Woman's Hour - The first all-women-of-colour cast and crew production of Richard II

Episode Date: March 8, 2019

A production of Richard II has just opened at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in London. All the cast and crew are women of colour. It's co-directed by Adjoa Andoh, who also takes on the role of Richard II. She discusses the significance of this version of the play, a story of a troubled King beset by problems at home and abroad. The psychologist and author Ayelet Gundar-Goshen talks about her latest novel, Liar, and explores, through the character of Nofar, an average teenage girl working in an ice cream parlor during the summer holidays, the consequences of not telling the truth.Dr Holly Birkett, Lecturer at Birmingham Business Schoo, on the University's Equal Parenting Project. It's some of the most extensive research yet into the take up of Shared Parental Leave, and looks at why more eligible parents don’t use it. Today and tomorrow, Women of the World Festival London takes place at Southbank Centre. What does the future hold for women in Leadership? We hear from Jude Kelly, the founder and director of WOW, and former politician Julia Gillard, the former Prime Minister of Australia and the only female to have held the post, who is now Chair of the Global Institute of Women’s Leadership at King’s College in London.Presenter Jenni Murray Producer Beverley PurcellPhotographer; Ingrid Pollard. Guest; Adjoa Andoh Guest; Lynette Linton Guest; Dr Holly Birkett Guest; Ayelet Gundar-Goshen Guest; Jude Kelly Guest; Julia Gillard

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 Friday's edition of the Auburn's Out podcast. Only around 3% of eligible parents are taking advantage of shared parental leave. Research by the University of Birmingham's Equal Parent Project asks why more mothers and fathers don't use it. A theatrical first, a production of Shakespeare's Richard II, has opened at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at the Globe in London, and the cast and crew are made up entirely of women of colour. Adjoa Ando directs and plays the king.

And Liar, a novel by the Israeli author Ayelet Gundar-Gorshin. What fascinated her about the impact of telling a lie? Now, it's International Women's Day and time for the annual WOW Festival, Women of the World, to open in London, where it began eight years ago. It's now extended its reach to 17 countries on five continents and has included more than 2 million people at more than 60 festivals. And the theme for this year's two-day event at the South Bank is Where Are We Now and Where Are We Going

in our moves towards equality between men and women. Leadership is one of the subjects up for discussion and with me is Jude Kelly who led the South Bank Centre for 12 years and is the founder and director of WOW. We're joined by Australia's former Prime Minister Julia Gillard. She's now chair of the Global Institute for Women's Leadership at King's College in London. She's also remembered for making that speech in 2012, addressing the leader of the opposition, Tony Abbott. The Prime Minister. Thank you very much, Deputy Speaker,

and I rise to oppose the motion moved by the leader of the opposition. And in so doing, I say to the leader of the opposition, I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. I will not. And the government will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. Not now, not ever. The Leader of the Opposition says that people who hold sexist views and who are misogynists are not appropriate for high office. Well, I hope the leader of the opposition has got a piece of paper and he is writing out his resignation.

Because if he wants to know what misogyny looks like in modern Australia, he doesn't need a motion in the House of Representatives. He needs a mirror. That's what he needs. Juliet, how much had you prepared that speech and how much did it just spill out? Well, prepared it, the answer is not at all. I was in Parliament for question time. We have question time every day in Australia. The Prime Minister is in every question time. And I knew because of political events that day that the theme of Question Time would be on sexism. And the leader of the opposition would be trying to suggest

that in supporting a particular man to be Speaker, that I had supported a sexist man. So it was one of those days. So I'd asked my office to get me Tony Abbott's top sexist quotes, which I was going to use when he asked me questions. And I've since joked that wasn't the hardest thing I ever asked my office to do. They got it done in record time. And I marched into question time with those quotes under my arm. But then instead of having question time,

the leader of the opposition, Tony Abbott, moved to have a motion instead. So he spoke first. And while he was speaking, I made some handwritten notes, which kind of guided the flow of the speech. And that was it, out it came. It had a tremendous impact internationally. What impact did it have in Australia? Not the same. I think now the same impact. And I have women, girls, men rushing across roads in airports to come and talk to me about that speech in Australia

and many women talking to me about how it's given them courage in difficult moments. So now I think it's equalised, but at the time it was received by the Federal Press Gallery as a big mistake, something that would cost me votes by men, the start of a gender war, which I ought not to have engaged in. So it was actually quite dimly viewed. And as the couple of days went on after the speech, the real extreme difference between that domestic reaction and how it was being received internationally just got clearer and clearer.

Now, Jude, at a WOW gathering yesterday, you said this is a defining moment in gender justice. What did you mean that this is a defining moment? Well, it relates actually to Julia's speech, because I think the reason that you got this overwhelming response from around the world was, I would call that, was the moment when you came out as a woman. Something I've referred to about myself when I started the WOW movement where you no longer are prepared to be complicit or compromise the reality of what you actually know to be true and you say it.

And what I've found now across the globe, because obviously we're seeing so many girls and women everywhere, is that the voices of so many women who used to separate themselves deliberately, either politically or because some were in commerce or someone wanted to sort of, you know, define themselves as good housewives. I mean, all the different splits that made women very careful about how they talked about equality. I think those have evaporated almost entirely. And now you have this deluge of voices. And I'm not just talking about the most active from the Me Too movement

or the Black Lives Matter who have been critically important, but also the disabled women's movement, women speaking about working class voices being necessary, women from right across the world, and being joined up by corporate women, political women, and everybody saying, this is enough now. And I have to say that it being legitimised and supported by boys and men, finally, in a way that isn't about, well, good on you, sisters, we'll stand by until you get equality, but actually them saying, genuinely, we need to change

and we're prepared to. But Julia, you've suggested recently that progress on gender equality is not just slow in some places, it's reversing. Why? That's a very good question and one that we are studying at the Global Institute for Women's Leadership. The truth is the picture is very differential. We've got regions of the world where, of course,

having girls being able to choose when and who they will marry, being able to complete a full cycle of schooling, they are still the big challenges. In our nations, Britain, Australia, obviously equal pay, sexual harassment continue to be big challenges. But we do know that the amount of time that will need to pass by at current rates of progress to get to economic and political equality are measured in the hundreds of years. The World Economic Forum has told us that. And the World Economic Forum told us this year that in Western countries, progress for women had slipped back.

Now, I think, you know, we've got to see whether that's a trend before we overreact. Inevitably, it seems to me there will be some years where progress is quicker than others. But generally, you know, I eat a lot of vegetables, but I'm not going to make it to 260. And so we need to really speed up the cycle here. And I think it relates to what Jude was saying. You know, the frustrating sense that women and men have is, you know, aren't we there yet? Why aren't we there yet? Let's speed up the progress.

But Jude, you seem very positive in what you said. And yet we know that more than 30 female world leaders and former leaders have called recently for a fight back against the erosion of women's rights. Susan McCorrer, the former Argentinian foreign minister, actually made that warning that women should guard against thinking their rights are safe. How justified is the concern that we really have to be attentive to it?

Totally justified. The concern is very real because we can see in Brazil already rights being rolled back. We can see in other places that they are contested rights because the world has not got an agreement that gender equality is something that is within our bones, within the natural order of things. That has not been agreed. So we're still struggling for that to be the case, which is why all rights are basically contingent

on people giving us those rights, and they can take them away again. The reason I'm optimistic is because I see an acceleration of the voices who are prepared to be courageous. I see an acceleration of the voices who are prepared to be courageous. I see an acceleration of the voices who are prepared to stand up and say, we will come together to fight anything that takes away our rights and to accelerate the rights going forward. And I haven't seen that scale of courage before. And I can see it in very young women.

And I can also see older women returning back or changing their minds and saying for the first time, I'm in this fight now. Julia, you said in a recent article that women are often assumed to be too soft, emotional or hysterical. Why do you think such myths persist? I think these unconscious biases are in all of us. And if we're honest with ourselves, there would be times when we've had whisper in the back of our heads, stereotypes about gender, about race, about a whole series of things. I've talked to many women about this and they have said, you know, yes, when I first went to work for a female boss, I did worry that she would be, you know, ruthless and hard bitten and not very likable. And yet we know from psychological research now that, you know, ruthless and hard bitten and not very likeable. And yet we know

from psychological research now that, you know, that's a stereotype many people hold. And it's partly because when we see a woman become a leader and sort of become commanding, we think she's given up on the empathy bit. So we expect her to be, you know, ruthless and unfriendly. So we can all succumb to these stereotypes. What I think we've got to do is analyse and surface them, name them and talk about them. And then instead of just succumbing to the whisper in the back of our heads, when we're in a situation where we're starting to listen to that whisper, we can stop ourselves and say, am I dealing with the facts here? Or am I allowing some unconscious bias to be a gloss over reality and I'm falling

for something that isn't actually there. Jude, you've spread wow across the world at times I suspect in countries where women's equality is not particularly welcome. How do you deal with patronising or dismissive attitudes when you're travelling? Well, one of the most dismaying things is that I can find myself in a situation where I realise that a woman or a group of women are putting themselves in direct danger. I'll give Somaliland as one of the examples of that. I might be able to walk away from the attitudes. They've actually got to live with them

and it might bring them into genuine jeopardy. We've just gone into a phase of now being an independent charity because we recognize that the scale of requirement for wild festivals around the world is kind of huge and partly in places especially in places i suppose where finding that celebratory voice is quite difficult and you know that's a very important ingredient you it isn't all about saying here's the injustice. A lot of it is about saying, look at the valour, look at the energy, look at the achievements, because women haven't been encouraged to celebrate progress because that's when you can sort of see the next stage of transformation. And Bloomberg, who've just sort of signed up to be our global help mate in this, you know, we've been talking together about how women are leading the way in sustainability arguments.

They're leading the way about debates about poverty. So women's voices aren't just talking about girls' and women's equality. They're talking about justice for humanity in a very interesting way. Julia, you are the only woman to have been Prime Minister in Australia so far. When will Australia have another female Prime Minister, maybe an Indigenous one? Well, I hope I see in my lifetime many women serve as Prime Minister, including an Indigenous Australian. It's not on the cards in the immediate term. We have an election due in May and the Prime Minister's a man and the leader of the opposition's a man.

And one of them will emerge as the next Prime Minister. Obviously, being from my side of politics, I'm barracking for a change of government. But what gives me a lot of optimism is my political party in Australia way back in the 1990s adopted an affirmative action target and it's on its way to 50% men, 50% women. And if you get there, that the parliament is equally shared, political parties are equally shared, then it becomes far more likely that a woman will come through to the leadership position. Julia Gillard, Jude Kelly, thank you very much

indeed. Hope everything at WOW goes wonderfully. Thank you both. Thank you. Thank you. Now this week a first occurred in the British Theatre. A production of Shakespeare's Richard II opened at the Sam Wanamaker Theatre at the Globe in South London, and it was staffed entirely, cast and crew, by women of colour. Adjoa Ando is one of the directors, and she plays King Richard, and will now, I hope, give us a sample of her performance. Okey-dokey. For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings. How some have been deposed, some slain in war, some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed, some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed or murdered. For within the hollow crown that rounds the mortal temples of a king keeps death his court. And there the antic sits, scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp, allowing him a breath a little seen to monarch eyes be feared and kill with looks

infusing him with self and vain conceit as if this flesh that walls about our life were brass impregnable and humor thus comes at the last and with a little pin bores through his castle wall and farewell king. Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood with solemn reverence. Throw away respect, tradition, form and ceremonious duty for you have but mistook me all this while. I live with bread like you. Feel want. Taste grief. Meet friends.

Subjected thus, how can you say to me, I am a king? Oh, well done. How did an all-woman-of-colour production of Richard II come about? Because I wanted it. I wanted it, Jenny. It's 2019 and it's the first time it's ever happened in this country and you are the only national broadcaster that's covered it, apart from the reviewers. So that's where we are.

That's where the interest is for women of colour. I went to see Michelle Terry, fabulous Michelle Terry, who is the artistic director of The Globe, about something else. And she said, have you thought about Richard II? And I said, no, I'll have a read. So I did. And I was going to talk about directing. And she said, so who do you want to play Richard?

And I went, me? Fantastic, but I'm not giving that to anyone else. And she said, so you're going to direct and play Richard? And I said, I know, I'm not totally bonkers. I'll ask my good friend Lynette Linton, who's the new artistic director of The Bush, has just been nominated for an Olivier for Sweat, her show that she had at the Donmar that's transferring to the West End.

So Lynette's in good shape at the moment. So Lynette came on board. Hang on. How easy, you know, director, playing a big, big and important and very well-known leading role. How easy is it to do both of those things and share the direction with somebody else?

Well, Lynette and I love each other. We're very frank with each other, blunt, and we value each other's taste. I think we have similar tastes. So we're quite happy to say that's a rubbish idea. Let's try this. And then the other one go, well, I think your idea is worse than mine. So, you know, it's and it's all done in love so it's fine I really wanted to create a space where women of colour could just come and be artists not have to represent womankind or you know all races everywhere because quite often you're the only one in the room and I wanted them to come and because everybody was a woman of colour just come and be an artist. How, though, did you see Richard's rather complex and sad character?

You know, in the first part, you're very masculine, posturing, and then the speech that we just heard, very sad. Well, for me, I reflect on the fact that he lost his father at three. He lost his grandfather at 10. And the accident of birth meant that he was supposed to be the king at a very fractious time in history. And was he built to be the king? I don't know. There's something about that posturing and putting on the aspect of being this God appointed king that gives him this huge external confidence. But for me, it's quite often the external confidence that hides the internal fragility. And what I love about Shakespeare's humanity

is that as the play progresses and he loses more and more of the sort of worldly attributes that you'd think would set him up to be a fabulous person, what he gains is his humanity. What he gains is an understanding of himself. I mean, that's why I wanted to do that little chunk from the play. Now, how much did you all have to think? I mean, obviously, there are a couple of female characters in it, but it's mostly men. And they're very masculine men. They're warlike men. How much did you all have to think about being masculine? Not at all.

I'm not interested in that. You know, for me, women are as varied as there are grains of sand on the beach. And so are men. I just wanted people to come and play the heart of the person. You know, Shakespeare writes on a heartbeat. That's what's interesting to me. So, you know, what do they want? What are they frightened of? You know, who do they love who do they fear play what your character wants and forget

about being gendered in that way just come and play the person from and bring yourself to it because you know there have been warrior women throughout time and we we continue to battle on a bajillion of different fronts every day so I just wanted people to come and bring all of themselves. You know, and we have the photographs of all our grandmothers and great-aunts and everything on the walls because I wanted to say, you know, you may go to Buckingham Palace and see Lord blah, blah, blah of blah, blah, blah, but for us, these are our ancestors

and these are the people who have got us to where we are today. Yeah, there's that series of black and white photos all around the theatre. And your photograph is of your grandmother. Yes, Mrs Mercy Hagen. Yeah, Mama. Why did you choose her? She's an extraordinary woman.

The full picture of that, you know, it's just a headshot, but the full picture, she is standing in a 1920s flapper frock in Cape Coast, which was then in the Gold Coast in Argana, holding a guitar because she played in a palm court orchestra. And my father's earliest memory of his mother is her singing and playing guitar. And I just love this sort of artistry that's run through our family. She's an extraordinary woman. She used to get on the back of her husband's motorbike, he was a surveyor, and go off around the country surveying the country. And then had all these lovely children

and was this very strong, loving, solid presence in the family. And I wanted to honour her. Why do you think when you went to talk about directing, was Richard II the play that you really hadn't thought of, suggested? Because Michelle is doing a whole series of history plays at the Globe. What's fantastic about this play and what really piqued my interest was the fact that it will be on stage on the day we do or do not do the B word, Brexit. So I wanted to look at this play that's about empire,

who we are as a nation, a nation in chaos and fragmentation, through the lens of people who have generally been at the bottom of empire, and that's women and people of colour. So I thought, let us tell the story of England. Let us resonate with that. Because I think quite often we get overlooked in terms of the centuries of contribution that we have made to the wealth and prosperity of this country. So I wanted women from across the empire in terms of their history and their ancestors to tell that story. Now, I do need to mention that we have heard you rather a lot recently. I apologise.

As did Maya Angelou. Yeah. And I wondered, how brave did you have to be to be the voice of that icon? Well, I did her with great pleasure in the 80s, and I met her then. It's a gift. She writes so perceptively and persuasively about her life. She spares us no pain or grief or humiliation. But at the same time, she tripped over these remarkable people, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Jimmy Baldwin. I mean, Nina Simone, the roster is extraordinary and she created herself from her own spirit and I think we stand on the shoulders I know it's a cliche but I think it's true

so it was a great privilege for me Thank you very much indeed for being with us this morning and I will just mention that Richard II continues at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in London until the 21st of April. Thanks, Jenny. Good luck with the rest of the run.

Thank you. Now, still to come in today's programme, a novel based in Israel called Liar. What fascinates the author about lies? And, of course, the serial, the final episode of a small-town murder. Now, earlier in the week, you may have heard the journalist Melanie Reid talking about her fall from a horse in 2010, which means she's since been paralysed from the chest down. There's a video on the Woman's Hour website where she talks about the way she's coped with the profound changes in her life.

Now, shared parental leave was introduced four years ago. It's designed to improve gender equality in the home and the workplace and offers 50 weeks of leave which can be shared between parents and 37 weeks of statutory pay can also be shared. But only three percent of eligible parents are taking advantage and the University of Birmingham's Equal Parenting Project has been asking why. Well Dr Holly Burkett is a lecturer at the university's business school. Holly why is uptake still so low? Good morning, there are a number of reasons that uptake is very low. My colleague Sarah Forbes and I have been doing research looking into this and two of the key reasons are really poor communication around this policy particularly amongst organisations. So very few parents actually

realise how they can use this policy and how flexible it can be for their families. And another reason are some of the cultural norms that still expect mothers to be primary carers. So how do those who take it actually use it? In all sorts of different ways and this is something that's really important for mums and dads to understand is it can be used to extend paternity leave after a child's born or adopted so you could take a couple of weeks to add to your paternity leave it can be used together so parents could take three months off at the same time we actually had people within our sample who took their young baby in a camper van traveling around Europe not something that I would have had the guts to do with my my children but it was amazing experience for that particular family it also can be used we've had a number of families where fathers have taken a few weeks when mums have

wanted to go back to work towards the end of maternity leave to support that process so that it's easier for mums to make that transition now the way the system works seems to be in the gift of the mother the mother gets the leave and then she can offer part of it to fathers and one of the things that jumped out of your report was something you've called maternal gatekeeping what do you mean by that okay so maternal gatekeeping um is where um mums um have the opportunity to use all the leave um and uh there are we actually found in our research that a lot of mums want fathers to be involved um so they can be very encouraging but then there can be times when mums feel and it's often because of pressure from society to to be, to be present for the whole first year of their child's life, that they can feel that they want to take all that leave. But why do you suppose women might be reluctant to hand their baby to their partner is it pressure from society or is it genuinely something that a new

mother just wants to be the number one parent in her baby's life well i think for different pair different parents there can be different reasons so there's different families have different circumstances um but yes so so for some mums yes um they've they, they've carried the baby or been actively involved in the adoption process and want to spend that time. But often, so shared parental leave allows parents to take the time off together. So it can be really, really valuable to a family to spend some time at the beginning, particularly together, creating routines and creating that family bond. How much is it have you found the early year that women seem reluctant to sacrifice and then maybe hope that their partner will share care later on? So we've been basically researching that first year mainly so there can be some reluctance and often mums look really supportive of their fathers being there to support them with them at the beginning of that period and are more likely to be comfortable and actually proactive about trying to get fathers to take time looking after the child on their own towards the end of maternity to allow them to transition back into the workplace if that's something they want to do. What have men said about their willingness to take it on? So that's really

interesting there's a perception out there that fathers don't really want to take it but actually the research is suggesting they really do and that's increasing even more among millennials so the majority of fathers say that the majority of fathers with children under one year of age say that they don't feel they're spending enough time with their children in that first year. And that's a really sad state of affairs. So that's one of the things that we're trying to break down, because when we're interviewing fathers who've taken the leave, the stories are just amazing. We have stories of fathers just saying it's been fantastic to be there for those key milestones, the first words, the first steps,

actively there when it happens. But to what extent are they suffering society pressure in the same way that the mothers are? Oh, you should be at home with your baby. To what extent are the men getting, oh, you should be going out to work and earning the money? Because it is often said that men can't actually afford to take this leave. How much sense does it make for the man who's often better paid to take leave and not get so much money?

This can be a real issue because generally in society still fathers tend to be paid more than mothers. So financial considerations are a big consideration. But as I said, the leave can be taken in a number of different ways. So that potentially is quite a significant issue if parents want to take or fathers want to take a large portion of leave. But there are also options to take shorter periods of leave. So fathers could take some time at the beginning. They could then, and they can take it in blocks.

So they could take some time at the beginning, and they can take it in blocks. So they could take some time at the beginning with maybe paternity leave. Then they could go back to work for a period and then take some more time. So they can actually structure taking the leave around both the needs of their family and the needs of the workplace. We've also found that some senior managers that have taken the leave have actually used it in terms of succession planning so to actually bring up people within their organisation to be able to take on the roles that they've been doing and so what we found with those kind of fathers if they've gone to their organisation and said right that's a busy time so I'm not going to take the parental leave the shared parental leave then but once that busy time's over I'm going to take three or four weeks to support my partner in this way and I'm going to get one of my direct reports to cover for me to develop the skills

that we need within the organisations. Organisations can be really supportive of that kind of approach. For those who did share what sort of effect did it have on their relationships have you found? So it has a huge effect ongoing effect on the relationship there's been a lot of scandinavian research and and also within our research that suggests that um that it affects the bonding of the family it can affect the relationship between parents over time um so it has significant effects at all different levels across the family. How much does the policy in itself need improvement? I mean, I think Iceland and Portugal have got the highest take-up of this

and their men have their own right to leave rather than it being gifted by their partner. What sort of changes need to be instituted to the leave in this country? So from our research so far, the leave as it works, as you say, allows the parents to share the leave. And increasingly, if we can move towards a portion of that leave being actually allocated to the father, then it's going to be easier for them to actually take it and to start breaking down any of those barriers that they might face, whether they're societal barriers, whether they're cultural barriers within their organisation.

And how much is this really about people not having the right information, not really knowing how they can make it work? It's hugely important. It's hugely important. A lot of people think that they can only use this leave if they take half of it each. A lot of people think that they can only use the leave if mum goes back to work and then father and dad's off. And none of that's true both parents can take the leave off together you can take it a short amount of times long amount of times you can take it in blocks dr holly burkett thank you very much indeed for being with us and if

you've done this if you've shared parental leave we'd really like to hear from you how did it work for you thank you now ayelet gund-Gorshan is an Israeli novelist, and her latest book is called Liar. It begins in an ice cream parlor in Tel Aviv, where a teenage girl, Nofar, works in the summer holidays. One of her customers is a Z-list singer who's been in a reality TV programme. They have a bit of an argument.

She runs from the store. He follows. And a misunderstanding occurs, which will lead to Avishai Milner being wrongly accused of a sexual attack and Nofar confirming that it really happened. The entire street hurried to see what was happening there, in that neglected alley.

And since Nofar was the one who was happening too, everyone looked at her. The dreamy-eyed cashier, the red-haired saleswoman, neighbors from their balconies, two traffic cops. Nofar's body, what a wash, was the kind of light that radiates from fondly gazing eyes.

And that light was now focused on a girl who had never before attracted a lingering gaze. A pretty lady officer held Nofar in a kind embrace and said, everything's fine, and it seemed that she had the authority to say those words in the name of the entire defense establishment. As the officer hugged Nofar in her arms to comfort her, the two traffic cops held Milner and demanded to know what he had done to the girl to frighten her so badly.

Nothing, he shouted, I didn't do anything. And the poor girl trembled in the kind embrace, because she knew it was true. He hadn't done anything to her. Ayelet, why were you keen to write a story where the main character is a liar? Well, it's based on a real story that I heard. And the story fascinated me so much that I felt that I have to dive into it to understand it. And it's a true story that happened in Israel, when an Israeli girl, a Jewish girl accused a migrant refugee from Eritrea in sexually harassing her. It was a big story, because at first she was considered the ultimate victim.

She was hugged by everyone. And then when she eventually confessed lying, she in one split of a second became from the hugged victim, she became the predator and she was publicly denounced. And she was called in names. She was referred as a psychopath and as a monster. And I remember I heard this story and I thought, what if she's not a monster? In a way, it's too easy to call her a monster. When you call somebody a monster, it's like saying he's not part of us. He's not part of mankind or humankind. And it's much more difficult but also much more interesting

instead of calling her a monster to try to understand her. So as an author, I said, maybe I can make up such a lie, or maybe I could get caught in such a lie. But given that you were drawing on a real story, it still seems incredible to me that you decided to make the theme a lie about a sexual assault, when all the focus recently has been on Me Too and women telling the truth about such matters. How worried were you that this might be too controversial? I used to wake up in the middle of the night asking myself, am I a bad feminist? So I was very bad, much concerned about this, especially because when I started writing The Liar,

I just had my first baby and it's a girl. And when she was very small, just a very young baby, I remember I was looking at her thinking, she's just a child right now. I don't know what she's going to like, what kind of music she likes, what kind of books she'll read. But I already know, given it's a girl, that at some moment in her life, she will be sexually harassed either verbally or worse I mean to look at a baby girl born today and to know for sure that somewhere in her future she has this coming it's terrible and for me Me Too is the one hope that maybe it won't happen so as a feminist I was concerned by the fact that I might be writing something that undermines me too.

But then I thought, well, if it was a man sitting here writing a story about a man pedophile, like in a book of writing Lolita, nobody would think that because the protagonist is a pedophile, it means all men are pedophile. Or Dostoevsky writing Crime and Punishment, nobody would dare to think that because we write about a man killing a lady, it means all men are killers. But when you write about a woman, people automatically assume that one woman resembles all women. And then if one girl makes up a story about a sexual assault, it means all women are liars.

I think in itself, it's a chauvinistic approach. You are a psychologist as well as a novelist. And looking at the way everyone around this incident behaves, why does everyone involved jump to the conclusion that a sexual assault has taken place, even though some of them actually know it hasn't? Well, I think there's something about stories, about the way we consume them. It's almost like the way we consume chocolate. Like you like chocolate to be bittersweet and we have a story here which is bittersweet and then we just eat a whole lot of it even though we know it's not really healthy

and we don't really care how it's manufactured and how many people suffer to get it ready for us. I think people are in a way junkies of stories with good and bad characters. You have it in fairy tales, you have it in Disney films. When we read the news, we automatically search for the good guy, search for the bad guy. Well, in reality, and this is something that, well, practicing psychology teaches you, but I think this is also something that reading literature teaches you, that in reality, you don't have this division of the forces of good and the forces of evil. You have the good and bad embedded in each one of us. a victim or a predator? And is the man assaulting her? Because he did assault her, not sexually, but he crushed her to pieces with his word. And I do consider it assault. And I do think this is something that men do much more easily to women than women do to men. Like in the public sphere, it's much more easy to men to crush a woman to pieces using words. And this lie, which is, of course, bad, is also her only way to get acknowledgement for her suffering, which is real.

Yeah, why does she become so emboldened and kind of improved by the lie? You know, she's admired, she's described as unattractive at the beginning with a bad skin and a rather dull girl. But then she becomes more beautiful when her lie is believed. Why? Well, I think some people look good wearing the truth and some people just look better when they wear a lie. I mean, we have this, we like to think that when somebody is lying, we can see it on his face as a sort of bad way.

But I think for her, the lie is like the blush on her cheek. She actually lies better than she tells the truth. And I think the moment she realizes that is the moment she's born as a woman and perhaps later as a writer. To what extent does everyone just continue to be complicit in the lie? There's a moment when the beggar, who did witness what happened,

tries to tell the truth and he is ignored. Is that because of his character or is it that people don't want to hear that a lie has been told? I think mostly he's one of those invisible people walking the streets of Tel Aviv. And as far as I've seen London, also the streets of London, people who are there, but nobody bothers to look at them. And because they're invisible, they can see everything. But as you said, nobody really wants to see what they have to see, or to hear what it is that they have to tell us. But we also have another character that finds out and that's the mother. And I was very interested because as I wrote it, I became a mother myself. And I asked

myself, had I discovered that my own girl made up such a lie? What would I do? And then you have the first moment you think, well, of course, I would drag her to the police and force her to confess. But then you think, well, think about the consequences. Am I supposed to protect my girl from the world or am I supposed to protect the world from my girl? Because I feel today in Israel people are much more concerned in raising a child that feels good than raising a child who is a good person. There is a second strand to the story

where Navar comes across a character who pretends to have been a victim of the Holocaust but actually hasn't. Why did you choose to go there? Well, it's a story of a Mizrahi woman, Mizrahi woman, a Jewish woman from Arab origin. And she did go through a lot because we have, today we have a lot of discussion about in the Israeli society that those Jews who came from Arab origin suffered a lot of discrimination from Jews who came from European origin. But this discrimination was silenced. For years we thought that Jews can't be racist towards other Jews. And this Arab origin woman pretends to be a Holocaust survivor.

And as she goes on a trip to Auschwitz with a group of kids to tell them her story, she really does tell her story. She tells a story of discrimination. She tells a story of suffering. But it's a story that no one would bother to hear unless she told a lie. Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, and her new book is called Liar.

Well, thanks for all your responses to today's programme. Diana Mears on email said, great to hear Julia Gillard and Jude on International Women's Day, especially the point about not making it all problems focused. I'm listening while preparing dinner, as I do every year for eight of my favourite women friends. We also discussed shared parental leave and whether enough companies are aware of how it works. Wendy Berryman on Twitter wrote, I believe until men and businesses take on shared parenting, nothing will change.

I see men all the time taking care of their offspring, but not vocalising, reducing their hours in the workplace to allow them to share being a parent. Jessica Cresswell said on Twitter, Please spare a thought for the self-employed fathers who don't get paternity leave, but are expected by society to be present in the early weeks after delivery

and still provide financially. My husband has often been judged. Rachel emailed to say I shared my leave with my husband who was then able to take three months to be with us after our twins were born last year. It was great. We shared night feeds and it pretty much saved my sanity as well as helping us to set up as a family. He took it as the civil service is encouraging more fathers to do it. The twins are now nine months old and I listen to and enjoy your programme most mornings. Claire Cruz said on Twitter, My sympathy is with employers, particularly the smaller ones trying to work it.

I've taken it with my husband. The forms are complex and there was no calculator that we could find online to help us work out exact dates. There should be separate periods of leave for both parents that are not dependent on one parent giving up some of their leave. I know of some mothers who are worried about being judged if they don't do the full period themselves. It should also be paid better. And finally, Michael tweeted to say, happy International Women's Day to all, especially to all my fellow BBC Women's Hour listeners and crew. Next, we need international, no prejudice of any kind whatsoever day. Now, tomorrow, weekend Women's Hour.

Do join me, if you can, at four o'clock when you can hear the Minister for Women and Equalities, Penny Mordaunt, the journalist Melanie Reid, who talks about having a riding accident in 2010 where she broke her neck and fractured her lower back. Join me, four o'clock, for today. Happy International Women's Day. Bye bye.

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