Woman's Hour - Ukrainian Drone Pilot, Young women NEETs, Kimberlé Crenshaw

Episode Date: May 28, 2026

The role of women is growing in Ukraine’s war effort, from military recruitment to frontline drone warfare. Anita Rani talks to 'Morva,' a female combat drone pilot who, aged 25, is fighting Russian forces on the front line and Olesia Horiainova, Deputy Director of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Centre - a think tank that works in military recruitment - about how women, and not just Ukrainian women, are getting involved in the fight to defend the country.Alan Milburn, the former Labour health secretary says there's a risk of a "lost generation" in the UK, unless urgent action is taken to ensure more young people are either earning or learning. He's the author of a government-commissioned interim report titled Young People and Work that's released today. To look at what this means for women Anita talks to Kate Nightingale, the campaigns director at Young Women's Trust which champions for young women on low or no pay. When the American Professor of Law, Kimberlé Crenshaw was five years old, at the time of the civil rights era in Ohio, USA, she was allowed to portray a witch but not a princess in a nursery play. Puzzled by her teacher’s behaviour, Kimberlé spoke up and never stopped, firmly establishing herself as a Backtalker, the name of her new memoir. Kimberlé joins Anita to talk about becoming a pioneering scholar and writer on civil rights and her instinct to question power and challenge what others accept as fair.A new retrospective of the late Indian artist Mrinalini Mukherjee, a modernist sculptor, has opened at The Hepworth Wakefield in Yorkshire. Called Mrinalini Mukherjee: Unbound Forms - Women Sculptors of India and Bangladesh, it presents her art alongside that by other sculptors from India and Bangladesh, including her own mother, and explores the impact of South Asian women. Anita talks to the exhibition's curator Tarini Malik and the artist and close friend of Mrinalini’s, Bharti Kher. Presenter: Anita Rani Producer: Rebecca Myatt

Hello, I'm Anita Rani and welcome to Woman's Hour from BBC Radio 4. Good morning and welcome to the programme. Now, she's the American legal scholar who coined the terms intersectionality and critical race theory. Now, Kimberly Crenshaw has written a memoir. It's called Backtalker. She's going to be here to explain it all. More women are fighting on the front line in Ukraine because of drone warfare. You'll be hearing from one of those drone operators.

And a major retrospective at the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield of the late Indian sculptor Murnalini Mukaji and other Indian and Bangladeshi women sculptors has opened. We'll be finding out about her extraordinary life from the curator of the exhibition and the artist Bharti Kare. And if you'd like to get in touch with the programme, do so in the usual way. If there's anything you'd like to comment on,

the text number is 84844. You can email the programme by going to our website or you can WhatsApp us on 037100,100. But first, Alan Milburn, the former Labour Health Secretary, says there's a risk of a lost generation in the UK, unless urgent action is taken to ensure more young people are either earning or learning. He's the author of a government-commissioned interim report titled Young People and Work that's released today. Latest figures show the unemployment rate for 16 to 24-year-olds is 16.2% the highest since 2014, and more than three times. the broader unemployment rate of 5%. To look at what this means for women,

I'm joined by Kate Nightingale, the campaign director at Young Women's Trust, which champions for young women on low or no pay. But also, I must say, if you have experience of this, whether you have a young out-of-work woman at home, if you are one, or you've been through it yourself, how tough is it to get into work right now? Or maybe you simply have advice.

Maybe you were out of work, you've got into work, whatever you'd like to say on this, It's always good to hear your thoughts. Get in touch in the usual way. The text number 84844. But now to you, Kate. Welcome to Women's Hour. Initially, what's your reaction to what Alan Milburn's saying?

Firstly, really glad to see Alan Milburn talk about what's going on for unemployed young people as a failure of the system, not of the young people themselves. I think that is really, really important. We are seeing a situation now where nearly half a million young women are out of work. and that's not because they lack the drive to work. It's because the pathways and the support for them to work are disappearing. So really, really good to see that very heavily referenced by Alan Milburn in his report. We would like to see more of a gender lens, both on the problem and on the solution.

What we've seen over the last year in particular is that the number of young women who are unemployed but looking for work is rising. And it's now at its highest for over a decade. So we really need to look at what is going on for those young women in particular. And it appears that they're the people being squeezed out of the workplace the fastest. What is going on? Well, what we're seeing is those jobs where you get a lot of young women, jobs like retail, hospitality, admin, the jobs where young women are most likely to get their first entry level position

and get some experience, those are actually the jobs and sectors that are shrinking the fastest. So young women have entered the workforce in bigger numbers over the last few decades, which is great, but now they're the first to be squeezed out. So how does the current state of the labour market impact women differently to men? Well, as I've said, you've got certain types of jobs in industry where women are more likely to be, and they do tend to be lower paid and more insecure work. So we know young women in particular are more likely to be on zero-hours contracts,

jobs where the hours are unpredictable, where you don't know how much money you're going to be earning in a particular month, where you're feeling under pressure to say yes to every shift. those sorts of jobs are actually really bad for young women's mental health. We often see young women in those sorts of workplaces being pushed out because of burnout, because of discrimination, harassment, which they can't challenge because of their lack of power. So actually you've got a lot of women in quite poor quality jobs damaging their mental health, being pushed out, and then when they're out, it's harder to get back in.

I want to bring in a young woman who's 24. She doesn't want us to use her real name in case it impacts her chances of finding a job. So hello there, good morning. Let me bring you in. You're an English and linguistics graduate. Tell me a bit about your situation. How easy is it to find or difficult is it to find work right now? What's happening with you? Hi. I feel like I've had quite a few issues with disabilities in the workplace. I'm really struggling to find work at the moment because I was previously in retail. And like Kate was saying, I reached a point of complete burnout and my physical and mental health took a very big effect to that. So for me right now, it's really struggling to find a position where I would be able to do a job where it wouldn't impact my physical health so much. So I have epilepsy. And being in retail, a lot of my triggers for my seizures are heat stress, dehydration and tiredness. which are all the things that come with a retail environment.

And it then becomes very hard to have, when you leave a job, to then have the confidence to know that you're able to get another job, especially when you get all those rejections. And having a degree and pushing through all of that time, I was diagnosed 10 years ago. When you're going into the workplace, my confidence was really, really knocked. And I felt that I wasn't able to do a lot of jobs. And throughout my time, I've gone travelling, I've done different types of jobs, which I'm really

proud of myself for, but it's got to this point now where I've become so burnt out. And my physical and mental health is I've had to move back with my parents. And I'm now really struggling to find work that's suitable for my health conditions, which I think is the case with quite a lot of people. How long have you been out of work? I've been out of work for three months now. And, yeah, so I moved back with my parents in March and left my job in March. And what sorts of jobs are you applying for? What kind of roles?

So I'm really looking into more office-based work. I mean, the goal would be to get into the charity sector, but obviously a lot of this comes with having experience and it's the Catch-22, which I think most people feel that it's really hard to get a job and get that experience without having the experience in the first place. And, you know, you can do all these extra things and it feels like it's still kind of not good enough.

And I think, yeah, advocating for your rights as a woman, I think can be really, really difficult and knowing those rights. So how's it going? How is the job application process, like explain, you know, how the last three months have been for you? I think the last three months have been, it's been great to be applying for new jobs because that's something I've really struggled with before is that I was so tired, my physical health was so bad, that I wasn't able to put my all into

applying for jobs. And that was something that really impacted my mental health as well. But now it has kind of, I'm able to spend that time, but it's just unfortunate that I'm in the position now where I've had to leave my job and feel, and have to repair my physical and mental health to be able to apply for jobs. And I haven't been able to get anything or even when you don't get a response and it's just it feels quite a big setback when you've overcome so many things and you, you know, have a degree and you have your education and you feel you've kind of been promised this life by being an education of your, if you do this, this and this, you're going to get the job that you want to do it. And it's not a case of entitlement. It's a case of that's what

we've been promised by the system. And when you get to that point, you feel like there's such a big, you feel quite disappointed in a way. When you said it was hard advocating for yourself as a woman, explain a bit more. What do you mean? So I think over throughout my whole working career, I've had issues with advocating for reasonable adjustments with disability. So in my previous role, I was working in, as I said, in retail and a really busy environment.

And it was an all-female company, which I actually think made it a bit easier for me to advocate for my rights. And I felt like maybe I would be heard a bit more, which I really think would be a different case if it was men in that situation. But I feel like I really had to advocate for my own rights for my reasonable adjustments to look after myself. And it felt it was very hard to do because there should be more of an umbrella situation for people. with disabilities of these are the things we can offer you. And people with disabilities are not going to take advantage of that system. If people are asking for help as someone who is disabled or people with mental health, it is something that they genuinely need help with.

And I felt, especially with invisible disabilities, it's really hard to get your point across. And I know that's what a lot of the young women's trust do is for women to know their rights and what their rights are in the workplace. And that is something that I'm really proud of myself in the last year to do, but it shouldn't have got to that point. Kate, disability and ill health are important barriers to finding work, but a big part of these stats are made up of healthy women looking for work and can't find them, can't find jobs.

Why is that? Yeah, that's right. So I think really important to hear from the young women there that people with disabilities often really want to work and we need to be kind of making work work for them. But yes, you're right, the biggest rise in young women is women who are ready to work, they're available to work, and the jobs are not there for them. So the sectors where they're likely to go are squeezing them

out, we're not preparing the jobs for the future with young women in mind. So if you think about where there might be growth sectors in industries, things like green tech, things like retrofitting houses, a lot of those jobs which are going to be the jobs of the future are actually typically male-dominated industries as well. So what we need to be doing, is looking at how do we design those future jobs, those future pathways to employment with young women and their needs in mind. So the interim report warns that the number of those

who aren't in education, employment or training could actually increase to 1 in a quarter million within five years. This is only the initial report. And that recommendations will come later in the year. What more do you think needs to be done to reverse this trend? I think, as I've said, it's really looking at what's going on for different groups of young people. So I think there is a gender lens. There's also looking at disabled young people,

really trying to look at not young people as a whole, but what are those intersections and where can we target measures in that way? So for example, we did see over the preceding decades a big decrease in the number of young women who are neat because things like teenage pregnancy went down and more workplaces were opening up to women, which is great. So it shows when we put targeted measures in place and we think about the needs of specific groups, we can actually reverse this. So really like to see the next report looking at solutions with that kind of nuance on it.

And back to our young woman who's currently trying to find what we should have given you a fake name. But you're back living with your parents because you can't afford rent. How has that impacted your life? I think for me it's quite difficult with my epilepsy in that where my parents live now is not got, great public transport and coming from living, I was living in London, living in a city where

you can go out and do anything and you've got all those resources there, like public transport, when you come back, it really does take away a lot of your independence. And I think this is probably quite a big experience for people not with disabilities. Like it can be quite isolating and especially if you've not, if your parents have moved in a certain time, like my parents have, I've not really got a social life here because there's not any young people around really. And so then you're kind of spending money to go and visit your friends and have that social life again, which a lot of the time you couldn't have with that work. Yeah. That you're then spending those money and benefits can be a really, really difficult thing to get into, especially for people

with disabilities, which is what I've struggled with. That actually a lot of the the time you're not eligible and there's a really big grey area there for a lot of people with disabilities that face that with benefits. I'd like to thank you both for speaking to me this morning. I want to wish you the best of luck to our case study in finding work and thank you to Kate Nightingale. Text number is 84844 if you'd like to get in touch with your experience or thoughts on this as well this morning. Now, Professor of Law, Kimberly Crenshaw is an American civil rights advocate who is a scholar of critical race theory and coined the third. term intersectionality.

When she was five years old, during the civil rights era in Ohio, she was the only girl denied a lead role in her nursery play, the only black girl in her class. Puzzled by her teacher's behavior, she spoke up and questioned the decision, something she's been doing ever since. Kimberly's instinct challenge what others accept as fair has shaped not only her own life, but the way we understand race and gender. And now she's written a memoir. An accidental one, she says.

It's called backtalker. Kimberly, what a pleasure to welcome you to Woman's Hour. I'm so happy to be back. Thank you. Backtalker, great title. Why did you choose that word? Well, I wanted to use a term that I hope would resonate with people who are deeply distressed about the direction of our various democracies, are resistant to the idea that there is an authority figure that tells us what's possible, what's not possible, and that expects a business.

That's what we expect of children. I wanted to make that a transgressive term that we all embrace as what we need to be doing right now. We need to be resisting authority. We need to be talking back against those who say that the lives we live are the only lives possible. So the back talker was a way of connecting my childhood, learning to talk back to those kinds of conditions and connecting it to what we need to do today. And why a memoir? Why now? Well, that is perhaps the most puzzling thing. I think a lot of people who are aware that a lot of the work that I'm associated with,

such as intersectionality and critical race theory, why wouldn't I do a treatise? Why wouldn't I do a book of essays? Why wouldn't I do a brief in defense of the ideas? Well, the most important thing that I wanted the book to get across was that these ideas don't come from sitting in an office somewhere, putting my finger to my temple and just thinking things. It came from a series of experiences that I had since I was five that stretched over the course of my life that told me that there was something amiss, something going on, but we didn't really have a way of naming it or a way of conceptualizing it.

So I wanted to build out an understanding of these ideas from the experience up rather than the academy down. Yes. And storytelling is such a good way. of reaching out to a lot of people as well. So you start the book with a story that was a defining moment for you in the memoir. Tell us what happened. Well, I start by saying that I am lactose,

I'm like lactose intolerant with respect to injustice. I can't swallow it. I can't digest it. It doesn't work for me. And I tell a story about when I allowed myself to be humiliated as a woman going to the back door of, establishment at Harvard University. You're invited to a party, right?

Yeah, invited to a party, being a guest. And it used to be an institution that was all white. And my partner and I, who went there, said, look, if they mess with us at all in any way, we're going to stand tall, we're not going to take it. And we agreed. We weren't going to take it. And we got there, and our friend told us that I had to go around to the back door.

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

And that night, acquiesced and going to the back door, I drank something that made me so sick that I negotiated with the heavens that if I could recover from what made me sick, I would never do what I did that night, which was go around to the back door. And that has basically become my operating system. That's what I do from here on in. It's a very powerful beginning to the book.

I have to say, for a woman to read that and go, oh, yes, oh yes. You were born in Ohio in 1959 on the verge of the civil rights movement. So what do you remember about the impact of growing up in that period? Yeah, well, I remember that I was born during a time before we were free. I was born before all of the major laws that were put on the books to protect us against discrimination and employment and in housing and in voting. I remember my parents who I call race men and women of the 20th century were fully aware that there were still constraints that would possibly interrupt my forward momentum. And so their dedication was to prepare me to navigate a world that may not see me as who I was, may not be invested in my forward momentum.

So they didn't hide from me where and how I was born, didn't hide from me the struggles of the past. In fact, it was important for my mother. who took me all around town and showed me the places that used to discriminate against her as she was growing up and the kind of fight that she and her father waged against these places. So it made it clear to me that we could never take for granted whatever progress we had made. And that progress was the project of talking back to unfair exclusions. So they shaped me to be the back talker I came to be. Yeah, a story that really stuck with me is that your grandmother and your mother going to the swimming pool

when your mother was three? Three years old. Yeah. Can you tell us a bit about that? So in Ohio, segregation wasn't often by law, but by custom. But those customs were reinforced by the subtle and sometimes not subtle ways. That discrimination occurred. So my grandmother took my mother to a little waiting pool.

My mother got in the pool. The attendant drained the pool while my mother was in the pool. My grandmother then took my mother out, went around the neighborhood, got her friends' kids, put them all back in the car, took them back to the waiting pool, had them all jump in again. And at that point, a police officer was called, and my grandmother stood her ground. It was legal for my mother to be there. It was legal for her friends to be there. And eventually the police officer got on his motorcycle and rode away.

That was my mother's first memory. And so I grew up hearing about these stories, understanding that we are a people that had to struggle for equal dignity. And that struggle was ongoing. And then you talk, and I mentioned in the introduction to you about how you experienced it yourself. And this was, you tell the story of how you were waiting and waiting and waiting to be cast as the princess in your all-white class. And you didn't get the opportunity to play her. And how your parents supported you through that. Yeah.

And that probably was the most important early shaping because my parents could have said, look, who wants to be a. fairy tale princess, right? I mean, you know, this is make-believe. You need to focus on what's real in the world. They could have said, you know, it has nothing to do with discrimination. This is just a fantasy. But they realized that an injury had happened. And they realized that in my tears, I was speaking up for myself. I was a kid. So I couldn't go into a rational argument about what was wrong about it, but I was expressing something that was real. I credit them for that because there wasn't a name for what happened to little black girls back then. And it wasn't clear how to integrate gender with the struggle for racial justice that we were all engaged in at the time,

but they made it clear to trust my instinct. And so over the course of time, whenever I had a feeling like, this reminds me a little bit about what happened when I was trying to be a princess, it's different, but it's the same and important ways. That's what led me to see that there's always a shadow of, some sort. And until we can name it, we won't be able to grapple with it. So it drove me to come up with concepts to capture these experiences. Yes, and we're going to come on to those concepts in a moment. But I want to just continue with your being quite an impressive young woman. Because at the

age of eight, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, you spoke out at a children's memorial service for him. Yeah. What happened? You know, when Martin Luther King was assassinated, it was the first time I saw my father cry. Father was big, six foot two full back, a man's man. But when we got the news that Martin Luther King had been assassinated, I saw him break. And I knew that there was something devastating about what had happened. I knew that there was an attempt to push us all back by this assassination. So when they called us together the next day some youth activists to come to a church and talk about how we were feeling about the assassination of Martin Luther King, I expected everybody to have something to say about it. And the silence was

just devastating. I mean, you know, no one had anything to say. And it made me feel that we were acquiescing to the effort to snuff out our future by killing our leader. So I felt like, had to say something. I didn't know what I was going to say. I jumped up on my feet and I had no words. People were looking at me and I was like, what am I going to say? But I think I started to channel what I'd heard on the radio, what I'd heard my parents say that night. And so I said some third grade version of we have to continue in his footsteps. We, you know, can't be silent. We have to realize the dream or whatever. And then when I sat down, I got scared. That's when I realized. Maybe I shouldn't have jumped up like that without knowing what I was going to say.

But by the time I got home, I think people had called my parents and told them what had happened. And although my father was still teary-eyed, he was also proud. And that made me proud that he was proud. And I think that is also, you know, one of the stories that I keep going back to think about how they facilitated the back talking. Yes. And then in a very short period, you lost your father. it was only 34 years old, and not long after your older brother, Mantel was shot and killed while at university. How did those huge losses affect you?

Well, I think, number one, it made it clear to me that one can never take anything for granted. You know, things can turn upside down, you know, on an instant and that had that impact. But we also were able to see what life is like. when you are a non-traditional family, when you've been turned into a single mother-headed household. So at that time in civil rights history, the arguments about what had to happen for black people ever to be equal were focused not on structures of inequality,

but on the structure of the family. It was if that was a natural under-qualification. It was a way in which the overall civil rights movement could be condensed to, well, it's because of the choices that you make. It's because of the structure of your family. Because my family became single-headed because of tragedy, we might have been exempted from that. But what I was able to see was that culture, society, economics, all of those things actually impacted my family. And that's what was impacting other single-headed households. So I grew up with a deep critique of the argument that patriarchy will save us. What will save us

is paying attention to the families that we have. What would have made life easier for my mother is if she had the same kind of a wage as a male, if she'd been able to benefit from the property that she'd been inherited. So all of this made me far more critical of programs that eventually said the issue is not race or racism, the issue is you and your families that are in gender disrepair. So you were reflecting on all of these lived experiences from a very young age, and then we get to 1989, where you coined the term, and this is coming back to what you were saying earlier about the importance of defining things, coined the term intersectionality, which I'm going to take this opportunity to thank you for. Can you explain what it means and why it was important to

identify. Well, intersectionality really was just a simple remedial framework that I was trying to use to get judges to see something that they seem to be incapable of understanding that racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination are not mutually exclusive. They're not running along parallel tracks. Many times, they overlap. And when they do overlap, they create injuries that many times people can't see because they're used to seeing these things as separate. So I was looking at cases where women of color were saying, look, we're being discriminated against not simply as racialized people and not simply as women, but because we're racialized people who are women.

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

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

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

as critical race theory. And federal agencies began flagging hundreds of words to avoid. including intersectional or intersectionality. What's it like to see that happening? Why do you believe? You know, I am not shocked because this administration has promised to take us back to a time before these words were part of policy, before there were laws on the books, before people like us were even in institutions. So that's not surprising. What's surprising to me is how other institutions that were not committed to this.

idea basically acquiesced. There are institutions that take intersectionality out of advanced placement curricula because they say these ideas are no longer useful. Well, that's clearly simply a feature of trying to make this administration happy or state governors who got on board with this idea that we have to take all this stuff out of the curriculum. And that to me is the moment where back talking is important because they have bent the knee, they have decided to comply. And that compliance means that how we understand our world,

what we educate our children to do, has been undermined by those who don't want democracy to include everyone. And then last January, at 2025, President Trump signed a DEI diversity equality and inclusion-related executive order entitled ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs and prefacing. The president said, I ended it because it's racist, I ended it because a lot of people were complaining that they were asked to do things that were absolutely insane, these are his words, and that it was a radical revolution that was taking place in our military and our schools all over the

place. What's the impact of that being for minorities? You know, I'm so glad you mentioned the military because I think a lot of people are confused about what he's actually after. What's the improper ideology that these executive orders are supposedly meant to advance? My simple and quick example is this. At the Naval Academy, under this order, they removed books by Maya Angelou. I know why the Cage Bird sings. books by Baldwin, by people who are talking about how to make America better. What did they leave on the shelves?

They left Adolf Hitler's M.inomph on the shelves of the Naval Academy. They left a book that argues that African Americans are biologically intellectually, intellectually inferior. So this is not about a colorblind agenda. It's about normalizing a hierarchy. in our government, in our military, in our society that removes women, that removes people of color. And as one administration official actually said who was able to keep his job, if you want anything to go well, you need to put white men in charge. That's the ideology.

Do you ever worry about your own safety? Yes, of course. Nothing's going to stop you. No. Well, that's what back talking is about. Yeah. You've said that one of the consequences of backtalking are remaining on the outside looking in.

Is that a place you're happy to stay in? I wouldn't say happy, but I believe that that's my mission in life. And I wanted to honestly say that it's not costless to be a critic. It doesn't mean that you're going to be loved. It will mean that sometimes you are a thorn in the side. not just of your opponents, but even people in your own space, even people in your own community,

even people sometimes in your own family. But you do so because you love the idea of equity and inclusion, and you love the well-being of your people and your nation. And sometimes a mirror has to be put up so we can see the ugliness or the missed opportunities to make ourselves better. Kimberly Crenshaw, what a pleasure. you so much and backtalker and memoir is available now thank you thanks for having me 84844 is the text number um I'm going to read out a couple of your messages on young people being out of the work um rejection number 55 arrived this morning since I graduated in July with a first

class English degree I'm in total despair hard work doesn't play off I just want to start my life and another one here the problem of youth unemployment is much broader than just uh jobs being available. Youth service has been seriously underinvested in for years, support that would have provided young people with a range of employability skills. Keep your thoughts coming in. Now, last weekend, Russia carried out a deadly large-scale wave of strikes against Ukraine, launching hundreds of drones and firing dozens of missiles. Dron warfare has been a defining characteristic of the war, but it's Ukraine's prowess with its cheap, sometimes homemade, innovative devices that have drawn a lot of attention and has enabled women to participate

in frontline roles in much higher numbers than would previously have been possible. To hear more about how women and not just Ukrainian women are getting involved in the fight to defend Ukraine, I'm joined on the line now from Kiev by Alessia Horianova, deputy head of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Centre, a Ukrainian think tank working in military recruitment. Alessia, welcome to the programme.

Now, Anne Keist Butler, the director of GCHQ. Good morning. GCHQ. GCHQ, which is the spy agency here in the UK, she said yesterday that nearly half a million Russians have been killed since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Ukraine's foreign ministry points out that Russia has been targeting towns and cities every week for more than four years now. How has Russia's attack changed the role women are playing in Ukraine's defense?

First of all, thank you for having me and for the opportunity to bring those. topics to the broader British audience. Well, yeah, indeed, the world that Ukrainian women have been carrying has been very much changed. And I would not say that they have changed since 2022, but also since the first Russian attack and the start of Russian aggression in 2014. because back then of the first military volunteer military units were formed that also played a huge role in defending Ukraine's territories on the east and southern parts of our state and women were a big part of them as well of those units military units also women were part of the regular military units but back then their role was, how to say, they could not hold many of the combat positions there were, and they were forced to be, to be put, to be enlisted as cooks, as cleaners, etc. But still, since 2014, women in Ukrainian military, we are talking about the military,

they have been taking roles like snipers like mortar commanders all kinds of combat positions as well as non-combat positions were filled by women and since the beginning of the full-scale invasion we see that it's all of the restrictions were dropped from the Ukrainian state in the military and we see that women are thriving in the military, they are able to choose between different positions. And the new warfare, as scary as it is, opened a bigger door to be able to defend the country for the women. In a moment, we're going to hear from a young woman who's a Czech national fighting for Ukraine. How common is it for women from outside of the country to join up as volunteers? is Alessia.

We seem to have lost her line. Well, we are going to hear from that woman now. We're only identifying this woman by her call sign Morver to protect her safety. She's 25. She pilots FPV, first person view Kamakazi drones. So let's hear from Morva. She spoke to us from her forward position where she's serving. And I started by asking her what led her to volunteer to fight for the Ukraine.

Ukraine has always been close country for me because my parents took me there for the first time when I was like three years old. So I knew the country a bit. I had some friends there. So when the war started, I felt like I have to do something. I started to volunteer. I did some humanitarian work and then I was also helping the soldiers and then I decided that I'm not doing enough. And I heard so many stories about the suffering of the people. I saw what the Russians do to Ukraine to its people. So I decided I want to do more to stop the war. So I joined the armed forces of Ukraine. And how did you even begin learning to fly one of these drones?

Tell us about how that happened. Well, I was thinking, like, what as a skinny young girl I can do in the army? And usually the girls do like they are either medics or they do some work with documents. And I didn't want to be medic. I didn't want to do the papers. So I decided to do the drones because it's also like something girls can do. I had some friends in the Czech Republic who were like making the drones who had some experience. They gave me some tips.

They recommended me a simulator which I can use for flying. They gave me a drone. So I started learning by myself. So I basically, when I joined the army, I already knew how to fly. That's impressive. What does it actually feel like when you're flying one? Can you explain? I like the feeling.

Like here, for example, I'm on the position right now. So it's like you're sitting under the ground in a bunker, which you basically shouldn't really leave because they are the enemy drones flying around you. So you have to sit under the ground. You don't see the sun. You don't see anything around you. And then you just fly the drone and suddenly you see everything. You see all the bushes blooming.

You see the coming summer. You see like the whole world from the drone. So it's a, yeah, it's nice feeling. What's it like physically? I fly the FPV drones. They don't have any stabilization. They are like the cheapest drones. so you really need to control every move of the drone.

So the whole flight, you have to have a full control because the drone will not help you. You have to be like all the time present. You have to hold them all the time. So it's a bit difficult because of that. Do you think drone warfare has changed who can take part in combat? Now more women can take part in those roles? Definitely.

Yeah. I feel like women can do anything if they want, but the drones definitely made it easier. For example, for people like me, because I'm skinny and I'm physically weaker than most of the men around me, and I just can't do anything about it because that's how I am. And so by flying the drones, I feel that I'm doing a job, which I can do very well, even better than men. and it doesn't depend on physical skills, you know. After a mission morver, when things go quiet, what tends to stay with you? I really keep in my head all the things which I did wrong,

like when I don't hit the target properly or when I forget something and I keep it in my head and when I'm outside of the position, I'm thinking about it all the time, what should I have done better, what should have been different? And so I would hit the target better, what I have to train more. So that's what stays with me. And how do you relax? Well, I have a cat.

So I quite often play with the cat or pet him. We saved him from the position. It's a complicated story, but we managed to save him from the position. So it's a fighter. I started to bake cakes. Also, like, I read books. I watch movies. People sometimes compare drone warfare to gaming.

What do you think when you hear that comparison? I hear it quite often and I don't like it really. I feel like for some pilots, I guess it is like a computer game. I have never been playing computer games. So I'm trying to keep it real for myself. I'm reminding myself that those are real people, like the targets I'm hitting, those are real people. And I'm always watching afterwards, like, what I did to the person.

I'm trying to think about that they have a family somewhere and that this is not a computer game. I'm trying to keep it real for myself. And then can you tell us about the psychological impact that has on you? Well, it's the Russians, they came to Ukraine. like they invited a sovereign country. They shouldn't be here. So I don't feel guilty for killing the Russian soldiers because they shouldn't be here.

And they are doing so many wrong things. And also like it's either like I kill them or they kill me or like my brother's in arm. So there's like no choice. So I don't feel. guilty about killing Russians. For me, it's a work. I have to do it. That was Mawrne, not her

real name, who's a drone pilot. Alessia, people might imagine drone pilots operating from a place of safety, but that's not the case, is it? Well, this is very interesting question, because taken into account that drones are really,

most of the trans, like FPDs, like all of the trans who operate on the inactive combat, meaning not like deep strikes and middle strikes, they can fly for over 10 or 15 kilometers, which can seem like a drone operator would be in a safe place. But the truth is that in modern war, we see the kill zone where actually, drone are being operated and it's quite unsafe for the people forced to be there. That can be prolonged for that amount of kilometers, meaning 10 to 15.

So yes, it is relatively, it's more safe than other professions, military professions might be, but it's not, as it is war, it's not the safest place. And how common is it for women from outside the country to join up as volunteers? Oh, actually we have seen many women, women from the very beginning of the full-scale invasion, as our team was involved in welcoming foreign volunteers at the very first weeks and months of the full-scale invasion. We saw women with different backgrounds, with different skill sets, with different motivation to come to fight for Ukraine, not only of Ukraine in origin, but also like Morva from, from. just people who were raised in different countries and felt that this is important to be here now. Yes, yes.

Alessia Horanova, thank you so much for speaking to me this morning from Kiv. 84844. Now, the trailblazing late Indian artist. Marinalini Mukherjee was a modernist sculptor. Her work is now being celebrated in a retrospective at the Hepworth Wakefield in Yorkshire. It's called Miralani Mukherjee. Unbound Forms, Women Sculptors of India and Bangladesh. The exhibition spans four decades and brings together her monumental fibre works

alongside ceramics, bronzes, drawings and watercolours. And for the first time in the UK, her work is also being showcased alongside a group of women artists from the early generation of modern Indian and Bangladeshi sculpture, including her own mother. Well, to talk about her now, I am joined by the exhibition's curator Tarini Malik and the artist Barthi Kerr, who's in Delhi, who was a gross friend of hers. Welcome to both of you. Therini, I'm going to come to you first to get context around her. How important is she as a female sculptor?

Renalini Mukagi was really a trailblazer and I guess the importance of doing this exhibition, especially in an institution like the Hepworth, an exhibition like this one, is really about reaffirming her place within the cultural zeitgeist, within what we understand about modern and contemporary art practices. She was a woman who really defied expectations. She defied the inherent nature of the materials that she chose to work in.

She chose to transgress so many different boundaries and categories when what we think about not only contemporary art, design, architecture, textile, but sculpture itself. And so, you know, the kind of key motivation of the, this exhibition and also in terms of placing her in the context of these extraordinary women, the only one of which she actually intersected with was her mother, of course, Lila Mukagi, but showing these kind of threads which bind us as women artists in terms of how we defy these expectations, how we push the challenges that we have in terms of cultural practice, in terms of

just existing, really. Now, Theruny, I'm really going to put you on the spot here to describe her work for radio. Of course. So, Renardini Mukherji was primarily a sculptor. She worked in these monumental, completely awe-inspiring sculptures made of textile, this really rough jute-like material, which she transforms to make these billowing, sensual forms. But she also made extraordinary ceramic work, drawings, watercolours, etchings and bronzes. In many ways, a lot of the materials that she worked in, the same. scale in which she worked in is often what we associate with male artists. You know, we think about these big bronze works within the tradition of great modern white men. But actually, she was an artist who really pushed what we kind of know and understand these materials to be. She was someone who, you know, even in, you know, sort of late 1960s, early 1970s, was embracing

forms of sensuality, desire, sex, death. not just as kind of really singular categories, but actually as fields of intellectualism, fields of ideas. So quite often you see these works when you encountered them in a museum or in a gallery, seeing them in real life. They're both really familiar as really unsettling as well. They sort of oscillate between abstraction and the figurative.

And I was lucky enough to come and see her work when she was showing at the Royal Academy and it was really, as you say, just quite awe-inspiring and breathtaking. But also her as a woman, She's quite a remarkable. She was quite a remarkable woman. Barti, you were a close friend. Can you tell us what your first encounter with her and her work was like?

What struck you, especially as a younger artist who had left the UK and had moved to Delhi? Sure. I came to India in 1993 and I think I met Dilu that year. She was such a character. Manalini, all her friends called her Dilu. Why is that? To me, she became DeLu. That was just her nickname.

And to all the art community, she was always DeLu. She was quite a force. I think in a time when experiments in modernism, specifically in India, were really of the hour of the moment. I think that her, this sort of radical dialogue that she had between fine arts and craft, between the local traditions of and Indian temple sculpture, that was really important. she kind of elevated weaving, knotting, you know, things like tying.

And all these sort of techniques were kind of relegated in some ways to the margins. But DeLu, as a person, she was reservedly unapologetic about her work. And so she really knew what she was doing. Whether people were listening or watching her, it didn't really matter. She was very courageous in the way that she worked. Material was never the main. It was just something that took her where she needed to go. And she was really aware that the materials that she used carried both cultural and political and gender histories,

as well as this idea of her own female force. I mean, to talk about things like the yaksha, the yattras and all of that at that time, when it was not sort of considered perhaps it was a bit perhaps too raw to look back at a five thousand. thousand-year-old civilization when India was like marching towards a sort of modernist, towards modernism in some ways. But, you know, her work was deeply poetic. Form was really important. But I, for me, it was just the physicality of her materials, the way that she was so fluid with form. And I think that, for me, it resonates with my own explorations of the body that I've been doing for the past 30 years or so.

Yes. Therini, how significant is it and how important is it that both her parents? I mean, she's showing alongside her mother's work at the Hepworth that both her parents are artists. Incredibly important. I think, you know, the key aspect of thinking about mother and daughter together, I guess, comes from my own kind of personal or sort of grappling with the idea that mother and daughter or kind of parent and child, actually, I should say, are kind of almost the first institution or the first school. You know, albeit what your relationship is with your parent, it's the first place that your body is housed.

And the idea of that being a space of kind of transference in which, you know, things are formed, became kind of key to the concept of this show, is how do we create these sort of threads of connection between different artists, different beings, different communities, different ideas and so on. Lila Mukajee, Muranali Mukaji's mother, actually in India today is somewhat kind of less known

as her husband, Beno Bih Bhaari Mukaji, who was also a very prolific teacher in Shantin Nikitam, which is a school that Tagore set up, and became, I suppose, in many ways, very foundational for Rinalini Mukaji as an artist and is one of today's most radical art schools in the world. Lila Mukherjee. What's she recognised in her own lifetime?

Lila Mukagi? No, her daughter. Renali Mukagi, I mean, I would say she was, as Bahadhi, you can probably kind of give testament to someone who was incredibly important within certain artistic communities. But it wasn't until later on in her life did she have these major survey exhibitions. It wasn't until after she passed it, the NGMA host, one of the most important exhibitions, I guess, in its entire history. But did one of the did kind of a follow-up of major institutional shows happen, including at the MET. She did travel significantly.

she did show in different parts of the country. She did show in various biennials. But for someone who was as groundbreaking and as trailblazing as she was, as is the case with many women artists, it wasn't until after she passed. Did you start to see different nuance applied to her practice in terms of how we consider it? And it's a consequence of major institutional shows.

And I hope they continue. Absolutely. So what feels, Bart, the most significant or urgent about this, this, this, this, this, this, this, uh, Bishon and her work today? I think that, you know, most artists, we all stand on the shoulders of the other artists that come before us. De Lu and I were 20 years apart, but I feel that as a woman, as a female artist, I think she was really, she was groundbreaking, she was radical, she was unapologetic. She loved, she's really an artist artist.

So if you talk to people in India, everybody knew her work. Everyone knew what she did. Everyone followed her practice and watched what she did next because she was constantly reinventing herself. I think that she's just someone that had this sensational desire to see things, to travel. She loved being with artist. But she was, you know, it was simple times. And she was hugely ambitious.

And now everyone can travel to Wakefield to see her work. Therini Malik and Vartikea, thank you so much for joining me. The exhibition is on until the 1st of November at the Hepworth in Wakefield. That's it for me. Join me tomorrow for more Woman's Hour. That's all for today's Woman's Hour. Join us again next time. The 8th of August, 1963. A gang of thieves hold up a British Royal Mail train.

on its way from Glasgow to London. More than two million pounds was stolen and Ronnie Biggs was the most famous face of the great train robbery. Daniel Mays reveals the true story of Ronnie Biggs. A train robbery, a prison escape and 36 years on the run. Gangster presents the story of Ronnie Biggs. Listen first on BBC Sounds.