Woman's Hour - Photographer Doris Derby. Composer Emily Hall. What's behind the success of TikTok?

Episode Date: March 5, 2020

We hear about the impetus to chronicle the civil rights struggle in 1960s Mississippi from photographer Doris Derby Women will be disproportionally affected by climate change. But they’re also at the forefront of campaigning against it. One of the most famous, Greta Thunberg, was in Bristol last week addressing crowds of young people. But have things changed since her first school strike in 2018? According to a new book, ‘Our House is on Fire – Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis’, they are but not nearly fast enough. What might motivate governments and people to truly act? Composer Emily Hall will be telling us about the inspiration behind her piece for the Seven Ages of Women a new commission by Radio 3 to mark International Women’s Day on Sunday. And we look at the huge success of TikTok the free social media app where users create, share and watch videos and ask; Why is it so popular among teenagers? Presenter Jenni Murray Producer Beverley PurcellGuest; Doris Derby Guest; Emily Hall Guest; Professor Alice Larkin Guest; Dr Alexa Spence Guest; Sarah Manavis Guest; Elizabeth Wosho

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. Hello, Jenny Murray welcoming you to the Woman's Hour podcast for the 5th of March. Good morning. As Greta Thunberg accuses the European Union of acting too slowly on climate change, how accurate is her assertion that when your house is on fire, you don't wait a few more years to start putting it out? On Sunday, Radio 3 will mark International Women's Day with seven ages of woman. Emily Hall is one of the seven composers who've collaborated on the choral work. And the photographs of Doris Darby, whose pictures of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s,

are being shown at the Turner Gallery in Margate. Now, there's a relatively new kid on the social media block, and it's known as TikTok. It's quickly become a huge success, particularly among teenagers. It's been recommended as a good, fun app where you can post videos you've made yourself and it's said to be suitable for young people from the age of 13. There have been some concerns about safety. One of the challenge videos is called Skullbreaker where apparently three people stand alongside each other and the two on the outside try to kick the middle person's legs from under him or her.

There have also been some worries about online predators getting access to young people through the app. Well, TikTok have recently introduced a family safe mode. So how does a parent keep control of what their child is posting or watching? Elizabeth Watto is 16 and posts content on the site. Sarah Manavis writes about digital culture and technology for the New Statesman. So Sarah, how exactly does TikTok work? Well, essentially TikTok is just a video posting app. So you can make a video that's from 15 seconds to 60 seconds, post it, and essentially it's just an endless stream of dances, lip syncs, memes, pretty much anything you want to do, sketches, that is an endless stream,

millions of videos that you can constantly flick through all on an app. What sort of things, Elizabeth, do you post on there? On TikTok, I post relatable content as well as some tutorials, things that I like, also things that I'm passionate about. I feel like I'm able to reach a wider audience with my following. And if it means making people feel happy and spreading positivity, then I will. So what sort of things are you teaching people about?

Your nails, by the way are amazing thank you i actually do them myself and i post tutorials on like how to do your nails and how to save money using acrylic kits at home so so you can do that yourself yeah okay what else do you do makeup and hair i post like makeup tutorials tutorials and mini hair tutorials. And these tutorials can go from 15 seconds, 30 seconds and 60 seconds. So you can learn quite quickly just through one small video. And how do you make the videos? I mean, are you sitting there in your bedroom with your phone, a camera?

Yeah, just with my phone and a ring light so I don't want a ring light a good lighting and my phone so this is what lots of young people are doing just sitting in their bedrooms doing this why would they choose to do it on tiktok's era and not on youtube or any of the other places well I think it's exactly the reason that Elizabeth just said. The sort of bare entry to, like, the entry point is much, much lower. On YouTube now, for most people to have successful videos, they have to have, you know, expensive cameras, expensive lights, fully planned out videos, videos that last, you know, not 15 seconds, but 15 minutes, 20 minutes. Whereas on TikTok, you can make a video that takes you, I mean, literally, it could take you

just those 30 seconds to make, and then you could immediately post it. It's really easy to use. The sort of functionality of it is very similar to that of an Instagram story. So posting captions and things like that, which most teenagers will already know how to do. So if you're a teenager at home and you already have access to a smartphone, you can immediately start posting on TikTok and can actually go viral pretty easily with kind of a low quality, technically speaking, video. So what, Elizabeth, do you get out of it? I mean, are you making money out of it? On live, you can live stream on the app and people actually choose to gift money to, well it's not really money, it's like little coins, like digital coins, which is then transferred into money through PayPal.

But TikTok only put settings where you can only be 18 and over to purchase coins. So younger children aren't able to use their parents' credit card or debit card to purchase coins on the app. What sort of things, Sarah, have you seen on there that might have just concerned you? I mean, I mentioned the Skullbreaker, which sounded a bit dangerous, I think. Yeah, and I do think that it's worth saying about the Skullbreaker Challenge, and I think Elizabeth was the same as me, she's nodding now, for those who can't see. The Skullbreaker Challenge, I think, is very much one of those things that is getting a lot of coverage in the media, but is not actually that prevalent on TikTok. I hadn't actually seen a Skullbreaker Challenge

video, and I'm on TikTok both personally and for work all of the time, hours a day, and I hadn't seen a single one, and the first time I saw it was seeing it on a news website. So just to say that a lot of the stuff you read about TikTok in the mainstream news isn't often not what the vast majority of people are seeing. However, I do think that TikTok, like any social media platform, is a little bit like a Wild West. Like you can definitely get bullying. You can have, yeah, predators. I mean, people on TikTok, it says you have to be at least 13 to join, but you can just lie about your age. There's no age verification. So you have people as young as like eight, nine, 10 years old on the app. And you do have pretty often seeing in young people's bios.

So they're a little personal about me on their page saying, don't be creepy, because they do have older people going in, making creepy comments about them. So I do think that there's a predator problem. I think there's a lot of bullying. As I said before, there's a lot of racism as well. And on top of that, TikTok itself has even admitted that it was censoring LGBT kids, fat kids, disabled kids, to quote unquote, like prevent them from bullying, which I believe they've apologized for. But yeah, so I think there's sort of a lot of kind of dangerous territory. But that being said, that is not the majority of stuff you'll see on TikTok. What sort of experience have you had from that perspective?

I saw you nodding when Sarah mentioned the word racism. Well, not quite recently, but I have shared my insecurities about my skin tone and how I used to feel quite insecure about my skin. And now I'm just bracing it online and teaching girls who look like me that they are also beautiful. But people do say mean comments like you should bleach and all that stuff. But for parents who want to censor their kids' comments, there is a section where you can type in mean comments and words that you don't want to see on their comment section and it would actually censor it out and people wouldn't be able to comment those words. Sarah, what would you say?

I mean, this new safety feature has been introduced. What do parents need to know to make sure their children are safe on this TikTok? I mean, I think, again, it's like anything with social media. It's kind of impossible to not see anything harmful because it is just one of those things where social media platforms don't really have an incentive to try to make their apps perfectly safe because a lot of the time that means alienating people and alienating young users. So I just think parents need to know that it is like any other social media platform where bullying can happen. But yeah, I guess there are features

there, even if I would call them a bit lukewarm, that you can do to, like Elizabeth said, to make sure you can't see certain stuff and at least not get abuse on your own account. What difference, Elizabeth, do you reckon this family safety feature will have? I feel like you would be able to freely go on the app and not worry too much about any predators or anything like that. Also, going on private mode can restrict you from seeing things that you wouldn't usually want to see or things that you wouldn't like.

Also, I feel like it would be a lot more better and a lot more kids safe, friendly, what TikTok is supposed to be. Is there more that needs to be done, Sarah, or have they cracked it now? I do think that there's always more that they could be doing. There was actually a BBC investigation into, you know, child predator comments on TikTok. I think it was by Bite Size.

I might be wrong about that. But essentially they reported all of these predator comments and TikTok hadn't taken any of them down. So I think that they could be more aggressive in how they handle that kind of content. They could be more aggressive about bullying, make bullying guidelines. But again, it's hard when these things can be subjective. But I think the onus is not on users to necessarily be better, but the onus is on TikTok to make the platform better. Well Sarah Manavis and Elizabeth Water thank you both very much indeed we did of course ask TikTok what they thought about

all this and they said promoting a positive and safe app environment for our users is a top priority we use both technologies and human moderation teams to identify review and remove dangerous or abusive content that violate our community guidelines. And they also say a public service announcement now appears underneath the Skull Breaker Challenge, reminding users to not imitate or encourage public participation in dangerous stunts. Thank you both very much. Now, Doris Darby is an American photographer. She's now 80, but when she moved to Mississippi in the 1960s, she documented the civil rights movement.

As well as using her camera to record what was going on, she was an activist. She became one of the founders of a theatre group and taught adults to read and write so they could go out and vote. Her photos from the 60s are on show at the Turner Gallery in Margate as part of an exhibition called We Will Walk, Art and Resistance in the American South. It was her father who'd given Doris her first camera when she was a child. How much did her family influence her and her work? Photography and the arts were very important to me and my family. My father was a college graduate, graduated with a degree in engineering. But during those times, it was back in the 30s, it was hard to gain employment. And so he was a cabinet maker also. And he did produce cabinets on the side as well as with his regular job.

He would be in the basement working on his cabinets, and I would go and want to spend time with him, but I had to do something, so I would get the scrap wood and make things out of it and then paint on it. The additional thing was that he would take photographs. He had a beautiful camera, and he would take photographs at all of our family events. And then at the next event, he would show them as slides. And so we had music, we had dance, and we had the photography, and then the cabinet making and the art. So all of that was there.

And I think painting was what you were keenest on when you were young. Why the move to taking photographs? Well, the painting and the photographs were very important to me because they were visual records that would stand the time of history. But the photography was more immediate, I guess you would say. The photographs, for me, as I worked in Mississippi in the civil rights movement, was a way of documenting all of the history that was being made in the segregated South as the civil rights struggle continued. I think it was 1963 when you moved to Mississippi. What do you remember most about the people you photographed during the civil rights struggle?

I remember that it was very hard for so many of them because of the system of racial segregation. People couldn't get jobs. They were tied to only certain kind of jobs, then farming or maid work, a butler and that kind of thing. Hard work. However, they were very dedicated to changing the system of segregation. And so they sacrificed a lot in order to be able to support the civil rights struggle, whether it was through letting civil rights volunteers stay at their home. That was dangerous. And in segregation, in the segregated South, whites and blacks were not supposed to associate. So if you were in a car together, civil rights workers, one of you had to hide in the car, get down, if the police were on the road when you were on the road.

So it was a lot of sacrifice. How willing were people to be photographed? on the road when you were on the road. So it was a lot of sacrifice. How willing were people to be photographed? They were willing because I was with a team. We developed a team of documentary photographers and filmmakers. And part of our role was to document and create photographs for use through the community. For example, if they needed to have photographs for posters, for flyers, then we provided that for them. As well as when some of the black community members wanted to run for political office, we provided photographs for them.

But the other part was that they knew we wanted to document the struggle, the civil rights struggle. How easy was it for a woman of color, a photographer, to work in that segregated cell? Well, remember, I was not someone who came in just to photograph. I was working in community activities, in civil rights activities. So I was there, living there. I wasn't coming in, get some photographs and go out. I wasn't just documenting a protest where the police were coming. I was documenting what positive actions people were taking to improve their status and to support change from injustice to justice. So how would you say the way you worked was different from, say, some of the male photographers who were there?

Well, I was in a team that had mostly male photographers. They varied. I was probably on that team the longest. We had a couple of male photographers who were sort of in charge, had more experience than I had because I was just learning a lot. But perhaps I took more photographs of women and children. So we overlapped. We played different roles.

It wasn't just photography because we were a filmmaking unit. I learned how to edit. I learned how to do sound. So I was doing other things. It is 50 years this summer since police shot and killed two black students at Jackson State University. I know you're currently working on a show. What contribution do photographs make to telling that story of what happened that day? This particular one-woman show that I've just about finished, in this particular exhibit, there's a story that identifies people and the reaction to this whole event. So I have 60 photographs, which I have selected out of about 200 that I took.

And I have sequenced these photographs. So it starts from the beginning with pictures of the two young men who were killed, and then pictures of the building with the bullet holes in them, the dormitory windows with the bullet-ridden windows. And then you have students with their hands upraised in protest the school to board the building up and not show the bullet-ridden windows so that the FBI would come in and look at the scene of the crime. Why is it important to you to publicize all these pictures now? It's important because we see a lot of things still happening. We see shootings and we see evidence of the police presence at various events.

You still have the supremacist groups and you still have to sort of give an overall view at the time of what happened and what is still there and what has to has to still be done. I was talking to Doris Darby and the exhibition is We Will Walk, Art and Resistance in the American South and it's at the Turner Contemporary Gallery in Margate. Still to come in today's program, Radio 3's International Women's Day. Emily Hall is one of seven composers who've made a choral work called Seven Ages of Woman. And the serial, the fourth episode of Giuseppe de Lampedusa's The Leopard. The young Greta Thunberg, the climate activist, has been busy again recently. Yesterday she was at the European Union berating MEPs

for not getting on with what needs to be done and echoing the title of a book she's written with her mother and other members of her family called Our House is on Fire. She told the EU that when your house is on fire, you don't wait a few more years to start putting it out. She was equally insistent about the need to act now when she spoke to thousands of people in Bristol a week ago. I will not stand aside and watch.

I will not be silent while the world is on fire. Will you? It should not be this way. We should not be this way. We should not be the ones who will have to lead on this and tell the uncomfortable truth. Once again, they sweep their mess under the rug for us young people, for their children, to clean up for them. We are being betrayed by those in power and they are failing us but we will not back down. And if you feel threatened by that then I have some very bad news for you. We will not be silenced because we are the change and change is coming whether you

like it or not. What if Greta and her family are right and nothing is being done quickly enough to make any real change to a planet she says is in crisis? What does need to be done? How quickly? And why is there no more urgency? Alice Larkin is Professor of Climate Science and Energy Policy at Manchester University and joins us from Salford. Dr Alexa Spence is Associate Professor of Psychology at Nottingham University and joins us from there. Alexa, if the world is on fire, and indeed looking back, Australia was, why is there no sense of urgency? Yeah it's hard. Climate change is a very psychologically distant thing. It's abstract, it's intangible, it's perhaps only really knowable through putting experiences together over time or through mathematical models so it's hard.

It's difficult to see in our day-to-day lives. And we've got other things that are more urgent. We've got work and school and things happening right now, whereas climate change seems very distant. But the flooding has not been distant. We've seen an awful lot of flooding in the past months. How much impact is that having on people's thinking? Maybe it is closer than we thought it was.

Yeah, indeed. And actually we are seeing that. So people who experience flooding actually do then demonstrate that they are more concerned about climate change, that they perceive they're more vulnerable to climate change and that translates into greater preparedness to act. So yeah, flooding is one of the big impacts we're seeing already in the UK and we're going to be seeing more of and I think relating, making sure that we communicate the relationship of climate change to these impacts we're seeing is really important.

Some people do make that link themselves but not everybody. Alice, what do you make of Greta's assertion that people have no idea about what the crisis means? What are we not getting? I think we're not getting the urgency of this problem and the scale of change that's required, particularly from those wealthy nations like our own, where our per person emissions are very high. So, you know, we look at the various, you know, policies that are being put in place. And yes, they're getting us somewhere. They're moving us a little bit further forward in terms of reducing emissions in the UK,

but nowhere near at the scale that is required for what we've signed up to in the Paris Climate Agreement. And I think that's what Greta is really pointing out. She actually uses a very strong term. She claims we're all climate change deniers, are we? I think that we are, it's not that we have the information, I think, to really understand the problem. And I think that there is a responsibility on our government and our decision makers, but also on us as climate scientists and academics to make it really clear to people what this challenge is and i think that there is some some guilt within the academic community as well around you know looking at our analysis and really being honest about what it's showing us we do have a tendency to to rely on sort of technologies that are not necessarily

well developed at the moment and thinking that they're going to kind of get us out of jail free kind of thing in the future and that's part of the issue is that that we need to deal with this now with the technologies that we already have with the ways in which we can use energy differently and those are things that you know we've known about for the last 10 years and could have been putting in place much more meaningful policy and we haven't been doing that so one example is we rely very much in the modeling on thinking that negative emission technology, so things that can take CO2 out of the atmosphere on a very wide scale deployed all over the world, are going to help with our battle against climate change.

But if that doesn't happen and we can't really wait to see if it's going to happen at the scale and the urgency that we need it. Then we're not going to meet those Paris climate agreements. So we need to be looking at, you know, what have we got under our noses now that we can actually, you know, put into place. So, you know, much more investment and support for things like renewable technology. But the other side of it is also how much energy we use. So if we're using less energy, then it makes it much easier to decarbonise that energy on the supply side. So, you know, there are two big parts of that jigsaw there. But isn't there evidence that nothing is actually being hidden? I mean, in 2018,

Britain's emissions were 44% lower than in 1990. So things are being done to improve things. So I would say things are being done, but not at the scale that we need them to be done. So one of the things that we count when we're looking at CO2 emissions for the UK is we count the emissions that are produced within our national boundary, if you like. But what that doesn't include are the CO2 emissions that are associated with all the goods that we consume that might be being produced in other countries. So, for example, you know, I'm looking at this sort of technology around me in this room right now. And there'll be technology here that's probably been produced in China, say. Now, the emissions associated with manufacturing and producing those goods will be counted in China's emissions, not in the UK's. But what we have done is we have

outsourced quite a lot of our production and manufacturing to other countries, which means that that's part of the picture of our emissions reducing in the UK. It's not all the picture. But it does mean that some of the emissions associated with the stuff that we're consuming are not being counted by us, they're being counted elsewhere. And at the end of the day, the globe doesn't see where those emissions are being produced it you know overall the co2 emissions are still far too high and not coming down anywhere near fast enough but what do we do about the fact that we appear to have made it somebody else's problem well i think it's this is everybody's problem but on the other hand there are very big uh inequities within this picture so we know that

about you know 50 percent of emissions are produced by around 10 percent of the population so we you know we need to be rethinking looking at our policies and thinking how are we targeting the right places the right people there is a role for the individual but also the collective and also institutionally um i just think we we really haven't grasped that it isn't just about, you know, decarbonising the electricity supply system. I mean, it's much more than that. It's about, you know, how we heat our homes, all of our transport emissions. Of course, the thorny issue of aviation, which is always one that comes up, but also meat eating as well. So there are so many facets to this and we really need to get a handle on it. Alexa, what promising changes would

you say you've seen I mean another runway at Heathrow seemed to be a major advance? Yeah yeah preventing that seems a big step forward and I think broadly we've seen climate change itself seems to become more trendy in recent years, which I think is a positive thing. I hope it doesn't go away again. But we have seen big positive changes. There was a report out by Cardiff University yesterday or the day before that indicates that climate change is, I think, the second most important issue to people in the UK now.

I think it was second to Brexit. Is that primarily among young people? No, I think it's across the board, actually. There are some age differences on different aspects, but there may be certain aspects that are more amongst young people, amongst some of the trendy issues. We've seen veganuary or veganuary in just this year. I think one of the big things we're seeing is changes on some of the behaviours that previously we were not seeing any movement on at all.

So reducing flying and reducing meat intake, some of the big things that I wasn't sure we'd ever seen, we would ever see shifts on. And we are now seeing that. So I think there are positive indications. Alice, from a scientific perspective, how much real difference do things like becoming vegan, not flying, not buying plastics what influence

do those things really have so as you as you can imagine this affects all different aspects of our lifestyle but some of the things are much more what we call carbon intensive than others so flying was just mentioned and it gets mentioned because it's one of the most carbon intensive activities that we can do. Also, you know, if we were driving a car, if you're driving and you're the only person in that car, it's an average sized car. And if you're driving, you know, for that whole year, then that's that's also a lot of CO2. But that's probably equivalent to around one and a half flights, transatlantic return flights. So, you know, it's actually trying to understand what the impacts are of the different things that we do, thinking about our lifestyles, you know, it's thinking about just trying to make better choices. Of course, if we stop spending, you know, money on a particular thing that is

high carbon and we save some money on that, we also have to be conscious that we don't end up spending that money on something else that is high carbon. So, you know, you could have an example where you invest in, you know, much lower energy efficiency fridge, you know, triple A rated, something like that. And then you know that it cuts your electricity bill. But if you then spend the money saved on a flight, then that's going in the wrong direction. And it's difficult, you know, that our carbon literacy, our understanding of how one thing compares to another is not very good at the moment i'm sure many of us are much more familiar with things like calories than

we are with carbon emissions and so i think that there is a role of of local authorities of organizations to help people really try to understand what the difference is between the things that they do and how much carbon is associated with them and i think there are lots of ways in which we can do that we're already already starting to see things like that. And I'm, I'm sure Alexa knows much more about this kind of thing and how that might have helped people, you know, make better choices. But also, you know, it's not just about the individual, it's also about, you know, how much are you talking to your other organisations, your boss, you know, what influence does your boss have within wherever you work or at home or in a school you know how how are they talking

about climate change can you get debate and discussion going because it's all that conversation that leads to a better understanding which also can lead to politicians ultimately being able to make those difficult policies because they know that people are all aware of what they need to do alexa what does psychology tell us will get people on board? When we know that people say, oh, you know, Greta and the other activists, they just preach doom and they give us no hope. And so we're not going to listen to them. Yeah, that's hard, isn't it?

And I have to say, I don't have all the answers. But yeah, so when we're talking about doom and gloom, alarmist kind of discussions, then it can disengage some people. So people may just then switch off to the message. I think what's really important there is to accompany that with what can be done. So when using fear fear communications we know from psychology that if you also tell people what they can do it empowers people to take action rather than switch off well dr alexa spence and professor alice larkin thank you both very much indeed and

we would like to hear from you on this one. What have you done to contribute to improving the climate change problem? You can send us a text, you can send us an email, or, of course, you can tweet, and we'll read out what you have to offer, perhaps in the podcast. Now, it's International Women's Day on Sunday and to mark the occasion, Radio 3 has commissioned a choral work composed by seven composers of different generations. Each woman has written a movement for the piece

which is called Seven Ages of Woman. Each was asked to choose a text they feel represents them and their age. Emily Hall is one of the composers. She's 41 and she chose as her text a poem called Veins by the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva. I opened my veins Unstoppably Lies burst out With such urgency I'll lay out the bowls and the dishes Each bowl will be shallow.

Each dish will be small. Every bowl will be shallow. Each dish will be small. Every bowl will be shallow. Each dish will be small. Emily, how much do you enjoy listening back to your work as it's performed? Is it a pleasure to listen to it or are you thinking, oh, what did I do there? Yeah, it has become a pleasure now, I think. Now I feel like I know what I'm doing.

You know, when I was younger, there was so much more kind of guesswork and, you know, changing direction and experimentation. And, you know, I felt much more anxiety. But now I feel, I kind of feel when I write stuff down, I know what to expect. It's very beautiful. But why did you choose Veins as your text? Well this is all in the context of this project commissioned by Radio 3, The Seven Ages of Woman and they asked seven female composers of different generations from teenage to Rianne Samuels in her 70s

to respond to their particular decade of their life and I know Marina Svatiava's work and it always chimes with me and I found this particular poem which is about creativity and just the kind of um how urgent it was for her to express herself even in the sort of context of um you know domesticity and just everyday life, which can be so time consuming. And it just struck a chord with me in my 40s. There's less time, but somehow there's always kind of music that I need to express. So what did that image of opening your veins mean to you? Well, it is a dramatic opening and it's an interesting and and blood doesn't come up but poetry comes out and it kind of overflows from the bowls and the dishes which she's set the table with and it nourishes the earth and it's just got all these amazing kind of metaphors.

You're obviously a great fan of Marina's work. How did you come across her? She died in 1941. Yeah, well, I was asked by an ensemble called the Hermes Experiment to write specifically, to set specifically Russian texts because they were doing a tour in Russia so I alighted on her work and then I was surprised she wasn't more well known in in this country actually yeah how did you work with the choir and the other composers was all the work just done individually you wrote it and sent it off to be performed or was there collaboration between you there was a bit of collaboration it

was um over overseen by the eldest of the composers um rianne samuel she um she oversaw it to make sure that you know nobody chose the same text or you know and everyone sort of went in slightly different directions i mean it was cleverly it was cleverly curated because all the styles are quite different so as a piece it really does hang together very well. But Rhian was very supportive, not only during the process of creativity, but also in rehearsals. She sat next to me and she was like, go on, go on.

When I had a, you know, when there was like a moot point, you know, she was like there going, go on, go on, Emily, stick to your gut. It was really nice, actually. So what kind of thing did you have to press for? Oh, there's always a little bit of a to and fro between, you know, the conductor and the composer. And you do have to fight your corner because obviously what you've written is what you want. And I appreciated having this sort of matriarchal figure supporting me at the time.

I felt like I'd like her to come to more of my rehearsals, actually. Push you on, Dane, go on, go on, go on. You seem to be drawn to a mixture of styles, classical and some electronic music. Why that mixture well i suppose um the the sort of generation i'm in this technology was sort of readily available when i was studying and it um it allows a certain amount of control it you could you know unlike handing over your music to performers when it come to the when it comes to the electronics you can really you know produce things and home them and make them sound exactly how you want them to sound um and uh i think it's it's nice to have that um you can't have an

orchestra in your you know in your studio but you can have all these other tools so it just for me it opens up the creativity and the possibilities what about the younger composers the the teenagers i mean you were there with a grand dame overseeing you and telling you what role did you play to help the young one uh well i tried to be supportive and i mean I was pretty awestruck to be honest the youngest um Helena Paish is uh only 17 I sort of looked at her date of birth and realized she was only six years older than my son and uh had a bit of a you know double take um so yeah I mean it was a very supportive group and it was lovely um there was, you know, there was a real feeling of support. It was very, very enjoyable to be amongst only women for this project.

Now, it's 11 years then since you had your son, your first child. What difference has it made to the way you work you were talking earlier about marina's work and the creativity and the domesticity and how domesticity can really interfere with the work what's happened in your case um yeah i was thinking about this i mean i um i have less time and I think what tends to happen is the the piece the music and the songs tend to kind of well up in you and you know it's kind of why I was so drawn to that image of the poetry flowing out of the cereal bowls because sometimes I have to abandon you know fish fingers just because I have an idea I really really want to put down um I mean the song that gets the most radio play um of mine is called Eternity and I remember writing that while my son

was having a nap and then the singer came to my house and we had to shoehorn the recording in but funnily enough it is the piece that's played the most so I kind of feel you're less you have less time but I do feel there's been a sort of a sort of ease of of getting things down on the page. I was talking to Emily Hall about her composition for Radio 3 The Seven Ages of Woman which you can hear on Radio 3 at one o'clock on Sunday. Lots of response to our discussion about TikTok. Paul on Twitter said, social media safety is impossible. The answer is the same as for age of consent, cigarettes and alcohol. Minimum age requirement to own or use a smart device. Stephanie on email said, I saw an 11-year-old emulating sexual intercourse

using the split screen feature with an unknown older boy on the app. This was shared among my daughter's friendship group. There are some nasty things going on online and passing under the radar, but it's up to families and communities to try and keep up to date on how this rapidly changing technology reaches the screens of our infant and children's hands. On climate change, Sarah sent an email and said, Lots of people are in denial about climate change because it's too disturbing to contemplate. For me, one of the reasons change isn't happening fast enough is because governments are influenced by fossil fuel and industrial agriculture corporations.

Aileen, also on email, said, I walked 10 minutes to my local supermarket instead of jumping in the car after my daughter pointed out that most of my car journeys are very short and probably unnecessary Anne, also in an email, said Apart from underwear and shoes

I buy charity shop outerwear I don't buy ready meals I cook from scratch each day and I shop at the local market as much as I can. And Jan said, I've been a meat eater all my life, but I'm now close to becoming a full on vegan, which is a big habit to change. My partner and I even run a vegan cafe now. And someone who didn't want us to use a name on Twitter said, I started a Facebook page when I began reducing my plastic use one item a week. A year ago, it was just me. Now there are

1,500 lovely members. Thanks for all your responses. Do keep them coming. Tomorrow, I'll be presenting the programme live from the South Bank Centre in London where the Women of the World Festival will celebrate its 10th anniversary this weekend. It was founded by Jude Kelly obviously a decade ago. I'll be speaking to her about what inspired her to create an organisation that's involved 2 million people in 30 locations on six continents. What have been her standout moments and where does the conversation need to go now? That's Woman's Hour from WOW. Tomorrow morning, two minutes past 10.

Join me if you can. 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 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.