Woman's Hour - Rugby star Ellie Kildunne, Baroness Jacqui Smith, Working from bed, Kimberlé Crenshaw

Episode Date: May 30, 2026

World Rugby Player of the Year and World Cup Champion Ellie Kildunne joins Nuala McGovern fresh from a Player of the Match performance at the Six Nations final. She reflects on her rise to the top and the story behind her memoir Game Changer.What are the implications for girls and young women of Alan Milburn's review for the government into rising levels of inactivity among 16 to 24-year-olds? There are currently just under a million young people in this age range dubbed NEETs because they are not in education, employment or training. Anita Rani speaks to Baroness Smith, Minister for Skills, as well as the Minister for Women and Equalities.As part of our special programme on wonder — how to find it and how to hold on to it when life gets in the way —Nuala speaks to Dr Jean Bennett, the research scientist whose medical breakthrough recently restored the sight of a six-year-old girl.Would you ever consider working from your bed? Perhaps you do, by choice or otherwise? Dermatologist Dr Alexis Granite and The Archers Podcast's Emma Freud are both fans and join Anita to discuss. When the American Professor of Law, Kimberlé Crenshaw was five years old, at the time of the civil rights era in Ohio, USA, she was allowed to portray a witch but not a princess in a nursery play. Puzzled by her teacher’s behaviour, Kimberlé spoke up and never stopped, firmly establishing herself as a Backtalker, the name of her new memoir. Kimberlé joins Anita to talk about becoming a pioneering scholar and writer on civil rights and her instinct to question power and challenge what others accept as fair.Presenter: Anita Rani Producer: Dianne McGregor

Hello, I'm Anita Rani and welcome to Woman's Hour from BBC Radio 4. Hello and welcome to the programme. Coming up, we have England rugby superstar Ellie Kildun fresh from her latest Six Nations win. We'll also hear from Dr Jean Bennett, the research scientist whose medical breakthrough recently restored the sight of a six-year-old girl. She coined the terms intersectionality and critical race theory. Now Kimberly Crenshaw has written a memoir, Backtalker. she'll be here to explain it all. And working from your bed, do you do it?

Maybe you're in it now. We'll be hearing all about it. But first, young people are caught in a perfect storm, the words of Alan Milburn, who this week published a government commissioned review into rising levels of inactivity among 16 to 24-year-olds. There are currently just under a million young people

in this age range that are classed as NEETs, not in education, employment or training, that's one in eight of this cohort. The report warns that without decisive action, the figure is on track to rise to one in six within the next five years to around one and a quarter million young people. Baroness Jackie Smith joined me to discuss the review. She was Home Secretary during Gordon Brown's Premiership,

the first woman to be appointed to the role. Today she wears two ministerial hats. She serves as Minister for Skills and also Minister for Women and Equality. I asked her, what are the factors driving this, in activity in young women specifically. Alan Milburn's review was really important in identifying, as we had asked him to do,

the reasons why we've got this stubbornly high number of young people who aren't getting those opportunities to work or to learn that we need to see. And interestingly, what you've seen for young women is actually there are fewer young women who are not earning or learning. That's actually changed over recent. years from a period of time when there were actually more women who were in this position, but they're more likely to be economically inactive rather than unemployed. In other words, they're not even able to look for work, sometimes because of issues like caring responsibilities,

for example, although one of the reasons why the numbers of women come down is because of the successful efforts to reduce the numbers of teenage pregnancy. So that's one of the numbers. of the reasons, I think, why you've got this discrepancy in figures. But I think if we think about the future, I mean, first of all, whether or not it's young women or young men who are not earning or learning, it is, as Alan Milburn rightly described it, an enormous waste of talent, waste of young people's opportunities to be setting off on a career path that is going to lead them to a good job and enable them to support their families in the future. And it's something that we're determined to take action on.

And talking about the future, Mr Milburn says that there is widespread concern, not least among parents and grandparents, that the challenges faced by this generation of young people mean that they'll be the first generation whose lives won't be better than their parents. Do you share that fear? I do share that fear, but I also am clear that, you know, one of the reasons why when Pack McFadden and I arrived in the Department of Work and Pensions,

we asked Anna Milburn to undertake this review, and we began the reform of support for young people to get back into the workplace and to get into educational opportunities is because we're determined not to see that happen. We cannot, in the way, frankly, that has happened over the last 10, 15, arguably longer than that time period, including when I was in government, the last time around.

We can't have this situation where young people are not able to get the jobs, the training opportunities that they themselves want. Because I think it was also a really important message from Alan Milburn that we haven't somehow or another got this snowflake generation who are not willing to work and to learn. They're desperately keen to. But structural changes in the labour market, the way in which the education system had previously been set up

means that there haven't been the chances that young people need to get that first step on the ladder. Well, actually on yesterday's program, Jackie, we heard from one young woman who told us about her own situation. She'd been diagnosed with epilepsy and how she found looking for work in today's job market. Here's what she said. My confidence was really, really knocked and I felt that I wasn't able to do a lot of jobs. And throughout my time, I've gone travelling, I've done different types of jobs, which I'm really proud of myself for. But it's got to this point now where I've become. so burnt out. And my physical and mental health is I've had to move back with my parents.

And I'm now really struggling to find work that's suitable for my health conditions, which I think is the case with quite a lot of people. How concerned are you for the mental health of young people? 84% of the NEAT surveyed for this review, and I know you know this, said they want a job. It's a huge weight to carry. And many of them who are graduates also have rising debts to shoulder as well. Whilst Alan Milburn didn't find one single reason why we have unacceptedly high numbers of young people out of work and learning, one of the factors that will make you more likely to not be able to earn or learn is having had special educational needs or a disability. That, of course, is part of the reason why we are, as a government, reforming the CEN system. It's why in the Department of Work and Pensions, we provide additional support for,

young people to be able to get into work where they've got a disability that is making that more difficult. Although there's more that we need to do there. This is a system that focuses more on paying new benefits to stay out of work than it does on supporting you to get into work. And that's why we are and we need to reform that in order to make sure that people are getting. For example, the work experience that makes that difference to them being able to tell an employer that they've actually got experience. And today we're announcing 300,000 more work experience opportunities for young people. It's why, you know, and for that young woman, I would say, you know, I'm really sorry about the position she finds herself in. There is mums and parents and others may also

want to help their young people with this. There is help out there. If you Google job help, it will take you to the DWP information and support for young people to actually get that work experience, to get the opportunities to train and to find the jobs that can transform their lives. We know that young women are more likely to enter low-paid sectors like care, retail and hospitality. Should the government prioritise drawing them instead into the...

types of work that offer greater stability? Well, we are prioritising those areas that link to our industrial strategy where Skills England have, for example, been able to identify that there's the greatest chance of growth and of high-paid work. And I think that's a really important point to me. You know, yesterday I spent part of my day talking to apprentices who were doing electrician apprentices. Brilliant young people.

actually the rising star apprentice there was a young woman, but there weren't enough women there. And electrician, construction, building and planning, aspects of technology, these are all areas where you are more likely to get high paid work in the future and where there are lots of opportunities, but there aren't yet equal numbers of women. In fact, it's very unequal. So the things we do in school, the initiatives that we've got in place to bring ambassadors in, from science and technology, to increase the number of placements in construction, working with the construction industry

to break down those gender stereotypes. All of those things are important because there are massive opportunities for young women in these areas and they will be good jobs and high-paid jobs. Yeah, no one's disagreeing with that. You know, we do need to get women in lots of different areas and get into these well-paid jobs.

But if women are more likely to be in care, retail and hospitality, Is there a need to recognise the value of this type of work for our society and maybe reflect that value in their wages? Well, these are all important jobs. And yes, you know, we do need to make sure that actually young people find the work that suits them. But I simply, on this point about science and technology and construction, I simply want everybody to understand that opportunities are open to use. regardless of your sex and that we need to encourage people to do the things that will provide them with the very best opportunities.

The report notes that the cost and the regulatory burden of employing young people has also risen. The minimum wage for young people has gone up. Employers' national insurance contributions have been raised, which both adds up to the costs to firms employing these workers. Were these policies a mistake? Well, no, I don't believe that they were. And of course, what the report also shows is that actually we've had stubbornly high levels of young people not able to work or to learn, but far predate decisions that this government has taken. But, you know, it's an interesting point, Anita, you just said to me, we need to make sure, don't we, that people that are going into retail or care or other what have traditionally been low paid jobs have got enough money to be able to live on.

That's part of the reason why we have a national minimum wage and why we want to make sure that where young people get into work and we support them to do that, they'll be earning enough to be able to look after themselves and to build that life for their families that they are so keen to do. I think we sometimes take for granted those of us who've been fortunate to be in work, the structure it gives to your life, the ability to go and meet other people. That's why giving people those opportunities to work is so important.

And then we need to make sure that the education system, the apprenticeship system, which by the way, we have seen failing young people over the last 10 years, moves back to supporting them to get not just the starting life that they need, but the opportunity to get those higher level qualifications that will enable them to get jobs for the future. That's why the Prime Minister has set a target for our skills and education system for two-thirds of young people to be able to be able to get jobs for the future. to get higher level apprenticeships, technical qualifications and degrees by the time they get to the age of 25. Because in the labour market, as it is now, as we're seeing some of those entry level jobs, as Alan Milburn pointed out in his report, no longer existing in the labour market, we need people with higher level skills to be able to get the jobs that make such a difference to them and to the economy. You're both Skills Minister and Minister. You're both Skills Minister and for women and equalities, do you feel you're able to do both effectively? Should the women

and Equality's Minister role be a full-time one? I'm, look, at the risk of cliché, if you want a job done well, give it to a busy woman, right? I've been around the block of it. I've got some experience. This isn't my first rodeo, as far as being a minister is concerned. And there is a really strong team in terms of women and equalities. You know, I work obviously really closely with Bridgett Phillipson as the Cabinet Minister for Women and Equality is with Seema-Mel Hotra with the rest of the team. So, yeah, I think I'm pretty good at my job, Anita. I'm not denying that you're good at your job, but, you know, maybe it's important enough for it to be

a standalone job in its own right, you know, women and inequalities minister. As I say, I think we've got a really strong team. And what's more, we've got a government that understands that the responsibility to make sure that women are getting on in life, are. safe, have the jobs and the opportunities that they need. That's not something that one single minister should ever be responsible for. It's at the heart of the whole of our land for government. Baroness Jackie Smith, Minister for Skills and Minister for Women and Equality. Now some ways to describe our next guest. World rugby player of the year. World Cup champion,

six nations champion runner up at the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award. I could only be talking about one person, the unstoppable Ellie Kill Dunn. The England rugby player is widely regarded as one of the most exciting players the game has seen. Most recently being named Player of the Match in the Six Nations final, where England won for a successive eighth time. Her curly hair has iconic status among rugby fans and she's shared her own journey to the top in her memoir Game Changer. Nula started by asking her, did she always want to be a professional? rugby player. You know, when I was a youngster, being

a rugby player as a profession, wasn't something on my radar at all. I actually wanted to be a football player because I could almost see that happening. I could see the role models that were out there, but I was a little bit better at rugby than I was football.

Where was the turning point when you decided rugby was the sport for you? I went to a tournament. I was a little bit younger, but I was allowed to go to this tournament representing north of England. And when I went there, it was all the best of the best in my age group and the age group above me. And suddenly I had role models. People that I hadn't seen before, women's rugby wasn't as visible as it is today. But suddenly I was

surrounded by role models that inspired me. And I think that's probably my own story coming through with what we can do for the younger kids now is as soon as you can see it, you can believe it. So, yeah, That was really the fire in my belly that made me think I want to do this. What age for you then, would you say approximately? 15. Tell me a little bit how the women's game has taken off. It's taken off in all directions. Obviously, we're a professional outfit at the Red Roses.

So I can say it's my full-time job and it's pretty much all I've ever known. You look at the crowd numbers. Yes. It's something that definitely over the past two or three years, the growth in it is just, yeah, blowing everyone's mind. Obviously the World Cup was amazing for numbers, but we never want to make a moment.

We want to make a movement. And to see the numbers carry on rising during this Six Nations just passed after the World Cup is definitely showing that that movement's happened. So, yeah, I think the women's game, and I think it's the same in football as well, the positive about it is that it can only go one way. It can only go up. We can take it in any direction we want it to go. And that seems to be what we're doing.

I did notice Chloe Kelly has a little blurb on your book as well. I love that intersection between football and rugby and the women as you talk about. She says it's about the example, you, Ellie sets, and the belief she gives the next generation that we as women belong on the biggest stage. Yeah, it's exactly that. Everyone's got a place that they belong. But at one of your first games for England, some fans asked you for a picture.

And you assumed that they wanted you to take their picture, but without you in the picture? Yeah, I mean, you know, growing up, my mum took loads of photos And in the book, there's a couple of sections of photos that my mum is taking. I'm so grateful that, you know, my life has been captured. So I just thought I'd be doing the deed back and taking a photo of this moment that, you know, two people were at the game. It could have been the first game.

They could have been to many games. But I wanted to capture that for them. And then when I soon realized that they meant with me in it, I felt a little bit embarrassed because I wondered why, why would you want me in it? as well but you know that's now become a norm to get the photos and uh to sign the autographs and actually another part to that that bit is the next person had actually asked me for my autograph and i was like 18 19 years old at that point and i didn't have an autograph so i made it up there on the spot and ever since i've had to keep that same or is it very swirly it's rubbish it's really

rubbish and i see some of the other girls do their autographs when we when we're signing things and it It looks so elegant and beautiful. And yeah, mine's just a little squiggle. But yeah, it's got a nice story behind it. But I'm sure those that come up to you are just delighted to get it. Most of our listeners aren't winning World Cups. But I think some of what you've learned from your experiences can be shared and perhaps helpful as well. You spoke in the book about the heartbreak of losing out in the 2021 World Cup final.

How do you deal with disappointment? Because disappointment is such a, it's a terrible emotion because sometimes there's nowhere to put it, if that makes sense. What do you do? I kind of use it as like fuel. No, yeah. And I'm very much a type of thing that I've got to put it into real life scenarios so that it almost like strips it away from the emotion and makes it physical.

So, you know, losing that World Cup, I just saw it as like this fire was already burning my tummy. Now I've got like a can of petrol that I'm thrown over it. the top of it so it never burns out. And I'm a strong believer that everything happens for a reason. Again, I tried to make it into a positive. We would have loved to have won, but now we've got this opportunity to rewrite the fairy tale. We're coming back to England and we've got a homewark up and we're now beatable. So more people are going to come to watch it and we can show everybody that we're here to win

and we're here to be successful. I do want to talk about another aspect. You were so open and frank about your long. and what brought you to this point. And that included body image, Ellie. And I want to talk about that. We often talk about it here on this program, on Women's Hour,

and about the positive message that rugby sends as a sport. All body types, not only accept it, but welcomed. You mentioned that as well. There's a place for everyone on a rugby squad. But your own relationship with your body image took a dip during lockdown. As you weren't eating enough, you were pushing your body to extremes.

Can you tell our listeners a little, of how that happened. Yeah, I look, I'm an athlete and I'm competitive. I'll always try to win and that's what has made me the person I am. But during COVID, obviously, it was difficult for everybody in many different ways. And to be stripped away from the team on part of, we had an Olympics ahead of us that we were training for. So everything kind of got taken away from me.

And I haven't been in that position for a long time where I've not had that structure. So I guess it started by wanting to be the best in something else. And that competitiveness in me just took over to take it too far. You know, it started with going on 5K runs and then how can I get a little bit quicker doing the 5K runs? Well, I need to get a little bit lighter. So you were setting down parameters for performance, really, I suppose. Yeah, exactly. And I think then it spiraled into wanting to be small.

You know, I remember I used to do body checks in the mirror. and see if by the end of the week I was smaller for no reason. And sat here today, I'm like, why did I do that? It's so silly. But I think it's something that as, you know, people that are seen as athletes and maybe, you know, people that championed a lot for what they do, it's very important for us to talk about it because it normalises it.

And the thing that really helped me get out of that time was talking about it. As much as I didn't want to, I spoke about it with a physio of mine at the time. She'd noticed I lost a little bit of weight. And as soon as I said it, I created this accountability that, you know, I didn't want to do it anymore. So, yeah, it was a very tough time, but it definitely shaped who I am today. And it's made me a better athlete now I've got out of it. You know, I never want to slip back into habits. And, you know, another part of it is I've got.

got ADHD as well, which I do write about in the book where, you know, it's strange sometimes just eating something simple just isn't a priority. And that was one of the reasons that I went through the diagnosis was because being in camp three or four weeks at a time, food ended up not being the priority, but I know how important food is for me to perform at the level that I do perform. So I needed to understand myself and that it's always going to be something that I've got to be conscious of. I don't want to slip back into a. routine that I think is normal but you know everyone around me is saying now you need to eat more than what you're eating and I've got to come up with strategies that help me one of my

strategies is I almost like create my own tapas have smaller place. Ellie tapas yeah yeah have small place it's sausage and mash as I have a small plate of sausage and mash and I get another small plate of sausage and mash so I end up eating you know the same amount or whatever I'm needing to eat and another another one is before a game I always eat plain pasta nothing on it. It's so boring. But it's just so that I know I'm having the fuel that I need to perform for my team, for my nation. And I'm going to make sure that I've got the food in me to perform at the level I need to. You mentioned the ADHD.

You did give a very beautiful description of it talking about all these thoughts that come crashing in. That at times might be somewhat disruptive. But you love a little bit of chaos. Yeah, I love chaos. I think there's so much calm within chaos. And, you know, I thrive in things being a little bit up in the air and not really knowing what I'm doing. I like finding my way throughout that.

And I think ADHD as much as definitely over the past few years, it's been spoken about on social media a lot, I think it's a superpower as well. I see the world slightly differently. I see the game of rugby slightly differently. And I'll pick up on things. that and things being spaces to attacking opportunities on the field that other people might not be able to see. The difficulty I have or have had is how do I articulate that to my team who

don't see it that way? And that's something that I've had to learn. And I think I've cracked the code on how to speak to my teammates in a way that they can understand what I'm seeing. It's frustrating when I still feel like I can't get it across. But that's something that getting the diagnosis really help me understand and I never want to see it as an excuse. It's just how can I get better. Now I understand this, how can I get better? So, yeah. I love this idea, Ellie, explaining to the other Red Roses, her chaos theory of how she sees it all playing out. Right, one more superpower before I let you go. Your hair, iconic, lovely head of blonde, curly hair that we see bobbing up and down as you play or maybe actually flying back because of the speed that you go at.

You say that also helps with performance. Yeah, it does. I think it goes back to the body image part of things. So, you know, I'm quite a tall female, and on the field I'm still quite tall, but I'm quite slim. And I remember years ago now, I'd always stand in the tunnel and try hold myself higher than everybody else because they'd be scared of me if I was tall than them. You've kind of got that lioness. I mean, we're talking about football, but you have got with the hair.

that kind of presence. Yeah, exactly. But then obviously going through what I did with my body image and eating, I lost a lot of confidence and I felt small than everybody else. I felt my hair was a lot longer at the time. I felt small and then that lacked in confidence. Then I'd lose a contact when I'm getting tackled. So I cut my hair a lot shorter, which obviously the weight of it was lighter and it got bigger.

And suddenly it gave me this presence that I am bigger than anybody here. It doesn't matter about, you know, the way that I look. My aura is bigger than everyone else's. And if you can have that confidence, especially in rugby, in any walk of life, if you really believe in yourself that I have got this, I am carrying something that everyone is thinking, who is this person? You'll be able to do whatever you want to do. Ellie Kildun speaking to Nula there.

And if you've been affected by any of the issues discussed, then go to BBC Action Line where there are links to support. Now Monday's program was devoted to wonder. How do we find it and how do we keep hold of that feeling when crucially life tries to get in the way? A six-year-old girl in the UK recently had her sight restored thanks to the medical breakthrough of our next guest, one half of a husband and wife team in the US.

They'd worked for over four decades on a gene therapy to treat inherited retinal disease, eventually leading to the treatment that gave Safi Sanford her sight back. The little girl from Stephenage has a rare inherited condition, Leber's congenital amaurosis, which prevent cells in the eye from making a protein needed for normal vision, and her parents had been told she would lose her sight entirely by the age of 30. Here's Lisa Sanford, mother of Safi, speaking to Radio Falls Today program about her recovery. She was pretty much completely blind in the dark before, and when people hear night blindness, they just think it just means

at night time. But actually that's not the reality. Any sort of low-level lighting was a real struggle for us. We had to rely on torches to do everyday things like, you know, eat a meal, do some colouring, go to a kid's party. It was really, really bad. She couldn't see it asshole in the dark. We couldn't get trick or treatise.

And life was really, really hard. She missed out on an awful lot. But we just didn't know how much of an improvement we were going to get. You know, I just thought if she could see a bit better, that would be amazing. You know, I could never in a million years have imagined. results like this. We were able to get trick or treat in last October and she was running down the path in the dark shouting, I can see, and we were just in floods of tears. You know, this has actually given our little girl her life back. That was Lisa Sanford, mother of Safi there.

Well, Dr. Jean Bennett's Professor Emerita of Ophthalmology at the University of Pennsylvania, whose work alongside her husband, fellow ophthalmologist Albert Maguire, had made Safi's recovery possible. Nula began by asking her, what did she make of what Lisa had to say. I'm just overwhelmed whenever I hear stories of people who've had this treatment and it's changed their lives. And it makes me cry actually hearing now that they have had their treatment, they can see better. And I feel so lucky to be able to have witnessed this myself. And you haven't met Safi yet, but you have met some of the other 500 or so recipients of your gene therapy in the States. what have they told you about what it was like to see?

So one of the most illuminating experiences that I had was the first subject that we recruited, who happened to be from Italy, from Sicily. So we offered to put her up at our house, and so we could follow her after the surgery, and she wouldn't have to travel back and forth. And she had the surgery, and she came downstairs the next day, and she looked in the mirror, and she said, Mamma Mia, when she saw her face.

And then she started describing things that she could see. She looked out the window and she saw branches waving in the wind. She saw reflections from a pond. She could see the pattern of grain of wood and furniture. There were just so many observations that she made, and it was. such an amazing experience to be able to hear this firsthand. It was like a child seeing something new for the first time in absorbing the world and learning about it. And that I think really illustrates that wonder that we are talking about. Yes, yes, absolutely. Could you explain briefly

in very much layman or laywoman's terms how this works? Yes, it's a surgical operation. People are treated under general anesthesia because you can't sneeze. This is very delicate microsurgery. So they're treated under general anesthesia and then they go home later that day. It's a fairly easy recovery. Luxterna is the name of the product. What the product is is a recomminate virus, which is neutered. The guts of the virus and the virus itself, even in the wild type form, has never been shown to cause disease or harm. But we removed the guts of this virus and replaced it with the gene, which is missing in the normal wild type form in these individuals. And use that to deliver the DNA into the cells which normally produce this gene. It's necessary to use this piggyback

method because DNA itself is really highly charged and it will not pass through cell membranes to be able to get it into the cell efficiently, we needed to use that technique. So like a virus will bring it along, so to speak. That's right. Viruses do it. They know how to do well. So fascinating. But you know, what strikes me about you and your husband with you

is that you don't consider limitations. You have that mindset of possibility and being able to wonder what might be possible. Where does that come from? I think the wonder comes from just the joy of science and wanting to know what would happen if you intervened, in this case, with genetic therapy. The question for me was, wow,

maybe you could use this gene transfer technique to be able to treat a disease at its root. And I wanted to see if I could do that. It was pie in the sky. I was totally naive. And there were so many obstacles I didn't know about, which was probably a good thing because otherwise I wouldn't have followed this path. But you found somebody who is ready to do that with you as well, which is your husband, Albert McGuire. I should say as well, congratulations to both you and your husband on a two million pound breakthrough prize for life sciences that was just awarded to you at a ceremony in Hollywood, known as the Oscars of the science world.

That must have been fun. Oh, it was just incredible. It was an amazing celebration. It's really fun to see all of these glamorous celebrities celebrating us nerdy scientists. Exactly, but probably very much would love to emulate you because this could be a movie. Particularly, here's one scene. How you met your husband? So we were in the same class in medical school and we were assigned as partners for dissecting a brain during our first neuroanatomy class.

He's like, she is the woman for me. But I imagine it must have been very different, you know, 40 years ago, what you were up against compared to what your husband to be at that point was up against, being a woman in that world. Absolutely. I grew up in my scientific world as being one of the few females, like from the training point on. And it was very difficult to find female role models.

I got used to being, like, the only only one. female in a group when we were in school and then later on as a young faculty member, when I was first recruited to University of Pennsylvania, I was just thrilled. And I'm still thrilled in retrospect. It just wonderful opportunity. It gave me a chance to try out all of these crazy ideas. And so I didn't really think about it at the time, but I wasn't given any startup funds to be able to buy a microscope, to be able to fund a technician to help me, things like that.

I had nothing. And that was fine. I did it, but I had to become the jack of all trades to be able to build things, repair them, to bring in used pickle jars to be able to store my reagents. It was a challenging time, and in retrospect, I realized that this was really not a, a fair situation as I saw some men being recruited who were given million dollars startup funds to be able to purchase all these things. But for me, it was what it was. What is it? Necessity being the mother of invention.

Exactly. You got it. Dr. Jean Bennett's Professor Emerita of Ophthalmology at the University of Pennsylvania. And if you want to listen back to that fascinating program in full, all about wonder, then go to BBC Sounds and find the episode from Monday the 25th of May. Still to come on the programme, Kimberly Crenshaw, who coined the term intersectionality. And remember, you can enjoy Woman's Hour any hour of the day if you can't join us live at 10 a.m. during the week. All you need to do is subscribe to the daily podcast. It's free via BBC Sounds.

Now, do you ever work from bed? Maybe you're there now. Well, there are plenty of examples of highly successful women who have done just that. Emily Dickinson, Frida Carlo, Florence Nightingale and Virginia Woolf, all worked from bed for long periods, often due to illness or disability, but sometimes it was by choice. Tracy Emin treats her bed as a creative space. French writer Collette said she did some of her best work there. Edith Sitwell treated her bedroom as a theatrical intellectual space, and Joan Didion apparently enjoyed the bed as a controlled, enclosed, working atmosphere. Well, broadcaster and Archer's podcast presenter Emma Freud and dermatologist and Junebird founder Dr Alexis Granite are both proponents of working from bed. Emma was actually in her bed, in her PJs feeding her cat when I spoke to her. And I started by asking her, what work does she do from bed?

The work that I do in bed is only the creative. I don't find it works so much for the admin. It makes me feel a bit slummy and I feel a bit slummy anyway. But working in bed on the creative stuff, it's just quieter. I am downstairs in the rest of the house and in my office, which is in the middle of our sitting room. I'm a mum and I'm a wife and I run a house. But as soon as I'm in bed, I'm just the creative person that I want to be,

and I find it much easier to focus on actually doing imaginative work. Do you have a specific routine? Are you in bed in the mornings, in the evenings, any time of the day? No, I'm just in the mornings. And if I can do some creative work before I ever go downstairs, then it's a sort of purer space in a way. As soon as I'm downstairs, I'm so many things. So in the morning, a couple of hours is probably my max.

And then in the afternoon, a lovely little calming moment is really nice, like between three and five or something. Never in the evenings. It doesn't work for me in the evening. Alexis, you're nodding away. Tell me about your work routine. You work from better. I do.

Obviously, I'm a dermatologist and a brand founder. So there are things I can't do from bed, have to see patients in clinic and work with the team. But I completely agree. I, you know, have a sort of, I do have a little bit of a routine. Mine is actually in the evening. So I tend to work from bed in the evening and sometimes on the weekends. But I like to kind of come home, shed the day, change into my comfy clothes. I also have a co-worker who's one of my dogs.

I have a heating pad that I lay on. And I kind of have to get everything done first, all the bits, the admin, the stuff around the house and then I'm kind of in my zone and that's where I can really be creative I can write I can do things that require a lot of focus in a way that I don't find as easy when I'm not in bed we need more detail here you have a heating pad so this is a proper setup do you have a special outfit yes my family affectionately calls it my groutfit my gray sweat outfit but I love to kind of come home be super cozy and comfortable the heating pad actually my husband turned me on to He originally started with it for lower back pain.

And honestly, it's the best. It's an electric pad that I sit on that's sort of against my lower back. And it just signals relaxation. What are the husbands doing whilst you're working in bed? My husband's usually falling asleep. I'm a night owl, so it's late. But you've got a set-up as well, haven't you? Your separate mattresses.

We have the same mattress, but two different sides. So his is firmer than mine. I like the softer side of the mattress. And your co-worker is your dog? Yes, I have two dogs. One of them likes to sit on the heating pad with me. That's Peaches. So she is my co-worker.

I need to just get the name of your ginger cat that keeps popping up, Emma, because it's your co-worker. Please, just in case, we need to, this cat needs to be celebrated. He's beautiful. He's called Teddy. Teddy. I was his midwife. I birthed him into this world.

Amazing. Are there any disadvantages, Alexis, to working from bed? I mean, we're told constantly that we should have clear space to transition from our laptops and working to sleeping. Yes, that is true. I think if you do have trouble sleeping, you know, particularly in the evening, it is good to kind of try to separate church and state, so to speak. So have a sort of separate place for your work and then you kind of enter your routine for bed. But in all actuality, I haven't really found for me that it's an issue. I do need to kind of, you know, once I shut up.

You know, once I shut off the laptop, I do need to do something else for five minutes, whatever that is, read a book, read an article, something to just kind of signify its time to transition to sleep mode. But like I said, I, yeah, I'm a huge proponent of work from bed. How do you avoid the Gen Z term bed rotting, not getting out and about enough? Yeah, I think it is good, again, to kind of have your allocated periods in the day. So whether that's in the morning, you're going to do, you know, your couple hours, as Emma said, or in the evening. But you do need to sort of force yourself out and about outside of bed too. I think there's another thing on that, Anita, which is that there's a kind of natural time limit that I think your body goes, oh, okay, that's enough now. And actually, if I do a morning in bed, I'm mostly.

much more likely to go for a get-up and go straight out for a walk or go to the gym or do a class or something like that because kind of middle-class guilt does get to you in the end. And you think, no, no, no, that's enough. I've really got to balance this. You've both got grown-up teens or grown-up kids. Would you worry if they worked from bed? Horrified. I'm in my 60s. I really feel I've earned it. You've earned it. Absolutely. Yeah, I couldn't have done it in my 20s because laptops didn't exist then. But, you know, I'm glad that I didn't. But I feel I feel I've really earned it now.

It makes me feel a little bit luci and disgusting and I quite like that. We like it, too. How about you, Alexis? My kids, I find, sort of rotate around different stations. So they might do a little bit of work at the desk, a little bit of work at the bed, a little bit on the couch, which, again, I'm okay with. I think it depends on what sort of flow you need to get into. So you might find if you're, you know, maybe you are more creative when you're writing

from the bed, but then when you need to do your math problems, you need to be sitting like upright at a desk. I'm just interested in this. Like, does it creep up incrementally? Because I've started to read, like, I used to just read books in bed. Now I have my laptop and I read briefs for work in bed. Is this a one-way trajectory? Am I just going to become a working from bed woman?

I think, next, you need your heating pad and then that's it. You're in. And I need a co-worker. I'm going to read out of some of the messages that are coming in. So we've got quite a few. Someone's saying here, I never work from my bed. My bedroom needs to be a rest of the house. from stress and daily grind.

I like to close my laptop and walk away at 5pm. But if your work from home space is visible all the time, your dining room, living room, dining table, then you're constantly reminded of work and can't switch off fully. Plus my bed is normally littered with cats. And my current reading pile, adding a laptop will not add to the coziness. And my pyjamas, lovely though they are,

and not for general viewing in meetings. That's from Michelle in Nottingham. Another one here, Carmen in Saltburn, says, As a writer, I need to write from bed. I need that in-between headspace between waking and sleeping to imagine worlds and people and find uncensored honesty to write. I also do most of my creative lesson planning from bed. It's basically what you were saying, Emma.

At the other extreme, I work with large groups of young people in schools, museums and festivals. So I shift between both extremes, focused, daydreaming and fully immersive teaching. Maybe I need bedworking to recover. Oh, that's a good point. Emma, if you needed tea and coffee, do you have it on? On tap in your work, you're working from bed space. No, that's why I married Richard Curtis. Brilliant.

Very good. Emma Freud and Dr. Alexis Granite there. Now, Professor of Law, Kimberly Crenshaw, is an American civil rights advocate who's a scholar of critical race theory and coined the term intersectionality. When she was five years old during the civil rights era in Ohio, she was the only girl denied a lead role in her nursery play, the only black girl in her class. Puzzled by her teacher's behavior, she spoke up and questioned the decision, something she's been doing ever since.

Kimberly's instinct to challenge what others accept as fair has shaped not only her own life, but the way we understand race and gender. And now she's written a memoir, an accidental one, she says. It's called Backtalker. I started by asking her to describe a defining moment she begins the book with. I start by saying that I am lactose, I'm like lactose intolerant with respect to injustice. I can't swallow it. I can't digest it. It doesn't work for me.

And I tell a story about when I allowed myself to be humiliated as a woman going to the back door of establishment at Harvard University. Yeah, you're invited to a party, right? Yeah, invited to a party, being a guest. And it used to be an institution that was all white. Yeah. And my partner and I who went there said, look, if they mess with us, all in any way, we're going to stand tall, we're not going to take it. And we agreed. We

weren't going to take it. And we got there and our friend told us that I had to go around to the back door. Well, I thought our solidarity pact applied to that. This was something we were not going to take. But my friend had a different interpretation of what solidarity required. For him, it only applied to things that affected us both in exactly the same way. So if we'd been excluded solely on the basis of our race, then he would stand tall, or with me. But since it was because of my gender, there was a sense that he didn't have to stand up for me. And that really broke me. I was shocked and upset and I acquiesced. And that night, acquiesced and going to the back door, I drank something that made me so sick that I negotiated with the heavens

that if I could recover from what made me sick, I would never do what I did that night, which was go around to the back door. And that has basically become my operating system. That's what I do from here on in. It's a very powerful beginning to the book, I have to say, for a woman to read that and go, oh, yes. Oh, yes. You were born in Ohio in 59 on the verge of the civil rights movement. So what do you remember about the impact of growing up in that period? Yeah, well, I remember that I was born during a time before we were free. I was born before all of the major laws that were put the books to protect us against discrimination and employment and in housing and in voting. I remember my parents who I call race men and women of the 20th century were fully aware that there were still constraints that would possibly interrupt my forward momentum.

And so their dedication was to prepare me to navigate a world that may not see me as who I was, may not be invested in my forward momentum. So they didn't hide from me where and how I was born, didn't hide from me the struggles of the past. In fact, it was important for my mother who took me all around town and showed me the places that used to discriminate against her as she was growing up. And the kind of fight that she and her father waged against these places. So it made it clear to me that we could never take for granted whatever progress we had made. and that progress was the project of talking back to unfair exclusions. So they shaped me to be the back talker I came to be.

Yes. You tell the story of how you were waiting and waiting and waiting to be cast as the princess in your all-white class and you didn't get the opportunity to play her. And how your parents supported you through that. Yeah. And that probably was the most important early shaping because my parents could have said, look, who wants to be a fairy tale princess, right? I mean, you know, this is make-believe. You need to focus on what's real in the world. They could have said, you know, it has nothing to do with

discrimination. This is just a fantasy. But they realized that an injury had happened. And they realized that in my tears, I was speaking up for myself. I was a kid. So I couldn't go into a rational argument about what was wrong about it, but I was expressing something that was real. I credit them for that because there wasn't a name for what happened to little black girls back then. And it wasn't clear how to integrate gender with the struggle for racial justice that we were all engaged in at the time, but they made it clear to trust my instinct. And so over the course of time, whenever I had a feeling like, this reminds me a little bit about what happened when I was trying to be a princess, it's different, but it's the same and important ways. That's what led me to see that there's

always a shadow of some sort. And until we can name it, we won't be able to grapple with it. So it drove me to come up with concepts to capture these experiences. Yes. And we're going to come on to those concepts in a moment. Then in a very short period, you lost your father. It was only 34 years old. And not long after your older brother, Mantel was shot and killed while at university. How did those huge losses affect you? Well, I think, number one, it made it clear to me that one can never take anything for granted. You know, things can turn upside down, you know, on an instant. And that had that impact. But we also were able to see what life is like when you are a non-traditional family, when you've been turned into a single mother-headed household. So at that time in

civil rights history, the arguments about what had to happen for black people ever to be equal were focused not on structures of inequality, but on the structure of the family. It was if that was a natural under-qualification. It was a way in which the overall civil rights movement could be condensed to, well, it's because of the choices that you make. It's because of the structure of your family. Because my family became single-headed because of tragedy, we might have been exempted from that. But what I was able to see was that culture, society, economics, all of those things actually impacted my family.

And that's what was impacting other single-headed households. So I grew up with a deep critique of the argument that patriarchy will save us. What will save us is paying attention to the families that we have. What would have made life easier for my mother is if she had the same kind of wage as a male if she'd been able to benefit from the property that she'd been inherited. So all of this made me far more critical of programs that eventually said the issue is not race or racism. The issue is you and your families that are in gender disrepair. So you were reflecting on all of these lived experiences from a very young age and then we get to

1989 where you coined the term intersectionality, which I'm going to take this opportunity to thank you for. Can you explain what it means and why it was important to identify? Well, intersectionality really was just a simple remedial framework that I was trying to use to get judges to see something that they seem to be incapable of understanding that racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination are not mutually exclusive. They're not running along parallel tracks many times. they overlap. And when they do overlap, they create injuries that many times people can't see because they're used to seeing these things as separate. So I was looking at cases where women of color were saying, look, we're being discriminated against not simply as racialized people and not simply as

women, but because we're racialized people who are women. We are women who are racialized. And if you don't understand that, you're unable to make the promise of equality real for us. we fall outside your frameworks and your prisms for understanding inequality. So it was basically saying, look, everybody goes through an intersection in which traffic is going in multiple different directions. Imagine that traffic being discrimination. Imagine those avenues being structures. Some people, because of who they are born to be, are subject to discrimination based on all of these bases. And our promise to create equality should attend to that.

So you needed a name to draw people's attention to it, and that's what intersectionality was. And then also critical race theory. Why did you feel that that was important to? Well, it was important because 20, 30 years after these laws had come under enforcement to protect against discrimination, we still had patterns of exclusion that looked very similar. When I went to Harvard Law School, there were two African Americans and the same number of women on the fact. And for the most part, the assumption was that's perfectly okay. This is not a feature of discrimination.

Well, we thought it was important to understand how you can have neutral institutional policies that don't say, you know, women can't work here or people of color can't work here. And still they function in discriminatory ways because they neutralize qualifications, definitions of merit that were based at a time when the, institutions only elevated and highlighted the careers of men or white people. So critical race theory takes a critical eye to the claim that color blindness or gender blindness is all we need to effectuate equality. Now, in January 2025, there was an executive order signed called ending radical indoctrination in K-12 schooling. It tended to cut federal funding for any school teaching what the administration defined as critical

race theory and federal agencies began flagging hundreds of words to avoid, including intersectional or intersectionality. What's it like to see that happening? I am not shocked because this administration has promised to take us back to a time before these words were part of policy, before there were laws on the books, before people like us were even in institutions. So that's not surprising. What was surprising to me is how other institutions that were not committed to this idea basically acquiesced. There are institutions that take intersectionality out of advanced placement curricula because they say these ideas are no longer useful. Well, that's clearly simply a feature of trying to make this administration. happy or state governors who got on board with this idea that we have to take all this stuff

out of the curriculum. And that to me is the moment where back talking is important because they have bent the knee. They have decided to comply. And that compliance means that how we understand our world, what we educate our children to do, has been undermined by, you know, those who don't want democracy to include everyone. And then last January, 2025, President Trump signed a DEI diversity, equality and inclusion-related executive order entitled Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Prefacing. The president said, I ended it because it's racist, I ended it because a lot of people were complaining that they were asked to do things that were absolutely insane.

These are his words. And that it was a radical revolution that was taking place in our military and our schools all over the place. What's the impact of that being for minorities? You know, I'm so glad you mentioned the military because I think a lot of people are confused about what he's actually after. What's the improper ideology that these executive orders are supposedly meant to advance? It's about normalizing a hierarchy in our government, in our military, in our society that removes women, that removes people of color. And as one administration official actually said, who was. able to keep his job, if you want anything to go well, you need to put white men in charge.

That's the ideology. You've said that one of the consequences of backtalking are remaining on the outside looking in. Is that a place you're happy to stay in? I wouldn't say happy, but I believe that that's my mission, you know, in life. And, you know, I wanted to honestly say that it's not costless to be a critic. it doesn't mean that you're going to be loved. It will mean that sometimes you are a thorn in the side, not just of your opponents,

but even people in your own space, even people in your own community, even people sometimes in your own family. But you do so because you love the idea of equity and inclusion, and you love the well-being of your people and your nation. And sometimes a mirror has to be put up. so we can see the ugliness or the missed opportunities to make ourselves better. Kimberly Crenshaw talking to me on Thursday's program.

And on Monday's Woman's Hour, could thousands of lives be saved if the government commits to more long-promised fracture clinics for those women with osteoporosis? We'll talk to a patient and a doctor about what extending these services could mean. Anula talks to Giselle Pelico. She waived her legal rights to anonymity after her husband, and raped her, inviting others to do the same, and said, shame must change sides. She shares how her childhood shaped her resilience to get through the trial, the impact on her family, and finding love in her 70s.

Join Nula at 10. That's all for today's woman's hour. Join us again next time. This is a nightmare. I need to get out of you because I do not want them to see me. A search across borders in some tricky situations. Shoot, there's a boat in the back of that car. Yeah, there is. No, no, don't get out. Watching smugglers who bring thousands of people to the UK. They have guns, they have knives.

They have no shame. And at the top, a man who keeps his identity well hidden. If they know I'm talking about him, they come tonight, they will kill me. Pop, pop, pop, pop. Can we find out who he is? From Radio 4, this is intrigue to Catch a King. Listen first on BBC Sounds.