Woman's Hour - The Future of Women in Space

Episode Date: December 11, 2019

What is the future of spaceflight? In October, the first all-female spacewalk was conducted by Christina Koch and Jessica Meir, as they made repairs to the exterior of the International Space Station. As space missions become easier to conduct, the novelty of an all-female astronaut team will wear off. But there are still some barriers to women astronauts. To discuss the importance of diversity in space, Jane speaks to the first British astronaut, Helen Sharman, who visited Mir, the Russian space station, in 1991. Alongside Helen is Dr Varsha Jain, a gynaecological researcher interested in the physiological impact of spaceflight and zero gravity on human physiology, and Liz Seward a senior space strategist at Airbus discussing when humanity will colonise the moon and when the first woman will set foot on Mars. Femke Halsema is Amsterdam’s first female mayor and she says she wants to make sex work in the red light district safer. The plan is to crack down on human trafficking and the humiliation women working in windows face from tourists. Four main options are being considered including closing the windows in which women work and moving the red light district altogether. A consultation has been carried out and Ena Miller went to Amsterdam to canvass the opinions of sex workers, campaigners, a brothel owner, residents and tourists about the Mayor’s plans. A record numbers of women are standing for Parliament in the upcoming General Election - making up about a third of candidates. But where are the high profile women? Have we seen enough prominent female voices on screen and in the debates? And what impact is this having? We hear from Anne McElvoy, Senior Editor at The Economist and Alice Thomson, Associate Editor and columnist at The Times.Presenter: Jane Garvey Producer: Kirsty StarkeyInterviewed Guest: Dr Varsha Jain Interviewed Guest: Helen Sharman Interviewed Guest: Liz Seward Reporter: Ena Miller Interviewed Guest: Alice Thomson Interviewed Guest: Anne McElvoy

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. This is the Woman's Hour podcast. Hi, good morning. Today we're talking about the future of women in space and we've got some cracking guests for you, including Helen Sharman, Britain's first astronaut, of course. Also in the programme today, we're asking, election 2019, where did all the women go?

Where have they been? Some of them we've hardly heard a word from and some are in the cabinet. But it seems they've been entirely silent for weeks on end. So we'll discuss that on the programme today. And we have the start of a series about the red light district in Amsterdam. You might well have been. It is on the tourist trail. What did you think of it? How did that experience of including it on a sort of tourist day out make you feel about what you saw?

So we'll talk about Amsterdam's red light district on Woman's Hour today. Now then, to space. We did have the first all-female spacewalk back in October. But we're asking this morning what the future holds for women in terms of space travel. When will the first woman get to the moon? Are there still barriers? You might well recall an interview that we had on Woman's Hour not that long ago with a fighter pilot essentially called Wally Funk, who felt very much that she had been restricted in her ambitions and hadn't been able to go into space. And she's still well into her 80s, dreams of doing exactly that. Helen Sharman has

been to space. She's Britain's first astronaut. Welcome, Helen. Good to see you. You went to Mir, the Russian space station in the early 1990s. Does it, you were 27 and I was looking at images of you in your space suit. You really, you were so young. I know. I was one of those lucky people who actually was mission assigned as soon as I got selected. So actually the training didn't have to be years and years and years. So it was only 18 months training. And yes, I was one of the younger people who had actually ever flown into space. Very lucky.

But there are some negatives in that. You know, the younger you are, the more cells you have, the faster they're replicating. So actually, perhaps radiation is more likely to be a problem. So I was there for a short time. I wasn't so fussed, but it is lots of considerations, but I was very, very lucky to get in. You are brilliantly understated, I have to say, about your, I wasn't that fussed. How long were you actually on Mir for? I was on Mir for six days, but two days on Soyuz getting to Mir,

so eight days altogether in space. Right, okay. And how often do you, I mean, obviously you go about your business now. You work for Imperial College, which is the big science university in London, hugely influential and important place. But do you wake up every morning with space on your mind still or does it just play not that much of a part in your everyday life? I think it's just normalised for me. so it's become just part of my life. I go to, you know, around the world and meet fellow astronauts, and for me it is just a very normal thing. You know, friends and family as well, it's become normalised for them.

So if we go anywhere and there's some sort of joke about an astronaut, they'll say, well, we knew that because that was you. You told us that years ago. No big deal. Let's move on kind of thing. And that's kind of nice, probably the way it should be. OK. Dr. Varsha Jain is a gynecological researcher, joins us from our studio in Edinburgh this morning. Varsha, good morning to you. Good morning.

And Liz Seward is here too, a senior space strategist at Airbus. Liz, welcome to you. And now, Liz, Airbus, the space gateway, this is something that's on the way. What is it? So NASA's plans to go back to the moon, it's called the Artemis program, and it includes the Deep Space Gateway, a space station in orbit around the moon. And so they're building an enormous rocket to get people into orbit and then the Orion capsule, which will take astronauts to the moon, and then they plan to land people by 2024. So the big American rhetoric is it'll be the first American woman and the next American man,

but we hope that there'll be some other nationalities along as well. Well, you might hope. Will there be? Well, it will be an international effort. So the Orion capsule, the service module, is being built by the European Space Agency, actually by Airbus in Germany, with some British engineers' help. So we're involved.

And the project manager of that is actually a lady called Valerie Cadets. So we have European involvement, but we hope that we can get European astronauts as well through ESA, through the European Space Agency. Now, Donald Trump has many critics. There are many listeners to this programme who don't like the cut of his jib, to put it mildly. But the man is keen on space and keen on American adventure and achievement in space, isn't he? What has he actually said? We had a programme that was aiming to get people to the moon and then to Mars, but Donald Trump has really accelerated it. So it had ambitions to get people there by the end of the 2020s.

But he said, no, by 2024, I want boots on the moon is the phrase that they use a lot. And so it's really energised the space industry, the space sector to deliver this. So it's moving very fast. The danger is, can we do it sustainably? If we're going to do it in such a hurry, can we do it so that we can learn to live and work so far from Earth? But if we can do that, then it's great for space exploration. Helen, do you feel that there has been a re-energising

by Donald Trump of the whole space business? I think, yes, as Liz said, he's certainly rejuvenated and accelerated what's been going on. But I think there's a lot of, the pragmatists, in fact, a lot of my astronaut colleagues would say, really, in actual fact, knowing the detail of what actually has to happen.

Sadly, 2024 is a little bit too quick. But what we really do need to do, as I said, it's that sustainable thing. We've got to go back to the moon and do it in a way, it's not just to put boots on the moon while Trump is still the president if he's going to win another election. We need to do that in a way that will actually

enable us to go to Mars. Otherwise, it's essentially wasted money. And he does mean American boots, doesn't he, actually? Yes, it would be great to have some European and wouldn't it be great if we had British boots? Tim, it would be fabulous if Tim Peake could go back. Tim Peake could go back. Listen, I was chatting earlier on.

I think it's possible. It would be great if he could. Britain still doesn't fund human spaceflight hugely with ANISA, and there'll be a lot of people with ANISA who would argue strongly against it being a British astronaut that goes to the moon. But it's certainly possible. And he's got another flight coming up towards the end of the next schedule. Now, I believe you're very keen on, why wouldn't you be, on talking positively about women in terms of space exploration.

So do you particularly notice things like the first all-female spacewalk? Is it significant or is it something we should just say, OK, well, we've done that now, let's move on? I think before NASA advertised that they were going to have an all-woman spacewalk, I hadn't noticed that there had not been one. And I think that was the case for most of us in the world. Fair enough. Because it wasn't really a big deal. We've had women doing spacewalks all over the place.

The longest spacewalk was done jointly by a woman and a man. That just has been the case for years. And I think because NASA heralded it, then we all got a bit excited about it. And then of course when we realised why it didn't happen originally, because there hadn't been the right number of the right size spacesuits that were configured

correctly at the right time. And then we all started to wonder about the hardware. And of course then we've got a bit of the history to think about. Why have there been fewer women than there might have been in space. Right which does lead me back to my conversation with Wally Funk on the programme where she really brilliantly expressed her indignation that that hadn't been possible for her. So Varsha you have looked at women's physiology gynecology in particular why would

it be a problem for women to go into space? So generally, men and women adapt to the space environment in pretty much the same way when they do go up. But there are subtle differences between that adaptation process. Overall, so women get more entry motion sickness than male astronauts. Men have more hearing problems and vision problems when they're in space. But overall, there haven't been that many human beings in space. And so we just don't have the data in order to understand the exact physiological differences. Yes, it's actually less than 1,000 people, isn't it?

Absolutely, yeah, yeah. Probably about 65 women in space in total. So not that many at all. So to get that data back and to be able to understand the real differences is not really possible yet to draw out those conclusions. at all. So to get that data back and to be able to understand the real differences is not really possible yet to draw out those conclusions. But it's a vital and important area to be researching. Well, what were the concerns about female physiology then?

So initially there was about 20 year gap between Valentina Tereshkova going up into space and then the first American astronaut going up into space. And the problem was, as the thought processes, what would happen to the reproductive organs? What would happen to periods in space? And they very soon found out that essentially periods occur in exactly the same way in space as they do on Earth. So there weren't any problems there.

And ever since then, women have adapted and been able to work and live in that space environment just as well as men have. Presumably, though, a woman, a female astronaut could just have taken the contraceptive pill and stopped periods for the duration of a space trip. Exactly. And that's the work that I was doing at King's College London and looking at how women astronauts are stopping their periods. And they do that in a very safe way because that's all targeted towards their health and that can bring forward sort of lessons to what we have for women on earth also working in extreme environments who may want to be stopping their menstrual cycles for work purposes or personal reasons as well. There was a great story I think wasn't there about the number of tampons supplied to a female astronaut how many again was it it was 200 for Sally Wright for her first flight just in case she had a period. That is quite a period isn't it imagine needing 200 tampons. Okay so it is fair I think to say

that the average female astronaut and of course there's no such thing because these people are superhuman is younger than a male astronaut and would not necessarily have had children. Am I right there, Varsha? Yes, it's approximately about two years age gap between the female astronauts and the male astronauts at first flight. And the female astronauts tend to delay pregnancy until after they've got back from their missions, yes. Helen, you've had a son, haven't you? I don't talk about my private life, I'm sorry.

OK, all right. Well, I understand that you have had a family. And I wonder whether when you were first told that you were going into space, what was your immediate concern? Did you have worries about health, future health, any worries on that score? I wasn't concerned. I knew my mission was very, very short term. And there'd been plenty of other people flying for short-term missions and some for very long-term missions and for me it was, if you like, the risk was worth it because of the amazing things I was going to be able to do and experience while I was there. So you really weren't worried

and was there anybody around to assuage any fears you might have? I'm speaking as a person who thinks twice about going to France and I do mean that. I mean, if you remember, I think I wasn't just training alone. So I was in Star City with people around me who had been into space five times. They've done spacewalks. And again, it's being normalised. So it was just a very normal part of life.

For me, I hadn't been into space at all. So I was a minion, you know. I was nothing like some of the great and the good that were there who were around to give us advice and social, psychological, as well as practical advice. And when you got back, was your first appointment with a doctor to check you over? Yes, as soon as we were dragged out of the spacecraft,

we go into a big tent that's erected actually at the landing site in Kazakhstan. And then, yes, we get sort of a quick medical debriefing, as it were. In fact, even before then, they're doing blood pressure tests on us. So, yeah, the doctors have a quick look over. And then when we get back to Star City or wherever, nowadays it's wherever space agency you happen to be, then the doctors will do a very, very in-depth study on people's bodies. And you were able to stand up. You were walking.

Yeah, I mean, my mission was a short one, so I wasn't completely space adapted, which meant when I came back, I could stand very easily. Whereas the people who I came back with had been in space for six months. So they would have felt much more faint, much more dizzy than me. They would have been physically weaker. Their bone and muscle mass would have dropped much more than mine. Yeah, so you're right. So the differences are not between women and men they are between individuals aren't they that's what we want to focus on the thing is that there are um the differences between individuals are huge so for instance bone mass difference for six months are in weightless conditions and the difference in your bone mass can be like you can lose two percent of it or

over 20 percent of it individuals that's huge whereas if you look at the differences between let's say, an average woman and an average man, or where the median of one and another leg exists, there's huge overlap. So I think what's really important is to look at those basic physiological, psychological characteristics, perhaps the skills and abilities that we have as individuals.

It's that personal stuff, the criteria we need, rather than categorising people somehow. Let's say then we're going to go to the moon again quite soon, Liz and Varsha. Varsha, what about Mars, which is the next stop on our intergalactic highway in terms of humanity's journey? Will it happen in our lifetime and will women be involved? I do believe so. I think that the private space sector is really pushing that drive. So I do feel that we will be seeing human beings on Moon and Mars, whether it's males or females, I think it's got to be the right people to do that job for when they actually get there. Liz has got a view on

that, Liz. And in fact, it has to be a mixture of both. Because when you're looking at teamwork and problem solving, you need diversity. If you end up with a very homogenous team, they'll become a team really fast and they'll hit a sort of plateau of ability and then they'll get stuck in, they call it groupthink, they all think the same way. You need to have the diversity of gender, of sex, of race, of age so that you can problem-solve better. I know that you've said there are women involved at the top

in terms of the space gateway. It is space gateway. Deep space gateway. Deep space gateway. It sounds even better. But the big money belongs to billionaires like Elon Musk. And there are others. And they are Jeff Bezos, I think, has also got an interest, hasn't he, in space? Yes. So Jeff Bezos, the head of Amazon, has his company called Blue Origin.

And then Elon has SpaceX. And they're both looking at getting people into space in a commercial way. In fact Blue Origin has a launch this afternoon of their New Shepherds mission. And where's that going? That's just a test flight and that will just be a low earth orbiting test flight to take tourists and then they've got a second capsule that will look to take people to the moon. I mean I know there aren't that many female billionaires but women do seem to be missing from this particular world. They really are.

I don't know if we just have too few billionaires that are women or they're not that keen on space, but underneath that level, actually, there are quite a lot of women. So the SpaceX company itself, the president is Gwynne Shotwell, who's also their chief operating officer, and she's been at the helm for over a decade, and she's really been driving it forward. Okay, that's interesting.

And then we've got Virgin Galactic, who are very close to having the first commercial space flight. And they're hoping to do that early next year. They may even launch from Cornwall in the sort of not too distant future. And their chief astronaut trainer, so the first person to be a commercial astronaut on a commercial craft. So Helen was a commercial astronaut, but on a sort of government mission, was Beth Moses, so she is really leading the way in commercial spaceflight. I remember some years ago, Helen, around the time, in fact, of you going into space, that I interviewed your grandmother

on BBC local radio, BBC Hereford and Worcester, to be precise, because she lived in Kidderminster. And you can't possibly, of course you haven't heard that interview but I do, the poor lady, I cannot imagine what it must have been like for, she was of course by then an elderly woman, to be living through her granddaughter's experience. What did you say to your family

when you got back, what did they ask you? I don't remember so when I first got back I actually landed on the ground, there was a phone call from somebody in the British Embassy to my father, who happened to be the one that picked up the phone, to say that I was safe and well. And that was the main thing.

And then, of course, after that, I just was taken up in all of this debriefing stuff and visits to the Kremlin and press conferences. So it was a while before we actually got to have just a normal family time together. But that's the important thing, is that when you do get back with your family, it has to be normal. You don't want to be standing there giving them a presentation about this is what it was like in space. It has to be just a chat, you know, and it just has to come as part of the conversation. Right. OK. As I say, you are fantastically understated. Great privilege to meet you. Thank you very much for coming on.

Helen Sharman, Britain's first astronaut. You also heard from Liz Seward from Airbus. meet you. Thank you very much for coming on. Helen Sharman, Britain's first astronaut. You also heard from Liz Seward from Airbus. Thank you. And Varsha Jain in our studio in Edinburgh, who is a space expert and a gynecologist. Good to talk to you, Varsha. Thank you very much. We are going to talk about politics. I know there'll be plenty of people who will be thinking about tomorrow and think I'd probably rather be in space. But anyway, that's a little bit later in the programme today. But we're going now to Amsterdam, to the red light district there, which, as I said at the start of the programme, it's a tourist attraction. You go to visit it. It's part of your trip to Amsterdam. Now, a consultation process is underway about how to make the area safe for sex workers.

Critics feel that it's all about gentrification and stigmatisation as well. Selling sex in the Netherlands is legal. Our reporter Enna Miller has been to the city. She's made three reports and you're going to hear them over the next couple of days. Enna's talked to campaigners, to the owner of a brothel, to local people, to tourists and to sex workers. When you are there you try to shut your heart totally. We know that window working is a safe way of working. I was long time in prostitution. It was sex traffic for nine years.

It was really the terrible time ever what I go through in my life. Over the last years, there are more and more stories of victims from the red light district. And these stories come out in the news more and more, and there are more and

more politicians who start to ask questions femcal zema is amsterdam's first female mayor she says she wants to crack down on human trafficking and the humiliation many women working in the windows face from tourists that are flooding into the red light district now there's four main options being explored at the moment and the decision isn't expected until sometime next year. Now we've referred to the mayor throughout this piece and we did ask her to take part or provide a statement all of which her department politely declined. I'm Sally Hendricks. I work for an NGO that is working on public health and I'm managing the sex work project. And we advise governments, municipalities.

We're in one of the main streets of the red light district. So you see here a lot of bars, you see here a lot of sex shops, you see here a lot of red light windows. So can you just briefly tell me what has been happening with regards to what the mayor's plans are? We are in the middle of a debate so the municipality is writing several scenarios so one is relocating the area one is making the close brothel area so with closed curtains instead of the open curtains that you see around here now and the other one is to relocate to several separate locations in the city now to me this has come about from what i've read is to do with the amount of tourists now coming to amsterdam like a lot of people walk here just

to look into the window people make pictures and of course that's that's not nice because many of the women that work here the families they don't's that's not nice because many of the women that work here the families they don't know that they're actually in this industry the problem is a bit deeper it's not it's not the tourists that are stigmatizing or humiliating people here it's a deeper problem in the netherlands and you do see a lot of tourists here and there's people laughing there's people pointing in a, I find it quite difficult to understand why you don't feel that's a problem. It's not that I don't see it as a problem.

It is a problem that women are being called names, laughed at, pictures are being taken. But it's not only tourists who create that problem. It's a bigger societal problem. One politician I read about said it's outdated to treat sex workers as a tourist attraction. Is that what they are? They're not a tourist attraction, it's their work. But then to solve it is not to relocate the whole area, but is to really ask the

woman, how can you make your work more safe? What do you need to make it more safe? To fight human trafficking, you need to have a really open industry. If you close things down or you ensure that things move to the outside of society, then it's more difficult for police and health workers to have access to the group. So I don't think closing this area will really stop human trafficking but what it will do it will go really against the human rights of people that have the choice that they want to work here they cannot work anymore I have just stopped you you've just come out of your flat in the red light district you live here you know we're in a really quiet part of the street but literally what 20 meters away it's mobbed it's a different world yeah it's a very different world what i always

do is trying to avoid it so just to not see it but when i walk there i feel very uncomfortable and i don't like it at all especially because you hear more and more stories of the bad side of it so if you don't like it why do you live here of it. So if you don't like it, why do you live here? Because it's in the center and I like it a lot. And it's not that I don't like prostitution because I'm familiar with that, but it's more the amount of people that walk by here and too much people who don't go in. That feels weird.

A lot of people take pictures from the windows, so you have a lot of fights between prostitutes and visitors because they took a picture and prostitutes don't want that. There's a lot of frustration going on over there that makes it feel more like a zoo than it should be. For me, only the tourism is the issue, but not so much the rest of the things that happen here. So far I've seen signs saying don't pee in the street, there's no alcohol. And I've just gone past a few windows with women in them and some of the signs in front of them say no tour guides to stop here.

You can see I'm not recording you. You can see my pictures, I wasn't doing anything. I feel a little bit shaken. I basically was trying to record the voices of some tourists sort of behaving awfully towards sex workers working in the window. But the way I was holding my mobile phone was it looked like that I was filming her. So all of a sudden she just started banging the windows, the curtains closed. I didn't think it was being directed at me, but now I found out it was.

She thought I was taking pictures or filming her. She was swearing at me. She was really angry. It was just pictures or filming her. She was swearing at me. She was really angry. It was just really, really unpleasant and I wasn't taking a picture of her. And I tried to tell her that, but I've just got first-hand, really, the reaction of sex workers

when they think tourists like me is taking a picture of them. Basically, I think what I've decided is I'm going to go on a tour of the Red Light District and there's lots of them. I've picked one run by the PIC, Prostitution Information Centre. They're sort of like a cafe, a knowledge hub.

They're pretty much an institution here in Amsterdam. My tour guide is going to be a former psychiatric nurse who's been working in the industry for about 20 years now and she seems really open to tell me about an industry that she says she absolutely loves. BIC, good afternoon. statue that Mariska Major from the PIC created. The sex worker is standing in the doorway of a window in a proud way, head up in the air, she's not embarrassed or ashamed and it really means a lot to us. It's really important that it's a legal business, that you have access to go to the police if anything bad happens.

Do you think that all sex workers have the same feeling about the police? Like they don't feel that this is a threat? The difficulty is if you're from another country where you cannot trust the police, but then we have to tell them to come to us and we can find you a trustworthy police officer. The rooms, the doors only go open from the inside, so you have to be invited in. You cannot just walk in yourself. And the glass is of extra thick safety glass. Excuse me, but you made me ask you, why did you come on this tour?

I live in New Zealand where sex work is legal, so I wanted to see what it was like. Actually, it's quite entertaining, to be quite honest, when you pass by. When you look at it, it's kind of like a circus. You always make a negotiation up front. It's not afterwards. How long, what do I get and what's the price first you take the money and you put the money in a safe there's always a safe in the room so that he the client cannot steal it from you if there is still a difficult situation during the work every room has

an alarm bell and it's a silent alarm directly going to the window owner where you rent your window from. They're always in the neighborhood. Also mandatory to have to be here. Is it always men? Women are welcome too. Unfortunately, we don't have men for women in the windows. I would love to.

I have had several people coming to the PIC men who wanted to work for women but no one ever started might be difficult for men to get a couple of female clients in terms of performance and you can just go to that office and say, well, is this room available? This one might be available any time, any afternoon. But other, especially behind the old church, there might be a waiting list of a year. It's definitely a market of supply and demand. And also the rent rooms, not so good location on a Monday morning might be

60 to 80 euros. Very good location on a Saturday night might cost up to 200 euros and this is for a shift. So there is a day shift and a night shift. What I know from research is on average a sex worker has seven clients which equals 350 euros. First we have to consider our biggest pimp and our biggest pimp is the tax collector. We pay sales tax and at the end of the year we also pay income tax. It is still cash business although nowadays many sex workers would like to have a mobile credit card machine. Usually we are denied business banking because they say there's too much cash going around. Excuse me, would you mind me asking you, why did you come on this tour? I'm intrigued how that would make me feel, being on show like that, because I would be so insecure to show my body like that.

Tourists like us are coming along that we're not purchasing, we're just looking and then moving on, so technically you're part of the problem. They're not benefiting from me being here, so that's very true. That makes me very sad. And you can hear another report from Enna Miller in Amsterdam tomorrow. She'll be talking then, in fact, to a woman who used to sell sex in a window in the city. And she'll discuss with Enna her experiences of life in Amsterdam's red light district. There are three reports in that series. They'll all be available

on BBC Sounds. Tomorrow the playwright Ella Hickson is here talking to Jenny about her new play Swive, which looks at the life of Elizabeth I. And there'll also be a conversation tomorrow about virginity. How do you as a parent talk to teenagers about losing

virginity? Obviously tomorrow is Election Day, so we cannot discuss politics on Election Day, but we can discuss politics now, which is why we have assembled Anne McElvoy, Senior Editor at The Economist, and Alice Thompson, who's Associate Editor at The Times. Welcome to you both. And this conversation essentially is about the fact

that women have been, if not quite invisible, because obviously Jo Swinson is the leader of the Liberal Democrats and Nicola Sturgeon is Scotland's First Minister and has been on this programme, as has Joe Swinson. Women haven't been all that obvious in this election campaign. So, Alice, is it because last time Theresa May was the prime minister and so she was omnipresent, but perhaps fooled us into thinking there were more women around than there actually are in politics? No, I think it has been very striking this time that there have been so few women. It's all been about working to man on the voters.

And then, you know, we've got a raft of female cabinet ministers and they're nowhere to be seen. So Priti Patel, I mean, she's in a cupboard somewhere. We literally have not seen her. She's the Home Secretary. Yes. Not a word. She's at home.

Yes. She's staying at home. And the terrorist attack. You just thought, where have you gone? And then Liz Truss. And there's a whole raft of women. And you see Michael Gove a lot all over the airways, but you're not seeing many women. And I know it's because they're trying to make into a campaign between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn. But there are a lot of other men around. The top nine men who've been chosen, or the top nine people in the Tory party have been chosen to go out and bat have all been men. There isn't a single woman until you get to Nicky Morgan. Right, and we'll talk about Nicky Morgan in a moment, who's been omnipresent, it seems, at times. Of course, Diane Abbott is the shadow Home Secretary,

Priti Patel's shadow. No word from Diane either recently. Emily Thornberry, shadow Foreign Secretary, not a murmurant. So what's happening? I think what's happening is that this has become, because it was an election in short order, a sort of emergency election called by Boris Johnson to try and get his Brexit deal through and move things onwards from his point of view. It became about the leaders and about the perception of that clash between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn realistically as to who could be in Downing Street.

So if you weren't a female party leader and you just cited the two there are on the block and there's also Sean Berry as well. You could also take it as I say there are others, but they're for the minor parties. They're around the Green Party and other smaller parties. You weren't going to get on air very much unless your party decided, as Alice reflects, to put you in the top batting six or nine. The interesting thing is why the parties didn't choose to do that, either because they thought in the case of someone like Priti Patel, let's put it from Boris Johnson's point of view, her immigration position is a pretty hard one. Boris Johnson's trying to send a mixed message. One day it's we're going to constrain immigration. The next day it's, well, it's global Britain,

we're open to the world. It's the Australian point system. And I think they probably feel that her view is too particular. So I think they basically handpick people they thought would be able to cross the lines and they don't seem to have selected women in the process right it is an omission in terms of of labor's position on brexit emily thornberry and diane abbott are remainers aren't they so i suppose it stands to reason that they wouldn't be front and center in the campaign what would either of you say about that i I still think it's very odd. What they've done very well, Labour, is probably get a few of them like Angela Rayner

or Rebecca Long-Bailey out. And that's partly because they're thinking about the next leadership election, I think. So they're testing them out and trying them out. And they have promised that they're going to try and put forward a woman at the next leadership election. But they still seem young and they're very much viewed as being sort of second tier aren't they

and that's that's the problem is the women who is viewing them as second tier well i think the party is the way they're put out they're put out in minor debates they're put out they're never put out as a front person so today you know it's michael gove is absolutely everywhere and so is john mcdonnell and then you know the women are nowhere to be seen i mean there is a reason why you don't put the old-fashioned way of putting it we a reason why you don't put, it's a very old-fashioned way of putting it, you don't put a yearling in for the Grand National. It is very hard. Would we really like being put into the semi-final at Wimbledon

when you're seeded lower and still getting used to your match play? These debates, they can look a bit all over the place. They are very hard and you can come a cropper easily. There's more to lose, isn't there, from all of us in the political media than there is to gain so it's actually quite a big deal even to put someone like Rebecca Long-Bailey forward in a sort of what you could have called a secondary role but she was on on national television having to put across the party line so I can see why you don't necessarily take the women that you want to bring forward and say, you know, why don't you smash it now? A word then on... That would be difficult.

On Nicky Morgan, who is doing all the work it seems for Conservative women. And she's not standing. That's an extraordinary thing. Whether she wants a place in the House of Lords, whether she feels she ought to be doing it for the greater good of her party, it is extraordinary that we have someone who is not actually standing in the next election, who is being the only one put out. And I

think it's very difficult for female voters because it does seem very blokey, this election. Well, it might be difficult for female voters, but where's the evidence that they actually care and whether or not it will affect their voting intentions? There is evidence that voters, female voters, at least until we see what really happens on Thursday, we'll be back afterwards to tell you why we were right. But as far as you can see from that quite deep dive granular polling that YouGov and others have been doing, women do cleave more to the Corbyn project than men.

That does seem to, whether that's an aversion to Boris Johnson or whether it's on issues like the NHS, where they feel that Labour is still leading or on spending, they're giving Labour the benefit of the doubt. I'm not sure, therefore, that it correlates with there not being women about. But even if there aren't women around in the campaign, I think it creates a wrong impression about politics. And I think it creates the idea that your future is only in the hands of men.

And I think actually women should not be so quiet about it. I mean, it's one thing I would like to ask the women after the election. I'm sort of realistic about it. They're not going to come out day to day. You know, it's absolutely terrible. I was kept locked up at home. But what do they really feel about it? And how do they intend to bring that forward,

whether it's an ex-Tory government, a hung parliament, a Labour government or whatever the outcome is? I do think enough people have noticed it, for it not only to be on the agenda on a show like this, it does feel a bit painful. And the women, every time they do come up, I think the other big problem is that they've been so traduced. So we've interviewed a lot of people, Rachel, Sylvester and I, over the years.

It's your colleague at the time. Women, their colleague at the time. So we do these interviews and the female MPs have come under huge abuse in the last few years. So when they do come out, they get much more Twitter abuse. They get much more heckling. It's much harder, I think, as a woman now, as an MP. And I don't think that happened 10 years ago even, that they do get the death threats. And so you have to be quite brave to go out there

and you really need the backing of your party when you do. So is there even a possibility then that parties are protecting their female leading lights from that sort? I mean, that would be a real indictment of how far we've plunged. No, I don't think they are, but I do think that the women, and I don't think the women are nervous, I think they've been incredibly brave about putting themselves forward, but I do think there is a problem that people look at women as fair game

and are far more sexist, difficult, and actually, I mean, really aggressive towards women in a way that many of the men don't get at all. I think one of the things that's also happened is that the penumbra, if you like, the number 10 and the leaders, teams and the policy advisors and those who select what the message is, then decide who's going to be the vector for that message. That has skewed, again, much more male across the two main parties than for a long time. And you've lost a lot of people who would have been in number 10, women who had some say.

They weren't always super supportive to every woman, but they probably at least didn't have such a tin ear about it. So I think at the moment, things have been so hotly contested that you've had a lot of people, and I'm afraid to say they are just overwhelmingly male, thinking, I've really got to smash this one, otherwise I don't get my Brexit through, if you're that way inclined, or I lose my leadership of the Labour Party if you're Jeremy Corbyn. And the women's question, for whatever the ideological reasons on both sides,

has just got lost down the back of the sofa. Anne, well, that is depressing. No, thank you both, but where are you going to be tomorrow night? Any exciting plans? I think I'll be in one of your delightful studios. That's what I was just getting at. A ten hour stint with about as much coffee as the human frame can bear. You don't need to be bashful. Where are you going to be, Anne?

Here at the BBC. There we are. And Alice? I'm doing some BBC and some... I'm going back into the Times actually for our readers at eight o'clock in the morning. Alice Thompson of the Times, Anne McElvoy of The Spectator, who sound like they're going to be very busy on election night. And I think this is the first election night in what I can remember that I'm not working.

I've just decided I'm going to spend the night home with Emma Barnett and James Nocte and a bit of telly to kick me off at 10 o'clock. And I do have, I have memories.

I wouldn't necessarily say they were fond of previous election nights. I've done my duty at counts in Sunderland for many, many years. Then there was the one in Brighton. Didn't get the result till a quarter to six in the morning. But it was May and at least I wasn't cold. And I have to say, I felt able. How can I express this?

I felt able to turn down the invitation for this election to pop to the northeast of England to be up half the night and then I'll be able to get a drink. I remember last time in 2017, couldn't get a drink at the end of the thing. And we all needed one. But good luck to Emma, who I think, as I said on the programme, will probably be all right getting a word in. But I know at about a quarter to three in the morning, I did say Guildford Conservative Hold or something like that before Jim swept back in with an observation. It

was a long, long shift that. Right. This is from Alison, who says, thank you for that discussion this morning. I'd like to say how pertinent your question was about whether it matters that there are no women in the top nine Conservative campaigners. I don't think it does. I actually think the best person for the job is what is always essential, regardless of their gender. We now have lots of prominent women across all the parties. There's Arlene Foster, Nicola Sturgeon, Theresa May, Jo Swinson, Nicky Morgan, Priti Patel. There's no need for us to feel underrepresented or sidelined.

Yeah, well, I get that, Alison, except to say we haven't heard from Priti Patel or indeed from many other. Andrea Leadsom, Liz Truss, they're in the cabinet. They haven't been anywhere during the course of this election campaign. That is indisputable. However, there has been a sighting of Emily Thornberry. My thanks to Glyn, who says, Emily Thornberry is out visiting constituencies.

Yes, I absolutely accept that. I'm sure she has been. She just hasn't been prominent on radio or television. Glynne, who says, Emily Thornberry is out visiting constituencies. Yes, I absolutely accept that. I'm sure she has been. She just hasn't been prominent on radio or television. I had a great one on one conversation with her, says Glynne, on Saturday in Falmouth. She gave a rousing and inspirational speech. She spoke with all sorts of people as she is incredibly approachable. She then went out and canvassed. Please point this out. Right. I have done. And Emily is indeed approachable. She then went out and canvassed, please point this out. Right, I have done. And Emily is indeed approachable and chatty.

As indeed, in my experience, is Andrea Leadsom. So there we are. There's a bit of balance I've thrown in. Zoe says, I entirely despair of the political situation here in the UK, mainly because of the lack of women involved. I've seen enough posturing male peacocks within the government to turn off my interest for several lifetimes.

I don't think things are going to change until the majority of politicians are female. Wouldn't that be refreshing, says Zoe. Now, to the subject of Amsterdam and a series of features we're running, there was one today and there is another one on tomorrow from our reporter Enna Miller. Neil emailed from Amsterdam to say there are now so many tourists it's making the area unlivable. They are making it impossible for the women to work. They also suffer from the front door back door problem where the trade is allowed but there's less control at the back door with trafficking and women forced into sex work. The problem is not the sex trade, it is the tourists, says Neil.

Jo, during a camping tour with my wife around Europe some 15 years ago, we had one night in Amsterdam and we found a restaurant through the Rough Guide. When we got there, it was in the red light district. I was horrified to see the women in the windows. I couldn't sit and eat in that restaurant and I would never be a tourist, so-called, in that place. I don't think you'll be alone, Jo. I think there are many people who would agree with you there.

Space, and Jill says, at the risk of being a killjoy, I feel incensed that we are all still pushing towards more spaceflight. And Jill says, From Janice, the Earth is in serious danger and we have a limited time window to make the changes to protect the future of our children and grandchildren. The efforts, time and money going into getting into space could be used to address the current disaster here. Alistair, a ridiculous, expensive, high-impact sideshow that is all about the next wave of colonisation. And let's face it, says Alistair, that never ends well.

Slightly less seriously, Susan said, female astronauts wouldn't use tampons. They would, of course, use... You're all shouting, moon cups. And that's right, of course. And our studio manager, Sue, is looking desperate at that gag. But I actually thought that was all right, Sue. Got her head in her hands.

And Liz emailed to say I cannot believe I didn't know that Britain's first astronaut was a woman how did I not know this it's the first time I've heard Helen Sharman's name why do I know all about Tim Peake and not Helen I was born in the 70s so it should have been on my radar. Thank you for giving Helen airtime and for educating me. Liz, it's a pleasure. To be fair to Tim Peake, he never, never claims that title. He's given it, but he always acknowledges Helen Sharman is, was Britain's first astronaut. Join Jenny tomorrow for a politics-free programme. Amongst other things, she'll be discussing how you talk or attempt to talk to your teenage children about the loss of virginity. That's tomorrow. Henry Akeley disappeared from his home on the edge of Rendlesham Forest somewhere around the

end of June 2019. They come every night now. The police don't believe me. Please, I just need you to get in touch. What we uncovered is a mystery that has sent us deep into England's past. To an area steeped in witchcraft, the occult, secret government operations. Now we have multiple sites of five lights with a similar shape. And something that might indeed be altogether otherworldly. This is The Whisperer in Darkness. Available now on BBC Sounds. I'm Sarah Treleaven, and for over a year,

I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started, like, warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this?

What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now.