of barriers? What happens to their business idea? Well, it's usually pushed to the side. People usually invest in people that look like them with problems that they understand

that affect their immediate circles. And someone like Miriam going across that, even if she does come across a black woman who's in VC or you know who kind of understands the problem she's going to have the black tax what we call the black tax a situation where someone actually might feel like you know what's a bigger risk for me because I don't feel psychologically safe to make these grand decisions people are going to judge me if I invest in a fellow in another black person because they think that I'm just doing it as a favour and I haven't really done proper due diligence.

And that's a problem also. I was talking to Charmaine Hayden and Mariam Jimo. You may well know Tom Kerridge from the television. You may have eaten in one of his Michelin-starred restaurants. You're almost certain to know he once weighed 30 stones and he lost 12 of them by changing his lifestyle he's now published a cookery book called fresh start how to cook amazing food at home he cooked the perfect roasted winter sprout curry sprouts are amazing and they

do seem to have this marmite effect on people, but they're just tiny cabbages, and cooked well, they taste fantastic. All right, so how do we cook them well? Okay. How do we make this dish? So the first thing we've got is sprouts that have been marinated in ground turmeric and some ground coriander, okay? So they've kind of like sat there and just absorbed all those lovely spices and flavours. I'm going to stick them into a pan on this amazing, this is an amazing stove you've got in here. It's famous. Yeah and we're going to start cooking them

through. Basically they're not blanched so what a lot of the problem that you have with sprouts quite often is the fact that people boil them in salted water and they get cooked for so so long that you know they lose all that texture and if you kind of look at stir frying them and cooking them and making them feel that they're that they keep some freshness and vibrancy about them that's where they start tasting amazing okay so the sprites are in the pan and then in a separate pan i've got some onions that i've sliced and caramelized and they're going to be cooked out so the beautiful thing about onions is they've got this lovely amazing texture and flavor that comes from it they have a natural sweetness they've got these lovely natural sugars in them so as you cook them and they caramelize them more all of those flavors are drawn out i know there are lots of other things that have to go in but whilst you

carry on cooking it why fresh start cooking at home why was that really important to you the last two cookbooks before that had been about weight loss the first one the dopamine diet was um about it being a low carbohydrate diet and it was my own personal journey because i'd made a decision when i was approaching my 40th birthday where i thought actually do you know what the reality is if i keep going the way i'm going i'm i'm not going to be around for another 40 years. How were you going? I mean, what was your lifestyle before you made this change? It was party. It was fun.

It was like a constant drive of highs and buzzes. You live a life as a chef. You know, the one thing that you do do is you kind of pretty much give up on sleep because you're too busy working, playing hard, really enjoying the whole connection with the hospitality industry and and knowing you know to get so big yeah as big as you did you must have been consuming all the wrong things i suspect beer or a huge amount yeah beer was massive and beer was a huge part of my life alcohol was

alcohol was huge and i've touched on it a number of times before and it was one of those things where you finish service and you need that acceleration that buzz that thing you don't just stop at 11 30 midnight and go home to bed then you need to be so i'm so alcohol became quite a huge part of my life and volume i love just consumption everything about everything for me was just always about trying to get as much in as possible the sprouts and onions are smelling lovely good need i worry about them are they all right you don't need to worry about them i'm just making sure that they're getting hot enough on on the famous cooker it's a very famous i love it i you know i may well take it home afterwards

how are you dealing with the change because massive weight loss is often really hard to sustain yeah so it is if you're viewing being on a diet as a diet diet has been thrown out there as a term as a word that people see as depressing and boring and it means you're trying to lose weight however diet is actually just the way that you eat, not necessarily about losing weight. It's so much about the mental shift in how you view food and you look at it as a balance and you go, actually, what I want to do is concentrate on the food that you can eat and how you enjoy eating and how you can cook at home, how you can encourage kids to eat, how you can encourage your whole lifestyle becomes very, very different. So the the maintenance of it it can't be short term so you have to choose a way of eating or a lifestyle

that you can see is sustainable forever now you did your television series on the fresh start with families learning to cook both the adults and the children but how easy when they go away is it for them day to day to find the time to cook and avoid the convenience food i mean that's the one thing that everybody talks about is is time and being time poor and time short and however it's about priority and finding priorities and a lot of that is you know you can batch cook stuff and put it in freezers. You can find very quick and easy recipes to do. Like if your time is, you'd rather sit down for half an hour

and watch a soap opera. Well, actually that half an hour, you know, you can cook yourself something, which is the most important. And we've all got BBC iPlayer now. You can catch EastEnders later. You haven't got to watch it at the time that it's on. It's about prioritising what you do and how you view your life.

Just one more question. You made a bizarre revelation, which people were really surprised about. Tinfoil. What is the tinfoil story? Well, like, that sent Twitter into meltdown. I mean, literally, there's two sides to tim ford there's a shiny side and a dull side and as a chef and for me i'd always been taught that the

shiny side you put on top of the food when you put it into the oven because it's reflective so as heat comes up it reflect it reflects the heat back better now that's all there's two sides that for me i'll go that's how it works okay and then there were loads of people go god yeah of course that makes complete sense that's it and then i had like mental nut cases going at me going no no no there's a it's completely it doesn't matter what it like it i mean it went the world went crazy over two sides of tinfoil however i still cook with a shiny side down because it just makes complete sense to me. Tom Kerridge. And the full recipe is on the website.

And you can also watch a video of Tom on the website where he offers five tips for a healthier lifestyle. And if that's not enough, you can subscribe to the Cook the Perfect podcast. That's through BBC Sounds. And Lauren's emailed, it makes perfect sense and I have tested the tinfoil theory, half shiny and half dull on the same dish. And although there's no noticeable cooking difference, there is a different browning outcome with the shiny side giving a much better result. In October of last year, a Hindu temple in Kerala in the south of India was open to women between the ages of 10 and 50. It had previously been closed to any female who might be menstruating.

But the stigma is common in rural India, as demonstrated in the Oscar-winning short documentary, Period, End of Sentence. To what extent does the taboo persist among Asian communities in the UK? Well, Jane spoke to the psychologist Dr Sunny Cleo, the journalist Poorna Bell, and the writer Sonal Sashtev Patel. In many religions, in many cultures, there is stigma around menstruation. In my family, we just didn't talk about it. My mum obliquely referred to her nappies whenever she needed us to go get some, for example. And I think it was a bit of a shock when I got it. I got it at age 11.

It was just after my grandma had passed away, so we were in the middle of funeral ceremonies. And it was stressful because I think all I knew up until that point was what I'd been told in school. And that was not very good because they told me a teaspoon of blood. That's a day, basically. And it wasn't it wasn't quite that. And then I read Just 17. And I think that was mostly my education around periods. The magazine.

Yeah, the magazine back in the day. There was some very useful information, we should say, in all of those magazines. Sana, I think you started your periods at 11 as well. Yeah. Which is young. What was that like? I mean, like Sunny, I was educated about it at school, but similarly, we didn't talk about it that much at home.

I was lucky because my mum was really progressive and I had a twin sister as well, which I think helped. I never talked about it with my brother and my dad, but it wasn't necessarily a taboo subject. It was probably a private subject. Where I found it became an issue was when we weren't allowed to go to certain events. Like what?

So religious events, there were certain goddesses, Mataji and Thurgama, where if women have their period, they're not allowed to go. And we abided by that. I mean, we weren't an extreme family. I was treated exactly the same way as my brother. You know, he had to help with household chores, just like my sister and I did. So it was total equality. And we didn't do it in our own home. But when we did it, when it happened outside

of our home, we respected what other elders in the community thought and we didn't go. And you yourself personally, do you ever question it? Yeah, I do. And I've actually looked back into the scriptures because I'm a practicing Hindu and I wanted to know, you know, where does it actually say this? Because it doesn't feel like the religion that I was brought up in. And I think Hinduism is quite interesting because it's such a pluralistic religion. But in the Bhagavad Gita or in the Vedas, it doesn't say anything about this. So really, it's a cultural practice that has taken different routes and people have given different reasons to but i don't you know there's no reason in

hinduism that we should be practicing this and put it your dad was a gp so presumably there can't have been an issue in your family about this well my family are fairly liberal so we've never i've i would never say that things, especially around, you know, being a woman have been particularly stigmatized again, or things or give it brought up with a sense of what you can and can't do. But my dad, you know, is very neutral. He's very, actually quite cool about just anything to do with periods. But it actually weirdly came from my mum. I don't think that when I first started my period, which was actually quite late compared to other people, which was at the age of 15,

I think she just handed me a sanitary towel and then just was like, welcome to womanhood. But off I had to jog and figure it out myself. I think that this is a big taboo in British Asian society around what you use. So, for example, sanitary towels versus tampons. And I remember thinking, no, sanitary towels is not going to be the way forward for me. And I remember that when I had switched to tampons,

like, you know, there was some kind of debris in a dustbin and my mum had said, oh, you know, you need to, this is literally one of maybe five conversations we've had about periods, the way me and my mum and she said oh you know you just might want to make sure that like next time you wrap it up properly in case your dad sees and I'm like dad had to like remove vacuum cleaner from someone's bottom in A&E he's not going to be freaked out by the sight of a tampon in a dustbin. No but it is astonishing how many women would make that intervention on behalf of their husbands. Yeah I looked at my dad got stressed at how much loo paper I was using.

And I found that really annoying. I was like, you don't know what it's like to bleed and that you're telling me off for using too much loo paper. It upset me a lot, actually. I still think about it these days whenever I change the loo roll. Do it with gay abandon. Yeah, just getting your revenge in. I can imagine that. Paula, what about the idea of not being able to go to certain events

because you were on your period? I lived in India for about five years. So any understanding that I had around not being able to go into temples, for example, if you are menstruating, actually came from my time when I lived there, when an aunt couldn't, she couldn't join us on a day that we went to a temple because she was menstruating. And I just remember, I must have been about maybe 10, 9 or 10.

And just this feeling of being so indignant that I couldn't understand why menstruation, which, as I understood it back then, was a thing that was, you know, linked to the idea, not the idea, sorry, the actual biological cycle of having a baby, by which none of those men in that temple would exist at all. Right. And I just thought, I don't understand how you're not allowed inside a religious structure because of something, you know, it's not like any of us were given a choice. It wasn't a box that we were asked to tick when we were born.

Yes, please. I'd love to have periods. So you, I don't want to put words into your mouth but would you then just go to an event so i was agnostic um for a number of years and i would describe myself as atheist now but yes i would just go to an event if i was on my period because even if when i was agnostic the way that i view it is that if I am supposed to believe that I am God's creature, then there is no place on earth that I should not be allowed entry. Like it's not a conditional thing. If God's love is meant to be unconditional, I don't understand how something that my body does, which is a biological imperative, which I did not ask for, how that is a thing that prevents me from going

into it. So now I think I think you would respect the idea that you shouldn't go to a service or ceremony. Well so I agree with Prerna I don't think there's there's any reason that women should be excluded and I think the chief minister put it well but I've not experienced ever having to not be able to go to a public place but what I wouldn't do is I wouldn't go to somebody's home. And that's where I've experienced it, where they've said, we're celebrating a certain event. And we ask that women who aren't menstruating don't come to our house to celebrate this event. Explicitly, have you been told that? Yeah, I have.

Recently? In the last 10 years, yeah. And out of respect to that family, I wouldn't go just because it's their home, not because I necessarily agree with their viewpoints. See, I think I still would go. Dr Sonny Cleo, Pornabel and Sonal Sashtab Patel were talking to Jane. Grace Williams was a Welsh composer who died in 1977 and a new album of her work is about to be released. The violinist Madeline Mitchell found

some of her unpublished work when she was researching Welsh music in Cardiff and was so impressed she's put together the album of her chamber music including the violin sonata. ORCHESTIN PLAYS Madeline, what was it about Grace Williams' work that so impressed you? It's so soulful and deeply felt and Celtic and beautiful. And I thought I'd play you a bit from later on in that movement to show how she had such passion and gutsiness. The music builds up and there's a section on its own for the violin marked appassionato, passionately. And then the piano comes in and joins me

in this glorious high register theme and full voice marked con anima. And then it just winds down slowly to this beautiful low register, rather soulful, wistful Welsh And you have your violin and your bow in your hand Ooh, that sounded lovely. It's lovely to have a violin right next to me. Beautiful.

Why was so much of her work unpublished? I mean, there you were, you found it, and it hadn't been published. It's very interesting. Grace Williams is well regarded as a composer, especially in Wales, and she attended the Royal College of Music from 1926 to 1930,

studying with Vaughan Williams, who recommended her for a travelling scholarship to Vienna to study in 1930 with Egon Welles. Must have been such an interesting time. And he very much praised her compositional gifts. And then she came back to London after a year and she took part-time teaching jobs at schools and at the same time started writing seriously chamber music. But she never really had a pushy publisher. She never really pushed herself forward, I think.

And the other thing I noticed, she was obviously very self-critical. She was a close friend of Benjamin Britten and they were each other's best critics. And when I discovered the violin sonata, I saw the manuscript at the Welsh Music Information Centre in Cardiff, known as Ticert. And on the frontispiece was, in her own handwriting, slow movement worth performing, outer movements not good enough, GW 1957. Similarly with the sextet we recorded and the nonet, which I got very interested after we played this piece and everybody thought it was marvellous. I thought, well, what else is there? She had all these fantastic connections then with very famous musicians. What sort of life would she have had as a female composer in the middle of the last century? How important

is her gender in her not being published and not being recognised? I think it was much more difficult for women at that time, the 1930s and 1940s. There was no expectation that they were going to become famous composers. She was a practical musician. She worked for the BBC schools department in the 1940s, but then she suffered ill health. So she went back to Wales and she lived there in Barry near Cardiff for the rest of her life. And although she did have success with some orchestral works, for instance, she wrote a mass called the Missa Cambrensis, the Welsh mass, towards the end of her life. And the first performance didn't go well. So it wasn't until a couple of years ago when the BBC National Orchestra of Wales did it

and it was successful. And I got hold of the manuscripts of these chamber music pieces from the National Library of Wales and just thought, why haven't they been published, let alone recorded? And I think they deserve to be heard. I was talking to Madeline Mitchell. Now, do join Jane on Monday. She'll be talking to Catherine McPhee,

who's best known for Smash and American Idol. She's making her West End debut in the musical Waitress. She'll also be talking to the woman behind the music and lyrics for the show, a multi-Grammy Award-nominated singer-songwriter, Sarah Bareilles. Enjoy the rest of the show. A multi-Grammy Award nominated singer-songwriter, Sarah Bareilles. Enjoy the rest of the weekend. Bye-bye. I'm Sarah Trelevan,

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 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.