Woman's Hour - The World for Women in 2020

Episode Date: January 1, 2020

As we stand at the start of a new decade we look at three key issues that will shape women’s lives in the 2020s. And we hear some big ideas on how things could change.How do we tackle the crisis in social care in the next decade? Given the fundamental caring roles women perform in households, what new ways of thinking about and valuing care work might help find solutions?In women’s health - are we getting access to the right treatments and diagnosis? With the growing visibility of conditions such as endometriosis, so long down played as 'women’s troubles', we’ll ask what treatments and drugs are getting funded and why. How could science and medicine better serve women?What does the workplace of the future need to look like for women, and how do we get there? Our guests are Kate Raworth, a self-described renegade economist, the sciences author Angela Saini, GP and Clinical Director of PatientAccess.com, Dr Sarah Jarvis, and the writer and activist Beatrix Campbell.Presenter: Jenni Murray Producer: Helen Fitzhenry Guest: Kate Raworth Guest: Angela Saini Guest: Dr Sarah Jarvis Guest: Beatrix Campbell

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, Jenny Murray welcoming you to the Woman's Hour podcast. Good morning and a very happy new year to you as we begin 2020. Today's programme is devoted to what needs to be sorted out in the coming year and decade and how it can be achieved. I'm joined by four women who'll set out their priorities when it comes to women's health, the workplace for women and that perennial problem which so often falls to women to take care of, social care. My guests throughout the programme are the feminist economist and author of Donut Economics, Kate Raworth. Angela Saini, who's the author of Inferior, How Science Got Women Wrong and the new research that's rewriting the story.

Sarah Jarvis, who's a GP, a regular contributor to Woman's Hour and clinical director of patientaccess.com and the writer and activist Bea Campbell. Now, for some years now, social care has been at the forefront of political discussions about the really important things that need to be reformed and properly funded. But what really has been achieved, and what needs to be done to reassure us all that we will be looked after by the society into which we've contributed so much and not have to depend on daughters, daughters-in-law, or maybe, but less often, sons and sons-in-law. Bea, how would you define what's been called the care crisis? You know, that's a very poignant question because in December, the woman that we've, me and my partner, been looking needed in the last five, six, seven years of her life

was a shock to her and a shock to her entire family and community of loved ones. We experienced the emotional and economic catastrophe that that is. And there won't be a family in Britain, there won't be a street in Britain that doesn't know somebody who's living with what is really a tsunami of crisis around the labours of love. There's been ten years of political inertia

about sorting this out. You know, if you were ill with cancer or leukemia or motor neuron disease, then you would enter the health service and its systems, you know, across the left flank. If you've got Alzheimer's and you lose your identity and you can't move and you can't see then you don't and for many women of this woman's generation what happens is that you command the care of those who love you and care about you and you lose all the resources that you probably spent given the typical respectable working class, middle class person who's now in their 80s and 90s, you just lose it because that's what it costs.

Sarah, what do you observe of a care crisis in your working life as a GP? Unfortunately, I see a huge amount. We are getting older. There's absolutely no question as a population. And although the gap is closing, women do still live for longer than men now the good news is that we are spending longer living we're not just spending longer dying but by the same token we're spending more of our lives as time goes on in poor health because the simple fact of the matter is we've done amazing job particularly for men not quite so much for women we'll maybe come on to that in terms of reducing deaths from heart disease, which tends to be very much a premature killer.

But what we haven't done is prevent people from living with long-term conditions, whether it's osteoporosis, much more of a woman's problem than a man's problem. One in three women will break a bone and often be in terrible pain, stop living independently because of things like osteoporosis. So as you get older, it becomes more difficult. And unfortunately, the social care we've got means that my patients, there's often a block with them getting into hospital because people who are in hospital haven't got the social care

to get them out at the other end. Kate, why has care been undervalued for so long? Because, well, the simple answer I would say is because economic theory, which turns into the language of public policy, right, the way we talk about the economy and what's valued, it was written by men several hundred years ago, and they were cared for by their mothers. Actually, Adam Smith was living at home with his mum

when he wrote his famous book about how the market meets our wants and needs. And when you miss out that fundamental, I mean, I'm hearing Bea and Sarah talk about this deep value that we put at the heart of our lives of health, of care. Most people would say it's priceless to be healthy and to be cared for. And yet it's so left out of the way mainstream economics values the goods and service of the economy. So any student, and I hate to say it, but still going to university today, welcome to economics. Lecture number one, here's the market, supply and demand. It's all about price. And then if the market fails, well, we'll talk about when the state can step in. Actually, we should start somewhere completely different. If we want to provision for our wants and needs and care for our well-being let's recognise that every day we all start in the household it's a space of unpaid caring labour it's it's the place

of the cooking washing cleaning sweeping raising the children caring for your parents and that is fundamental to our well-being and the commons where people come together and provide community services community support now we need to start economics again, putting those right side by side, the household and the commons, together with the market and the state, and say we meet our needs actually through the synergy, through the interaction of these different things.

At the moment, because they're pushed to the side, it's called, oh, you can go and study that later, it's feminist economics, if you're interested in that. But it's left out. And yet here we are, talking right at the start of the 2020s about the fundamentals of well-being. When a family has a really unwell member, that is, as Bea's describing it, it turns everybody's lives around.

It should be at the heart of well-being economies that we now need to create. Bea, what impact do you reckon it has on the generation that I suppose you could call the meat in the sandwich. They're the children of elderly parents with children of their own and they need to be caring at both ends of their family.

Well, almost everybody I know of my age who was born after the Second World War is connected in some way to people for whom they offer care. So I've been involved in childcare. All of the women in my family have been involved in childcare for grandchildren.

Done with the greatest of enthusiasm, I have to say, for these little divine beings. And at the same time, you hit the catastrophe of social care, which is not just because there are old people and old people are getting older, longer and in more vulnerable conditions, but because the economic approach to care is to treat it simply as a cost and also as a burden that in the context of promoted austerity cannot be afforded.

So £8 billion has just been lopped off the social care budget in the last 10 years. So there is disrespect for the commitment to care that my generation of women now have vast experience of and great generosity in delivering, but so much of that great generosity is not reciprocated either at the level of politics or in our relationships with men generally. I don't mean some individual bloke who may be heroic in the care

that he gives to his grandchildren or an aged parent. But men collectively have turned their face away from sharing the solidarity of care, whether through their taxes or the practice of wiping bums and tears. And as a daughter and a mother, how do you hope to cope when the time comes? We've already thought about this, actually. My in-laws recently moved near us. I should say, so I come, my parents are Indian, my in-laws are Indian, and the culture in India is slightly different

because people tend to live in extended families, as most human communities always did. Actually, in many parts of the world, to live in extended families as most community human communities always did actually in many parts of the world people live in extended families and that kind of care burden gets shared and that was certainly the case that I saw with my grandparents is that they lived in the family house and everybody pitched in and even now as a mother a lot of the child care of my son is not just by me, but my husband and his grandparents, both grandparents, I should say. So I do see things changing in terms of the burden that men are taking up, especially younger men now who are becoming fathers. That isn't to say that they're taking up enough. I do think women are sharing the bulk of it. But in this country, I think there are a number of things happening.

As Kate was saying, one is about this idea of the nuclear family and everybody lives separately, which is not the case everywhere. And second is this demographic crisis. You know, we just have so many old people now. Angela, it is often assumed that women are the natural carers. What does the science say about that? Well, it's slightly open, I have to say, because we can't know. A lot of this comes down to, you know, how did we live in our distant past? How, you know, what is the natural state of humans? And I'm not sure there really is. Humans

live in all different kinds of ways, and they always have. There are societies, hunter-gatherer societies, in which men are very hands-on with child care. There are others in which they're not. So it's really up to us how we live. And we are very adaptable as a species in that sense. We can really live any way we want. I would say that if we want the kind of society that Kate's talking about, we can have it. It's just about will, you know. I don't think everybody really wants it. And that's where we're at at the moment but to what extent Kate are we going to have to have it because women's caring role has long been undervalued it doesn't figure in the economic planning but so many women are now going out to work doing jobs not doing the caring how do you fix it so caring needs to happen when we're raising kids and the question is who's going to do that caring i think it's about countries recognizing that it's

about parental responsibility you know let's look to the countries that have said parents can take a year's parental leave between them as long as it's split between both partners and that just starts to rebalance care roles between men and women. It starts to change what's normal. And you're more and more seeing in those countries, and often they're Nordic countries, more men saying, yeah, I am taking six months.

I'm going to look after my child between the age of six months and 12 months. And actually, I'm really glad because it means I get to really know my kids. And then I'm going to go back to work. And that is becoming normal and respected. So we need to change the law to allow this to happen. and then we need to change the culture so that women and men are sharing these roles. And caring for the elderly. You know, people want to look after

their children. It's an attractive proposition. It's hard looking after an elderly person. Yeah, and I don't know how we solve this. And are you talking about people being in the sandwich? I have 10-year-old twins and my mum recently had a broken knee and lives in a different city from me. So I was exactly in that situation of being torn between the two. And I think listening to Angela talking about cultures where families live together and let's actually, can we rediscover that?

And what would that look like making sure it doesn't all fall on the women in the family? So I think this is a big cultural norm that we need to change. We're seeing it happen with childcare. We're seeing it become far more normal for men to carry babies in papooses, pushing prams, taking time off work. Can we take learning from that and bring it over into how we care for our parents?

Bea, can we make that change? Well, we've learned a lot over the last 30 years. The dedicated childcare that men do, on average, in the best societies in the world for this, which is, as you said, the Nordic societies, is a bit less than one minute per day, per year, across 30 years. So the problem is bigger, I think. We are yet to witness a movement amongst men to make the thing that you have described and we all long for happen. Now, there's another bit of this narrative, which is equally structural. We're talking about, you know, the labours of love that we're all touched by.

But think of this. In China, as we speak, they're also living with a demographic crisis. It's also a demographic crisis that's hitting India. So those places where half of the world's population live are reaching a point where there won't be the women around to take care of old men and women. There just won't be there. The populations have been masculinised by boy preference and that bizarrely, of course, articulated the belief that if you have a boy, then the aged will be cared

for. As it happens, the women do the caring but there are fewer of them so the world is lurching towards a crisis that we now know a great deal about but has no answer to. OK, shall we move on to health? We've heard a lot about how men and women are often treated very differently when it comes to taking care of health. We've learned that drugs that work perfectly well for men could be useful for women too, if only they'd been tested on both sexes. Viagra, interestingly, generally useful for men with erectile problems, is now discovered to be quite good for period pain.

Then there's the coronary question. Women's symptoms of a heart attack tend to be different from men's. But how would you know that as so much medical research is geared towards the male? So how could science and medicine serve women better? Sarah, it's very interesting on Women's Hour. We hear so often when we talk about something like endometriosis or problems with vaginal mesh, we get people getting in touch with us saying, oh, I suffered with that for years until my GP. I was in terrible pain, but no one took me seriously.

Why? Well, it's really interesting you bring up those two topics because those are women's health problems. And I think we have absolutely suffered from under investigation and under research in problems which are exclusively those of women's health. I think HRT is another one. What we see, I remember seeing a comment not long ago from somebody saying, you know, this is ridiculous. HRT carries all these risks. This is a normal part of life. Why are we medicalising something that's a normal part of life? Well, of course, the simple fact of the matter is the vast majority of women didn't used to live until much long past the menopause, until the last few decades. So actually, all those

hot flashes, all those other things, if those were being experienced by men, my feeling would very much be that we would have looked into it a great deal more. But I think where, for instance, conditions that affect both men and women are concerned, you're absolutely right. So for instance, all the studies on statins, for instance, were done in men rather than women because women weren't considered to be as high risk as men. Women are less likely, even if they're diagnosed, to be given stenting, to be given preventive medication and so on in terms of having had a heart attack. But what we're also seeing is that many of the conditions here, for instance, such as incontinence, it's not very sexy and prolapse is definitely not very sexy. So of course, it's mostly done, the surgery is mostly done by male surgeons. There are some wonderful female exceptions out there. But I really worry, you know,

NICE has come out and said that under some circumstances, vaginal mesh can be used. My personal feeling is I've read the science and I understand their rationale but you know if I wouldn't have it and I would not dream of having it why would I recommend that to my female patient? But why do you suppose women's pain you know going to your GP constantly saying I'm in pain I'm in pain I'm in pain why does it get dismissed? I really really wish I knew and one of the issues of course with endometriosis is that the symptoms, certainly for many women, are very similar but more severe than, quote, period pain. Of course, if you've got a male doctor who doesn't understand what normal period pain is, or if you've got a female GP who's had herself a Mirena inserted and therefore she's been able to forget all about periods, it may well be very difficult for them. And one of the issues we've got with endometriosis is that traditional ultrasound scans are not very good at picking it up. So you actually need a laparoscopy, which is surgical, which is invasive,

in order to make a really good diagnosis of endometriosis. And it doesn't necessarily correlate the amount of pain you're in with the severity of the lesions when you do the surgery. And to what extent would you say women are poorly served by medical research? They are poorly served, but I wouldn't say that all women's experience is the same. There are class dimensions to this, there are race dimensions to this, and we have to bear those in mind because I think within each of those categories, people are treated very differently.

And we have to, I think one thing I've seen happen this year, which worries me because I covered this topic at length in my book, is that this narrative is emerging that women's bodies are somehow completely different from men's bodies in every way. That is just not true. I mean, although, you know, there are obvious differences in, you know, gynecological and things like that, hormonal, there is also a considerable amount of overlap, even hormonally, between men's and women's bodies. And some of the examples that people keep bringing up have actually been debunked by scientists. the bha british heart foundation edinburgh university did a study just this year a really big study the first of its kind that showed that men and women actually experience typical symptoms most of the time that are the same i'm really glad you brought that up i was going to but jenny sidetracked me because you're right for years we've said women are much more likely to get

abnormal atypical it's not the central crushing chest pain actually it is so you're right there are similarities but i think we do sometimes fail to recognise them. One of the issues, as you both brought up, is that a lot of this is not necessarily to do with sex differences, so biological differences between men and women, but about how they are treated. So we know that black women, for instance, get worse treatment than other groups. Now, this has nothing to do with them being black or women. This is just because of racism and prejudice among doctors and in the medical community. How well is that kind of thing being researched?

I mean, earlier in the year, we did a whole programme about maternal mortality among black and Asian women, which was so much higher than among white women. Are people looking at these reasons and why and saying, look, this has to stop? Yeah, they are actually. And I'm going to a conference later this year at the BMA where they've already done this research. So we'll look for the outcomes of that. So not just racism in terms of patient care, but also racism towards doctors within the medical profession.

These are big issues. One thing I just wanted to say is another big example that gets brought up all over the world in terms of differences in drug reaction. We have to remember, I mean, this is something else I hear that just drives me crazy, is people say that drugs tested in men don't work on women. Although there are a few very isolated cases of that, very often it's not, again, not to do with sex differences. Zolpidem, which is a sleep drug, famously in the US, the FDA designated different doses for men and women. Well, actually, it turned out later

research showed that this was all to do with, or mostly to do with size. So a larger man would need a higher dose, a smaller man might need a lower dose, and a larger woman would need a higher dose like the average man might. There are no typical men or women. No, we have exactly the same thing with alcohol because, of course, it's assumed to be a gender and we have always had. Not anymore. We now say not more than 14 units a week for both men and women divided up over several days and with a couple of alcohol-free days. And that's been a big change for men because the level has gone down. But the interesting thing is it's because we're looking at different parameters. Now we're looking at cancer, for instance, and the impact on men,

and it does have an impact if you drink alcohol at a lower level. But women will have a higher blood alcohol level because they're smaller and because they have a higher proportion of body fat, which means they've got a smaller proportion of body water alcohol is distributed in body water so if a man and a woman of the same size drink the same amount the woman's blood alcohol will be higher what's happening that's positive that's hopeful sarah about health oh there is a great deal that is positive about health for instance breast cancer the single most common cancer in this country, despite the fact that virtually always, not always, some men do get it, but virtually

always it only affects women. One in eight women will get it during their lifetime. Survival rates have doubled in the last 40 years. And actually, breast cancer doesn't even have the best survival rate. Even advanced melanoma, we are now able to provide real hope for people so i think in terms of cancer we've made enormous advances in terms of mental health there's still a long way to go but in terms of cardiovascular health as well we really have made huge advances and we've dramatically reduced the number of women as well as men who are dying. Angela? I think, so I've just come back from the US, where I was speaking at many of the universities and the National Institutes of Health. And one of the wonderful things I see happening in health and medical research funding bodies all over the world

now is an understanding that we need to be treated as individuals. And although this has been a dream for a long time, personalised medicine, now all different kinds of data, so not just gender and not just socioeconomic stuff, but everything, you know, your diet, where you live, your educational level, all these things are being overlaid to try and understand, as well as the person's particular history and genetics and family history are being overlaid to make sure that that individual person, not because they're a man or because they're a woman, are getting the treatment that they need.

Still to come in today's programme, as the time for resolution has come round again, what do our four guests hope will be achieved in work in 2020? And, of course, the serial, the first episode of Charlotte and Lillian. Now, earlier this week, you may have missed James phone in on habits. And yesterday, the heterosexual couple who campaigned for civil partnership rather than marriage and have finally achieved it. And don't forget, if you miss the programme as broadcast, you can catch up by downloading the BBC Sounds app. And so to the workplace. As the 21st century progresses, we find that the number of women in paid employment is the

highest since records began, and three quarters of all mothers go out to work. So there's a higher proportion of mothers in work than single men. But how well does the workplace treat women? What are your chances of progression and promotion? How likely are you to get equal pay for work of equal value? And how many young fathers have gone part-time compared with young mothers? Bea, what does the workplace for women look like to you right now? To me, it looks like this. There's a lot of talk about, oh, great, isn't it? Yes, we're approaching the point where men and women will be earning equal pay for equal work. We've got there. We've got there. The argument is over. Sad to say, it's not. If you look at the gender gap in annual earnings between men and women, that's important because

it addresses what men and women actually have available to them in their earnings over a year. The gap is absolutely stable in Europe between 25 and 30 percent and it isn't going anywhere. Indeed, in Britain it's getting worse and in Europe there's no sign that it's getting any better. Why? Why? Well, two reasons. One is that there is a fragmentation in the labour market that means that an increasing number of people are part of what we call the precariat. That means that they're outside what would be regarded as the official labour market. Zero-hours contracts, people who are not paid for their time getting from A to B.

We know very well now about what the life of a precarious carer is, for example. But I think there are all sorts of ways in which, firstly, men's earnings are boosted by bonuses and all sorts of hidden fixes that ensure their privilege in their wages. And, in fact, interestingly, one of the major sources of unequal pay in the public sector, which is formally committed to equal pay and has been for a very long time, is the preservation of the red fence around the bonuses that have been accorded to men since the 1970s,

when the legislation that we're now living with, was first formed. So there's been a deliberate commitment, hidden from most women, to preserving men's pay privilege. The other issue, of course, is the politics of time. In the city, where there's a massive pay gap between men and women, men work all the hours that God gives because they either have a wife at home looking after their kids or they pay somebody to look after their kids. So Kate, as an economist, how do we resolve that problem? Well, for me, it starts by recognising that whether it's paid or not, care is fundamental to our well-being. And I just want to say that this decade has to be the decade where

more and more countries move from thinking that economic success is endless GDP growth, endless national income increasing by what percent every year, and this, you know, frenetic reporting around the quarterly GDP results. That is just so last century. Let's move towards well-being economies. And I think it's not a coincidence that the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, is the Prime Minister who I'd say is leading this saying, actually, we're going to measure the success of our economy in terms of well-being. So let's start moving away from financialised national accounts to well-being accounts. Now, when you start going there, so really the big framing of the economy now, well-being, we know depends on care, on this balance that B is so clearly describing between women, you know, having a job in there, in the city or wherever, in the canteen or in the shop alongside men and having to leave at 320 or having to, you know, only come in when the kids have gone to school. And that is the reality of life.

And men are often expected to lead a very unnatural life which has no cycles. It doesn't have sleep time and child time and rest time. It's this kind of rational economic man that again comes from economic theory, endlessly working, efficient, productive, competitive. And men are, I think, expected to perform to that. And so it exacerbates this difference. But does flexible working which you know so many companies are moving towards does that begin to solve the problem for both men and women or maybe shared part-time working for both men and

women? I think both as and it's as long as it's for both women and men as you say so that if we are if both women and men are modelling that this can be normal, that I can work part-time of the week or part-time from home, and it's normal to say, I'm really sorry, I'm going to have to jump off this conference call now because I'm going to go and collect my kids. Women are having to do that all the time, often half apologetic. I would like to hear more than half.

Right. I would like to hear more men saying, oh, I need to jump off the call right now because I need to go and get my kids as well. That's when we start changing cultural norms and also talking about the fact that care is part of our lives. And we need to rein in the space that's taken up by our marketed jobs rather than always squeezing care quietly out of sight because it's not very professional to make it show. Sarah, we know there are more part-time doctors than ever before and I suspect that's because there are so many more women who are GPs. Well certainly in general practice we've got far far more part-time GPs than we ever had. Now when I first became a GP about 25 percent of women of GPs were women and I was definitely in the minority 30 years later

it's well over 50 percent and attitudes have changed. And in many respects, I think that's no bad thing. But part of the problem I have is that if you've got people who are more boundaries, and you've got something like general practice, where there are just people, it is, you know, it is patient led, it is not demand led, it is not necessarily needs led, then we do need to be aware that actually, the past the government has completely underestimated the number of excess hours that GPs did unpaid unnoticed as you say because they weren't part of their quote contract and that now we have got more women who are more likely to say I've got child care commitments I've seen this myself in my own practice my colleagues who got younger children they were the ones who would jump off and that there was one occasion where I had a colleague who said,

well, I'm going to have to leave when I come back from maternity leave at 5.30 because I've got a child to collect. And I said, well, who's going to deal with the patients? I've got children too. And she said, well, that's your responsibility. And, you know, I think we need to actually start to take responsibility as well as saying, I've got to take responsibility for home, but what about at work?

Can we all be equal here? How much equality, Angela, exists in science? Well, there are some disciplines in which there are many more women. There are others like maths and physics and engineering, which I studied, in which there are very few. You see far fewer women at the top, as you do right across academia, because these are professions that require really long hours. And I think that is kind of the breaking point for a lot of women is that when you have children, you just can't do those long hours.

Now, I think, as you've all been saying, we can take steps in order to rebalance things and reintroduce things. I should say my experience feels completely different to the other women in this conversation because I grew up in a very egalitarian family. My parents ran a business and they completely split all the housework and childcare between them. And my dad now, since my parents retired, my mum is doing social work,

my dad does all the housework and cooking. And his view was always that work is work, whether it's at home or whether it's somewhere else. And that's the ethos I've always taken in my life. Work at home, whether it's paid or not, is work. It needs to be done. It can't be factored out of the way that we structure society. And I think if we're going to acknowledge that, then we need to talk about it at work. So one of the things I do i'm a freelance but when i'm invited to conferences and festivals i always say to them will you pay for my child care

will you pay for my son to come with me if it's half term and if we each in our own little way remind people that we work with and the institutions we work for that actually there is stuff to do at home and we have to do it and they have to pay for that, then maybe we can restructure things. Bea, just one final point on this. I mean, that's all very well, but how much care needs to be taken with this forcing the women, forcing the families issue on employers and maybe risking them just getting sick of it?

I think they're already sick of it and I think they've always been sick of it. And the reason they getting sick of it? I think they're already sick of it and I think they've always been sick of it and the reason they're sick of it is because they don't want to have to think about their employees, their workers as people who have a life outside that office. They never wanted to think about that issue and they will have to be forced to. There's no way around it. History, 150 years, 200 years, have told us that the last thing an employer wants to take responsibility for is what the worker is faced with when it steps out of that door.

So, what we have to do, and this connects to some of our earlier conversation, is expect of employers what we expect of ourselves, that they think about humans as people who were trained before they walk through that door, who've arrived on roads and trains that are being paid for collectively before they get through that door that the humans that they employ are people who've been made and will make a world outside that building. They have to participate in and they have to take responsibility for how that gets resourced. And we live in a society which is very reluctant, very reluctant, to do what they call put a burden on the employer. So we leave the burden entirely with the employee. That conversation needs to change.

Angela, what difference would you say having more women in science is making? It is changing the way research is done. It is changing how people think about women being able to do intellectual things. I mean, one of the reasons there weren't so many women for hundreds of years is that there was an active belief that women just didn't have the intellectual capacity, so they just weren't admitted. They were barred from the scientific academies and universities. That has changed, thank goodness, although not completely. One of my fears is that we see a backlash effect now among some male scientists who say that, you know, it's because of quotas or it's some kind of other factor that women are exploiting in order to get access to these male bastions. Of course, that's not the case.

Men have coasted for a long time in these professions and they are now getting their rightful place. But there are other issues also to solve. There are class issues, race issues, lots of other things that need to be addressed in order to change academia fundamentally. So to round up on the 1st of January 2020, a new year, a new decade and new resolutions obviously required. I want to go around each of you and ask you what's your one big hope for a resolution for women that should be made by the government or by men and women themselves? Kate? Well I want to pick up on this point about women in science because what excites

me for this coming decade in which we need to reinvent our relationship to the living world right we need to cut our carbon emissions we need to reinvent our relationship to the living world right we need to cut our carbon emissions we need to turn our economies from waste producing economies to circular economies and i see women inventors designers thinkers leading so much of this so i think women as angela says women's role in science they're actually leading an intellectual revolution i see janine benyus in the US inventing biomimicry and what can we learn from nature's design. Ellen MacArthur, the sailor, who's now leading the charge

on creating a circular economy. I see Liz Corbin in London who set up this fantastic lab making 21st century materials out of seaweed and eggshells and coffee grounds and walnut shells. And so it's women actually reconnecting with the earth and reinventing science so i want to put those women's insights and innovations at the heart of our new economies angela well i'm working on a project now to combat pseudoscience online i'm working with other journalists policymakers and scientists because for me the lack of regulation in online spaces is doing huge damage to not just to democracy,

but to women's rights. And I would love to see our government take some steps on that. So it's been very difficult for me not to see it here actively clapping both of those statements. But if there's one thing I'd like the government to do is to stop using the NHS as a political football. It has done it for far too long. Every government wants short term headlines and short term headlines mean that they're going to focus on the sexy stuff, on the acute stuff. What they need to do is to start looking into the fact that actually preventive treatments are going to keep our populations well and particularly women. Women do particularly bad out of this and those preventive treatments are going to keep our populations well, and particularly women. Women do particularly bad out of this. And those preventive treatments are going to cost now,

and they're going to reap benefits 10, 20 years down the line. And as long as the government is intent on short-term headlines about how much it's invested, then frankly, we are not going to get those treatments, and it's women who need them most. And B? I agree with all of that, and I'd like to add, imagine a feminist foreign policy that takes responsibility for the environmental emergency and for promoting that being sorted out at the global level and for promoting no more war and violence, violence as a way of doing business.

Peace. Bea Campbell, Sarah Jarvis, Angela Saini and Kate Raworth, thank you so much, all of you. Really interesting discussion. And of course, we would like to hear from you. What do you want to see in 2020 to improve the lives of women? And again, to all of you, a very happy new year. Bye-bye. 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 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.