Woman's Hour - Weekend Woman's Hour - The Art of Repair, Nurses' Pay & the Power of Oprah Winfrey

Episode Date: March 13, 2021

The art of the repair, Molly Martin an illustrator and textile repairer, tells us why repairing clothes, furniture and appliances can be beneficial to not only your pocket but to your mind.The government's proposed one per cent pay rise for NHS staff is discussed with the Health Minister Nadine Dorries and Dame Donna Kinnair, nurse and chief executive and general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing.We look at how more than 70 women in a small English town have had their private, often naked images stolen and shared online by people living in their community with one of the victims Ruby and the MP Maria Miller who has been campaigning for better legal protection against image based sexual abuse for years. It took a year for Maria Beatrice Giovanardi to convince the Oxford Dictionary of English to not only change their definition of ‘woman’ but to re-examine the synonyms for ‘woman’ in their thesaurus, and amend the contents. She tells us why she turned her attentions to Treccani, a leading online Italian dictionary, in a bid to get them to do the same thing. And after her interview with Harry and Meghan the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, we discuss the key to Oprah Winfrey’s success with the British Presenter Trisha Goddard.The psychologist Dr Jessica Taylor tells us why she has set up a new charity to provide support and advice to women and girls who become pregnant from rape, sexual abuse, exploitation, trafficking and incest.A new report from the Institute of Fiscal Studies suggests that women in heterosexual couples are much more likely than men to give up their jobs, or cut their hours, after becoming parents. And it shows that this happens even if the woman earns more than her male partner. Alison Andrew, Senior Research Economist at the IFS explains why. Presenter: Jessica Creighton Producer: Rabeka Nurmahomed Editor: Lisa Jenkinson

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2, and of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme. Peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to the weekend edition of Woman's Hour. On the programme today, after Oprah Winfrey's interview with Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, we discuss Oprah, America's first black female billionaire and the key to her success. And the story of more than 70 women in a small English town having private, often naked images stolen and shared online by people living in their community.

They must have been taken off Facebook in that four week period by someone I would consider a friend, someone who I know well enough to allow to view a private album. It feels very violating and quite personal because I know this person, I must know them personally. Also we hear about a new organisation set up to help women who have become pregnant as a result of rape, sexual abuse, exploitation, trafficking and incest. And the art of repairs, why mending our belongings is beneficial to the pocket and the mind. When we kind of slow down and can repair something ourselves, that even if it is just a holy jumper,

there's something within the broken fibres of a moth-eaten jumper that represents a little bit about us and it gives us a sense of reconnection and comfort. Now, one of the standout moments during the pandemic was the thousands of people who decided to clap for NHS staff every week. Well, the Prime Minister has come under fire this week because of the proposed 1% pay rise for NHS staff. Strike action has been threatened by nurses unions. 90% of nurses are women and 77% of the entire NHS workforce are female.

Emma talked to the Health Minister, Nadine Dorries, but first she spoke to Dame Donna Kinnair, Nurse and Chief Executive and General Secretary of the Royal College of Nursing. What pay rise does she think would be acceptable to nurses? When we surveyed and talked to our nurses, they felt that given the years of lack of pay rises and the fact that our pay hasn't kept up with or commensurate with the knowledge and skills because it is a skilled profession, they asked us to put to the government 12.5%. So that's where you're coming in at and you have obviously heard what the government has had to say and the public will have heard as well and you know of course the near universal support from the public over the heard as well. And, you know, of course, the near universal support from the public

over the issue of nurses generally and your lives and what you've been doing, it reflects as well, with a lot of them also chiming in on the pay row, the high regard nurses are held in and the acknowledgement by the public of your hard work and sacrifice during this pandemic. Do you not believe the government when they say 1% is all they can afford? Matt Hancock says, for instance, the health secretary, it's what's affordable as a nation. Well, I tell you, this government's track record speaks for itself.

When the government says that, and just remember, when we talk about track and trace, it is nurses that have predominantly done this, public health nurses like myself. We, you know, any kind of infectious disease, we've been out there and nobody has offered us £6,000 a day. So for nurses in this country, when they see that, when they see the advantage over a number of years that have been taken of their skills and their knowledge, we have to question how you can bring someone in

and pay them £6,000 a day to do something that we have been doing throughout our entire existence, whatever pandemic, whatever disease, and we know we needed it on a far grander scale. But let's just think about who would have advised those people on how to track and trace, because whether it was HIV, we were risking our lives. We didn't know the origin of it. Even in this pandemic, we were risking our lives and we were tracking and tracing. So why is it now that other skills, the same skills that we've always shown, have come in and they're worth £6,000 a day? You're talking about consultants and some of the fees that have gone alongside with that.

Would a one off bonus stop strike action? And how much would that bonus have to be? Well, according to our nurses, they don't want a bonus. They want a decent wage. You know, it's more than just pay. This conversation that we are having with the government is more than pay. It's about a safety of our system. It's about how you attract and keep experienced nurses. Now, it's all very well for the government to say, well, we've brought enough people in from overseas

and we've got new nurses joining the profession. But what we're talking about is the experience and skills of a profession now that has demonstrated over the last year that we're not just angels. We're highly skilled, critical people that are needed to keep people alive. So it isn't so much just a pay argument. It's about going into this pandemic with 40,000 less nurses in England, because we don't pay them enough to keep them. And that's the issue that we need to correct. So actually, it is a political choice whether we want to run a health service with a decent amount of staff. So in answer to my first question, actually, around believing the government, it sounds like you don't believe that the government doesn't have this money because you're talking there about, just to make it specific,

the likes of senior members of the Boston Consulting Group have been paid over £6,000 a day with regards to test and trace. So is that fair to say you don't believe the government doesn't have the money, it's made a political choice? Well, I think they do have the money when it suits them. And to the health minister who's listening, Nadine Doris, who I'll come to in just a moment, who's stressed the fact that new nurses have experienced a pay rise over the last three years, a considerable one, she'll make the case in just a moment.

What would you say to that? Well, I'd say that Nadine Doris has come out with that as an issue, but actually it continues that reverse patriarchy that we see around gender in our profession. What I'm talking about is paying people for their skills. Sorry, what do you mean by that? The reverse patriarchy? Well, actually, it's that thing about, you know, we do it as a vocation. They're heroes. They're angels. They don't need to be paid. We absolutely have the same rents, the same issues that everybody else has. So it

just isn't good enough to say that gender biased issue that we've faced all of our profession. What we need is proper pay. Dame Donna Kinnear, thank you very much, Nurse and Chief Executive and General Secretary of the Royal College of Nursing. Well, listening to you, that is the Health Minister, Nadine Dorries. Let's get to that, if we can, a bit to come back on. Can you understand the disappointment after the year that nurses have had? Well, Emma, if I could quote a nurse manager of a vaccine centre that I spoke to on Saturday, this is what she said. I'll quote her words. And if you don't mind, I'll just come back to some of the points that Donna raised. She said to me, we have two children in our house. There are two of us, two wages coming in and one mortgage going out. She said, if I had to choose between my husband being furloughed until the autumn or a

pay rise, I would choose my husband being furloughed any day because now we have the security that our mortgage can be paid. And she also said to me, I completely get it. And I understand that because, you know, anybody who manages a budget, there is a limit on that budget. And we have had unprecedented pressure over the past year in fighting COVID and dealing with COVID on the nation's purse strings. But it was important that in order to recover, important that in order to have an economy to fund our NHS, that we did everything we can to keep people in jobs, to keep people paid and protect those people's jobs. And that is why, you know, we have to make tough choices. And the choice was, one of the choices was to do that and

to continue furlough. And I do think that most nurses get it. But if they know they have partners, husbands, they get it, that they understand that that's a really important decision that we had to make. And it was also an incredibly expensive decision to the public purse. So do you stand by the 1% pay rise then as the health minister? Look, every year, this isn't something unusual. It's just happened because of COVID. The government always puts down its position to the pay review body in terms of what the public

can afford. And you quoted me quite accurately. Newly qualified nurses have had a 12% increase over the past three years. And junior doctors' pay scales are increasing by 8.2%. This is a healthcare sector pay review, not just nurses. But when you make that point about the new nurses, it's true, but it doesn't deal with what Donna was talking about there, which is those nurses going through the system, retaining and keeping skilled nurses. So it's very nice that new nurses have got more money. But what about those who've had an absolute year of it, starting this fight against the pandemic with barely appropriate PPE?

So, well, the PPE question, Emma, was a global problem. It was countries all over the world. There was a limited amount of PPE across the globe and every country was competing for that. Every country in the world was struggling with PPE at the beginning of this pandemic. Do you know, we have an increase of 34% of applications of people wanting to apply to become nurses. That's not retention. No, but Donna made the point about attracting nurses. We've had a massive increase in the number of people wanting to become nurses, which is a good thing. Sorry, but you're answering a question I haven't asked.

You're comparing apples and pears. I'm talking about nurses in the system that have heard 1% might be what the pay rise is. After the year that they've had, do you really think that's going to incentivise them to stay? So, as I said, we cannot pre-empt the recommendations of the independent pay review body. But what's your human response? We will carefully consider the recommendations when we receive them from the pay review. But on a human level, having trained as a nurse, do you understand why some of them might just think, I'm going to jack this in? So, again, as I said, the average pay for a nurse is £34,000.

When I was nursing, it was nothing even anywhere near the equivalent in terms of, and quite rightly so, you know, if it was up to me, I'd be paying nurses millions, quite rightly so, that they have seen their pay increase in recent years as a result of agenda for change. And, you know, we all hope moving forward, but this year has been a very difficult year for the NHS and for the government, for nurses, but also in terms of you don't know the economy is in the at the moment and we all want to see that economy recover because without a strong economy we can't fund the nhs and that's very important but you're you're not you're just just on the record as health minister you're not worried about retention after this if it goes through so that's well so first of all workforce isn't my portfolio. It's not an

area I'm an expert. No, but I wondered your view. I don't know. I can't quote you the retention figures at the moment. But what I would hope is that nurses will stick with us. And I'll go back to my vaccine centre manager who told me nurses get it. They actually get it. Nadine Dorries and Dame Donna Kinnair talking to Emma Barnett there. And we've had a few emails from you on this subject. Jess has got in touch to say, I am really disappointed that the health minister, Nadine Dorries, was allowed to come on the programme and spout such old-fashioned sexist drivel

that nurses do not want to pay rise and would prefer that their husbands and boyfriends were paid more than them. What about women who are single or are gay? Or just women who are not stuck in the 1950s? Jess not mincing her words there. Milo has also been in touch to say, simple point, our country has the fifth largest economy in the world. Surely the comparison that should be made is how much are nurses paid in countries with similar economies? The government choose not to pay It's a disgrace. Now, more than 70 women in a small English town have had their private, often naked, images stolen and shared online by people living in their community. The explicit photos, including some of underage girls, are thought to be taken

via hacking or provided by former boyfriends and uploaded anonymously on a website which features 73,000 images of women from across the world. About a dozen of the victims have banded together and set up a group to try and get justice. Emma spoke to one of those women, Ruby, and to the former Women's Minister, Conservative MP Maria Miller, who's been campaigning for better legal protection against image-based sexual abuse for years. Ruby explained that photos from a private Facebook album had made it onto this website and here she describes those images. One of them I was sunburnt so one of my friends had put after sun into my back so I was kind of lying on the hotel bed so I didn't have a top on but it wasn't explicit and another one we were kind of having a

bit of a joke about how small the hotel towels were so I was kind of showing how it didn't wrap all the way around my bum so you can see my bum. But yeah, they're not overly explicit. I mean, not that that diminishes this. I just wanted to paint an image of what you were looking at and how that made you feel. And regardless, I imagine it made you feel exposed and also concerned about how this had happened. Do you know how it's happened? Well, they must have been taken off Facebook in that four-week period

by someone I would consider a friend, someone who I know well enough to allow to view a private album. I know the privacy settings on that album were friends only because at the time when I uploaded them, I was like, oh, some of these photos are a bit risque, so I'll keep it to friends only. And it feels very violating and quite personal because I know this person. I must know them personally and also there were over 800 photos and these are like three photos from within four separate albums so they've they've kind of gone looking for them it feels a little bit which is a bit more sinister perhaps in in the yeah and quite invasive really and so I found out about my photos that way but I was actually aware of the website itself six months earlier because one of my close friends was contacted again by a message on social media.

And her photos were really explicit. They were photos taken between her and her current partner. And they were photos they'd never sent to each other, but were only stored on personal kind of storage platforms and had been hacked. But she reported that to the police and they kind of pursued it, but put it down as a cyber crime, despite the fact her personal details and her location were mentioned on the website. Did you report it to the police? Yes. So I reported the police straight away as soon as I found out. When I went to the police station, we're quite a small local community, like a lot of people know each other. So there was a kind of informal conversation with

the desk officer and the desk officer said they'd had 30 reports in one day. And I think that just shows you the kind of scale of how quickly this website link was circulating our community in our area. The 30 women to have reported in one day is just a crazy amount. So what was the resolution of your case? Did you get anywhere? Not really. I think the police didn't support us as well as they could have as victims. But then also, I don't think the law was supporting them. The revenge porn law, as it's known as, that came in in 2015 was a massive achievement and a brilliant thing to come in. But it wasn't robust enough for them to pursue

investigation into our cases. And even at the point of categorising and recording the reports, there was inconsistency. I was given a crime reference number. Some of the other victims weren't even given that. They're given incident logs. Some of them didn't even get a follow up call. And some did. Some got victim support. Some didn't. And so it's very inconsistent. And there was only one male handling officer assigned to all of these reports, which we felt as a group was actually quite inadequate and not conducive to solving this crime. Are the photos still out there? Some are, some are. It's a real beast of a website. It regenerates its URLs,

it regenerates its threads. When we did a little bit more digging ourselves, we found threads from 2015, 2017, same photos, same women. The Revenge Porn Helpline have been really, really amazing amazing and they have directly contacted site owners got some of the images removed from certain threads but then they just pop up again and I think the dangerous thing about this website is that the threads are categorized by local area so although our area was affected and it came to light for all of us on kind of one day last summer there isn't a thread for almost every corner of the UK. Is your name attached to your image?

My name's not attached to my image, but for a lot of the other victims, their names, their places of work, the schools they went to, their family relations, people asking for swaps for ones of their sisters. It's really, really personal stuff. And for us, when the police responded and said this was more of a cybercrime issue and referred it to the cybercrime unit, that's fine, because actually they are probably the ones that can get it taken down if anyone can. But this is a kind of attack that's personalised by local knowledge. And there didn't seem to be anything the police could do about that. Maria Miller, let's bring you in at this point, both as an MP and someone who, as the former chair of the Women and Equalities Committee, and someone who has done a lot of work in this area. First and posted online without her consent. But Ruby's absolutely right that the law just hasn't kept pace with technology and she is left with very few options in terms of getting these images removed permanently. What can she do with the

law as it stands? What she can do is to try and use the existing laws, but revenge pornography laws wouldn't bite in this case because there's no relationship between her and the people who've posted the images. There may be some opportunities under the Malicious Communications Act and some of the other existing laws that relate to these sorts of image abuse cases, but it's very difficult for the police to actually get a case and then successfully bring it to fruition. And one of the most difficult

things, Emma, is that Ruby wouldn't have a right of anonymity, which is one of the things that I want to see change. So that's one of the changes that you want. What else do you want to change? Because, of course, people have been talking about the online harms bill and that going through the House. So the online harms bill is hopefully an opportunity, we haven't seen it yet, to get a clearer approach to a duty of care amongst these sorts of websites. So the website provider would have to make sure that any user generated images are within the law and that they've got authorization to be able to post them, that they make sure that people under the age of 18 can't view them. But it doesn't actually offer an

opportunity for Ruby to take individual redress. So what I'm calling on the government to do is to really take all the existing patchwork of laws around upskirting and revenge pornography and just to make one simple law which says it's a criminal offence to post an intimate image without somebody's consent. So that's the main change I want to see happen, whether we can do that through the online harms bill, whether it has to be a parallel piece of legislation is yet to be seen. So that's what you'd like to see and you'd like to see it simplified. Maria Miller, do you actually have faith it will happen? I believe it has to happen because technology is now at a situation where people like Ruby are seeing their images being stolen and put online and very little recourse to the criminal law to get them removed. Ruby, let me ask you the same question. Do you have faith it will happen having gone through this process? I would like to have faith it would happen. I think it's an issue that cannot

be ignored by the government at this point, especially for women of my generation. That was Ruby and Maria Miller MP, and you can find out more on this story on the BBC News website and social media channels. The Law Commission are conducting a review of the existing criminal law as it relates to taking, making and sharing intimate images without consent. The consultation is open until the 27th of May 2021. If you'd like to find out more,

there's a link on the Woman's Hour website. Time now to talk about language. If you've looked up the word woman in the dictionary recently, you might have noticed that the definition has changed. That's thanks to a campaign by women's rights activist Maria Beatrice Giovannardi. Now, Maria also had the terms associated with woman changed in the thesaurus too. So how was woman defined before the changes? I found this definition via Google because Oxford licensed its content to all the search engines. And what was wrong was that basically there were a lot of surnames such as, you know, piece, bit, baggage, bitch, and a lot of other derogatory words. But also within the definition, there were example sentences such as, I told you to be home when I get home, little woman.

Or, you know, if this doesn't work, they'll become women off the streets. Like typical sort of like negative stereotypes. And also most of the example sentences were patronizing women and they were showing them as sexual objects or objects of men. It doesn't sound great when you list it out like that. Well, more than 34,000 people signed your petition. The definition has now changed. So what is it now? They sort of like revolutionized it in a way that before the woman had a passive role in the definition

and now you know the example sentences changed to you know a woman that puts kids through college and you know women of letters women of science the woman of the moment they made the effort to change the way women are represent were represented in the definition and are represented and also they changed the fact that before you know a woman was a man's lover or a man's partner, and now it's just a person's partner. And this was a huge victory for, of course, the LGBTQ community. Yeah, they removed lots of derogatory synonyms. And yeah, I mean, I'm quite happy. It's not 100% perfect, but it's definitely much better. You've also said that the definitions for man were also a lot more exhaustive than those for woman. So can you give us a few examples

of what was in the dictionary for man? Men were actually playing an active role in the definition. So, you know, the example sentence is where he was a solid Labour voter or, you know, a Cambridge man or, you know, a man that plays basketball. Like, men were just like being human beings. They're like doing things, and they're also excelling at them. And women were discriminated against.

So, yeah, and there are no derogatory surnames whatsoever on the word man. So that was another problem. Now, when you challenged the the oxford dictionary of english what were the justifications given for having those definitions and synonyms of of woman yeah so the first challenge which is also the one i'm getting in italy is was that um you know a dictionary had the role of the dictionary is to describe the way society is and how people speak, not to prescribe a reality or prescribe a reality. So that was the main challenge, really. But we kept saying that, first of all,

like not everyone speaks like this, but also that sexism, just as, you know, homophobia, racism, xenophobia are serious issues. And it's not a joke or it's not trivial to basically speak about sexism because a lot of people were saying, you know, you're not going to change the world by changing the definition.

And we understand that. But this was just one of the examples of everyday sexism and how it's not taken seriously and how sexism actually has a huge impact on women because we are discriminated against ever since we're born. And I love two quotes.

One is from Angela Carter that says, language is power, life, and the instruments of culture, but it's also the instrument of domination and liberation. And another one from Tony Morrison that says, you know, oppressive language does more than represent violence. It is violence. And I think, you know, language has been used throughout history to oppress different groups from a religious perspective or, you know, under the racist

spectrum, like for more phobic purposes. So, and I think sexism is still, of course, something that it's not taken seriously, unfortunately, especially in language, because, you know, even in the media or in TV, we always see people discriminate, well, men discriminating against women, and no one really caring, or it's sort of like a symbolic campaign, I guess. Of course, but as you rightly pointed out, language does matter. Now, you're trying to do the same thing in Italy. You've come across Tricani, the online Italian dictionary, and you're trying to get the same um definition of woman changed what's the response been and is it going well yeah so we just started after oxford decides change i asked tricani she's a huge institution in italy of of course like a public

interest as well and um in november they said they weren't going to change it. So this March, the 8th of March, for International Women's Day, we wrote an open letter assigned by over 100 people, very influential people in the civil society, from the vice president of the Bank of Italy to lots of politicians and etc., asking again to remove the sexist connotations within the definition. And the response has been that the director said, they sort of like associated us to, you know, the movements in the 70s that were like of women burning books, patronising us. So not positive then, but you have had some high profile support from the president, no less, Sergio Mattatrella. So could that change their mind?

Mattatrella did a wonderful speech. Oxford answered in the same way in the beginning. And of course, they are a huge institution, so we weren't expecting a yes plea, like, thank you. We'll keep challenging them. We'll probably start a petition. And Mattatrella also, yes, I'm sure he had an impact. He's had an impact uh he's had an impact and uh yeah I'm sure they'll change it we'll just need to keep fighting. Maria Beatrice Giovannardi there

still to come on the program why women in heterosexual couples are much more likely than men to give up their jobs or cut their hours after becoming parents and and The Art of Repair, how it's not only good for the environment, but also for the mind. On Monday night, UK audiences were finally, finally able to see in full Oprah Winfrey's interview with Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. Millions tuned in, and whilst what was said continues to fuel media debate, many have said that the real winner was the woman asking the questions, America's first black female billionaire, Oprah Winfrey. Oprah is a TV phenomenon. By her early 30s, she had become the queen of the daytime television world. Her Oprah Winfrey show,

which ran from 1986 to 2011, became the highest rated television show of all time in the US. Her in-depth confessional approach to interviews even earned its own dictionary definition, Oprahfication. So what is the key to her success? Well, Patricia Goddard enjoyed her own very successful TV career and also had her own daytime chat show, first on ITV and then Channel 5. She's been to the mountains, you know, she's waded through all sorts of hell. She's lived, she's lived. And, you know, I think when you sit down with an interviewer, if you sense or you know or you pick up a vibe, you know.

For instance, if I sit down with somebody and talk to someone and they've had, for instance, mental health issues, there are subtle ways they use language, certain things they say. You know, you click, you know, like at a party or something, you say, oh, I just got that vibe from you. And obviously, the more life experiences that you've had, the more relatable you are, the better. And if you remember when Oprah started in television, the interviewing style was very combative. And those kinds of interviews, you know, I remember being in Australia as a news and current affairs journalist and a very well-known British journalist came out to lecture us and basically said, you know, you women are far too emotional when you interview guests, you know, and then there was this very heated discussion about how women tended to get too emotional. And then the war correspondents started getting a very emotive stories from people, from women, if you remember, in the

Serbo-Croat war and what have you, and really adding some dimension to the atrocities of war by talking to women. So talking to people about their experiences became a different way of interviewing people. And still to this day, you will get more from a guest, whether you're doing news and current affairs or politics or whatever, you will get more from a guest with that kind of approach than the combative, if you like, you know, Piers Morgan type approach. I just wonder, as a fellow broadcaster, do you think Oprah did a good job? Yes, I do. Yes, I do.

When she didn't get an answer to a question, instead of beating them over the head, she was very clever. She left it alone, went on to something else. And then to use a very American term, circled back. I knew you were going to say that. She circled back to it I I think you know people ask me I I used to hate being called um you know Britain's answer to Oprah because I felt that was more about color than than style because I come from a journalistic background if you like and and she didn't but But the other thing is with facial expressions. And I use facial expressions a lot, not intentionally. I mean, it's been pointed out to me during my career.

Some of the best questions I've ever asked, I've never said a word. And looking at Oprah, you know, the gasp, the stop and wait a minute, you know, because it's like talking to a friend. She likes she likes the word wow as well. I noted the word wow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And we all have our different things like she'll even mouth it, you know, but also body language is a really important thing as well. I mean, I learned that very early on with with guests. I mean, she's well, I was just going to to say, she's a very serious businesswoman as well. You know, there was no making a mistake of who was owning the rights to this. Harpo is her production company.

Nothing wrong with that. She is in control now of it all. Yes, I've been to her headquarters. I mean, I was invited. I won't go into details, but to talk to the network and the people that work with her have similar, a similar ethos. It's actually very female led. It's a very female. When I say that, I'm not saying everybody in charge is female, but even the headquarters where you go, it's a very female vibe and it's very female led. And it's its approach to programming and everything is probably more equated with with females. So I actually really like the fact that she's such a powerful businesswoman.

I wondered, though, there was a discrepancy in the interview about a very important point. It may have been a misspeak, but Meghan Markle said to Oprah, the Duchess of Sussex, she said a comment was made about our child's skin tone. And that was about it was it seemed like when she was pregnant. And then when Harry joined the set, he talked about it being right at the beginning of their relationship. And I just wonder, you know, some people wanted perhaps a bit more of a follow-up

on some of those details. Do you think that was a miss by Oprah? It might not have been because I understand, I mean, they showed more here in the States on CBS this morning with Gayle King. They showed yet more footage because there was also, if you remember, criticism that they hadn't been asked about Thomas Markle and the system, what have you. Well, actually, they had talked about that and that was shown me the next morning. Apparently, there's still more hours of interviews so we oh there's loads and loads and

loads so but for editing I know for instance again you know anything like I did Piers Morgan's life stories or anything like that it's three hours of filming and they've got to squish it down to a commercial hour and let me say those extraordinary figures of what advertisers were paying it was like literally super expensive to the super bowl exactly so you know it's like can we can we run this to 47 minutes are you kidding and knock out three minutes it's like half a million dollars plus you know so you you don't know how it was edited so before I sort of criticize her unless like one was to sit there you know and and you can never have an interview you you look back at an interview and the flavor is always going to change slightly

you know in the editing booth so who who knows what happened there you know there was an added bit I think the bit with the chickens and what have you, they had to sort of bring it up to date because things had happened since they did the original sit down. Just to bring you back to your own career here, and you have just done your own life stories with Piers Morgan, the thing I wanted to ask you was how much of an impact do you think Oprah had on black women specifically and their role on television

and in society did it impact you or was it just happening at the same time oh no no it was just happening at the same time with me because when Oprah started I was actually again a news and current affairs journalist in Australia I I made history as the first black on-air anything there in 1988. And I would never, honestly, if you'd said to me then, I was going to end up as a talk show host. I would have, you know, I was doing news and current affairs. In those days, I was doing health and social welfare. I tended more towards that.

That was a woman's area of news and current affairs back then. But no, she did make a huge impact. And I think I only really, she was only really brought into focus for me when I started, when I was brought over to the UK to do my talk show and people started saying Britain's Black Oprah. And I was really you know but um and I I purposely didn't watch her shows in that those days because America was so very different to Britain in the late 90s I mean we've we've kind of merged a little bit more thanks to social media and what have you but let me say she has made a huge impact um Her Oprah magazine, for instance, her Oprah magazine at a time in Britain when it was rare to see a black woman on the cover or even really in the pages of any magazine.

And people will jump in and say, oh, but Naomi Campbell was on magazine. Yes, Naomi Campbell was just about it. You know, but you could buy Oprah magazine at the airport when we used to travel with my girls. And there was a magazine with a woman on the cover who happened to be black. That was Tricia Goddard. Approximately 85,000 women and 12,000 men aged 16 to 59 experience rape, attempted rape or sexual assault by penetration in England and

Wales every year. That's roughly 11 of the most serious sexual offences of adults alone every hour. This week a new charity and website was launched called Mokra or Mothers of Children Conceived in Rape and Abuse. The aim is to give support and advice to women and girls who become pregnant from rape, sexual abuse, exploitation, trafficking and incest. It also aims to provide services for children who find that they were conceived in acts of rape and sexual violence against their mothers. Emma talked to the forensic psychologist, Dr Jessica Taylor. She specialises in cases of violence against women and is the founder of the charity. So why did she set it up? I guess it's a mixture of professional experience and personal experience because I have worked with women and girls for 12 years this year and I have met so many women

and girls who've become pregnant from rape or exploitation, even child sexual abuse. And there really wasn't a specific service or guidelines or advice or information about, you know, what to do and how to make the decision about what to do when you become pregnant from rape or abuse. And then also, you know, for me and for some of the other women on the board who have helped me to set up Mokra, you know, several of us have either had children from rape ourselves or were born from rape. And it's about supporting both sides of that. Yes, because women and girls need support when they realise not only that they've been raped, but they're now pregnant and they don't know what to do. But also there are so many, you know, adult children out there

and children under 18 who were conceived in the rape or the abuse or exploitation of their mums. And currently there are no services for them to seek help, get counselling or, you know, process some of the feelings of knowing that they were conceived in rape. And in your experience of the women you've talked to because is it fair to say we don't know necessarily how many people we're talking about here because the data isn't there? Yeah I totally agree so at the moment there's no prevalence statistics there's no data there

are no studies so when we started writing research on this a couple of years ago we published three reports on this. There's no literature to sort of draw on to go, oh, well, this year there was this many cases of this. That doesn't exist. So we don't know how many women get pregnant every year from rape. We don't know how many children are conceived in rape. So at the moment, it's really difficult to know how prevalent it is. And with that difficulty then, I was wondering what you have seen with your experience of helping and trying to talk to these people, these women and children, about whether they tell and how they tell and when they tell the children how they were conceived. So we know from our research that the majority of women never tell anybody that their baby was conceived in a rape. And so we interviewed 85 women who'd had babies from rape and their experiences were really diverse, you know,

but the majority of them said that we were the first people they told that their baby was conceived in a rape or that they was pregnant from abuse or rape. Their experiences really did range from, you know, everything from being raped repeatedly in their relationships, in long-term relationships, right the way through to, you know, being 13 years old and being raped by somebody and then becoming pregnant, their families covering it up. Some of these women and girls their parents lied to their school and said they're having their appendix out and took them for late-term abortions for some children they told you know family and friends that it was their sibling so they actually let their teenage daughters have these babies from rape and then brought them up as their sibling and nobody has ever spoken about it it's such a diverse experience and in terms of whether they ever tell their children that they're born from rape that was really mixed as well so some of the women we worked with and talked

to did tell their children uh either when they were in their teens or when they were much older in their 20s or their 30s um and some women we spoke to said they would never tell their child the truth and and all of these different experiences have different connotations because we spoke to some women who like for example I spoke to one woman who was in her 60s and her child from rape is in their 30s and she was saying to me I've never I've never told anybody and now um you know they my child thinks that this particular man is their dad and he's not their dad and then this particular man has now found he has uh an illness that's genetic so her child is now worrying that they have this

genetic issue and the woman I was interviewing was saying, what am I supposed to do? Because I know full well, they don't have this genetic issue because he's not the dad, because I was raped when I was a teenager. So there was things like that. But on the other hand, I've spoken to a woman who told her son, and then I interviewed her son, and I think her son coped with it remarkably well. I was very surprised when I spoke to him how he managed to process that he was born from a rape. That was Jessica Taylor speaking there and if anyone listening to our interview feels they need support please do head over to our website where you'll find the necessary links. A new report from the Institute of Fiscal

Studies suggests that women in heterosexual couples are much more likely than men to give up their jobs or cut their hours after becoming parents. That's even if the woman earns more than her male partner. Alison Andrew is the senior research economist at the IFS. She told me how these new figures were collated. This is a small part of the gender chapter for the IFS's Deaton Review on Inequalities, which is a long run project looking at various aspects of inequalities in the UK. So like over health, education, and then over gender, race, and then we're looking at labour markets, etc. And what did the results show then about the way men and women's jobs and their hours changed after they became parents? Yeah so the gender gaps in paid work tend to open

up a lot after individuals become parents and what we show in this research is that this is the case even when women previously had a higher wage than their partner. And so these are the group of households who you might think that all of the financial incentives point towards them prioritising the women's work. But actually, if we look in these households, these higher earning women drop their hours of work by an average of a quarter, and a further 13% drop out of the labour force entirely. So it really tells us that this doesn't seem to be what's going on. It doesn't seem to be largely driven by households prioritising the paid work of the person with the highest earning capability.

Rather, it always seems to be, on average, women who take the largest step back, whilst men's careers seem remarkably unaffected by parenthood. Okay, so it counteracts that common myth then. Were you surprised then by these results that the woman, even as the highest earner, was more likely to stop work? I think just how similar households where the woman was the highest earner look to households where she wasn't is quite surprising. Also, the persistence of these effects. So these aren't short term effects. Women's participation in paid work and hours drop immediately and then they stay at that much lower level for at least the next 10 years.

And that's where our data runs out. But we think it lasts much longer. Do you think this tells us anything about, I suppose, the social norms in place at the moment and why women often end up carrying more of the childcare duties? Exactly. So I think it's really important to think that couples are making these choices within loads of social norms, so whether that's social pressures from friends and family about whether women should

take a larger caregiving role, or whether men should be a primary breadwinner, or just sort of small things like schools often using the mother as a default caregiver, that all serve to reinforce sort of very traditional gendered norms. How much of, I suppose, the women that responded to you felt they had a choice? Because it's easy to say that even though women were earning more, they felt obliged to become the primary caregiver, but perhaps they wanted to. Perhaps it was that woman's choice to decide to give up work and stay at home and be the stay-at-home parent? Absolutely. And I think that's a crucial thing to say is that the care work that people do, whether that's paid or unpaid, is obviously crucial for our society and our economy. And that's not what's at issue here. I guess we want to get to a stage where individuals can make

meaningful choices. And at the moment where we have quite an unequal policy environment in terms of it's quite difficult often for fathers to take a good amount of paternity leave at high pay and when couples are making these decisions within a lot of social norms we really don't know the extent to which all of this and stepping back from paid work reflects genuine choices. And it does seem likely that for some women, they would prefer to take a larger role in paid work. And likewise, for some men, they may prefer to take a larger role in the care of their children. We had quite a few people contact us about this on social media. I'm reading one out here from Twitter from a woman that said she stepped back from a teaching job for 10 years while her three children were small. Husband was away with the RAF lots. So thankful that she had the chance to do this as the job was well paid. Back in a full time post now. So no real impact in the career. Pension not looking too good, though. I wonder with the results that you've found, what does it tell us about the, you've hinted at it previously, but the systematic problems between the genders in the labour market? around childbirth can have quite long lasting impacts, both because they establish norms and habits within the household, but also if women take a large amount of time off, it often is hard

for them to get back into a job with a comparable pay, and they lose out on a lot of pay and promotion decisions along the way. What's interesting, what we find is that hours and employment rates drop off immediately. And then we have this slow accumulation of the opening of the wage gap where slowly it seems that women earn less per hour. And large part of that might be because they've either switched to jobs that might be a bit more flexible or they've reduced their hours. We've also had another tweet come in from Alison that says, four children later and 15 years later, I retrained and had to start again. It certainly was the right decision for me. It does set you back a lot, she said in capital letters, in potential earnings and career progression though.

So Alison, what would you like to see in terms of policy changes that can make it better? I think that actually highlights a really positive one. There are a lot of women in the UK who have perhaps stepped back entirely from paid work or reduced their hours a lot when their kids were young. And now they find themselves in a situation where they don't need to do as many hours of childcare. And there could be real scope for policy to help more women move back into paid work if that is their choice. And then likewise, we've got policies around parental leave. So many Scandinavian countries have what's called use it or lose it months where leave is reserved for the father and can't be transferred. And this

has been quite effective at encouraging fathers to take more time with their kids during the early years. I think the final thing I'd say here is that the status quo is really costly. We've got a lot of women dropping out. And therefore, policies that are able to help women to move back into the labour force are going to generate tax revenue. And they're going to mean that those policies may not be as costly as you would first think. Alison Andrew talking there. Now during the last year when we haven't quite had access to the usual shops many have turned to fixing up items around the house and mending our own clothes with shows like The Repair Shop and Salvage Hunters being so popular.

What stories do our possessions carry and how can restoration keep them alive? Molly Martin is an illustrator, textile repairer and author of The Art of Repair. She also runs workshops on how to mend mindfully. She told Emma what people have been trying to repair during lockdown. It's been so fascinating watching everyone kind of contemplate over the lockdown, over things that are normally long forgotten. And, you know, they don't usually have time to repair and mend. Or maybe they don't even think about doing that in the first place. But I've been teaching these repair workshops online and the reach has been incredibly wide which has been fantastic and mostly it's textile repair but I really encourage you know everyone mending all sorts of things.

I'm quite interested in something you said about mending being almost a political act. Yeah I do think it's a political act in terms of repairing anything in you know the modern society we live in for me me, feels like a small act of defiance against consumerist values. Because you can bring something back to life. And actually, it's what I'm noticing, people are very, they sort of are perhaps having a greater attachment to their objects if they can keep them going. Yeah, I think that that's really important as well to kind of what I try and, during my workshops, but also in the book a little bit more is repairing your pair of jeans is fantastic. But what you get from it, the feeling you get from it, the reconnection that you can gain is so much more than just mending for the sake of mending and the feedback has been fascinating as well you know

just you know to see it as a wider philosophy of how you know in the west we're we're pretty obsessed with perfectionism and symmetry and the kind of you know historically that comes from roman ideals of basically everything being eternal and made of stone and marble. So I think that holds up a lot of expectation for our own bodies and ourselves. And I think that when we kind of slow down and can repair something ourselves, that even if it is just a holy jumper, there's something within the broken fibres of, you know, a moth-eaten jumper that represents a little bit about us. And it gives us a sense of reconnection and comfort. But also the idea of perhaps, and sticking with clothes,

it's often other things as well, of the idea that you could even think to keep this for the next generation. And that was something that people always often used to think about. Do you think perhaps we can get back to that? I'd love, I would love it if we could. And I think that that's part of the reason I wanted to write about the history of mending and repair in my book, The Art of Repair, because I think it's very humbling to look back at times like, you know, the make do and mend movement of World War II when everything was rationed from food to clothes. So we really had to make our clothes last.

We had to make choices when we bought things and really think about it. But today, because we're surrounded by, you know, abundance of clothes and high street've got from the lockdown is a moment of contemplation to sort of reassess what we buy and, you know, to kind of search for meaning within the things that we do wear and make good choices. Just to ask you, have you seen any trends between what women mend and what men mend? Are there differences? Are women different menders, fixers, repairers? It's a funny one because I think that like... A massive smile has come across your face as I've asked you this go on why I think it's just because I I like that you brought that up because I really encourage men and women to both men I think that historically repair and anything to do with sewing or craft is often seen as a female act. But actually, men have historically also been menders.

You know, fishermen used to mend their sails and their socks when they went to sea and same with soldiers. And I think that it's nice to kind of give that as an example. And actually more, you know, more variety have been coming to the workshops. And, you know, the men that I have spoken to before,

you know, they bring their jeans and their jackets where they, you know, where wallets have kind of made holes in the back pockets of their trousers. Well, now that was Molly Martin talking and many of you have enjoyed this subject and have got in touch with us. Ross has said, my 91 year old mum has mended her knitting machine by watching YouTube videos, then sending off a spare part. Amazing. And her family are now the recipients of lovely sweaters she has produced on the new working machine. What a fabulous story. Brilliant. Anna says, my father taught me how to do all of my own plumbing jobs. Recently, my toilet ceased to work. I purchased a whole new interior kit, stripped out the old one and

installed the new one. No leaks, no plumber and the loo working perfectly. By the way, I am 80 years old. That's absolutely brilliant. I need to up my game in terms of plumbing, clearly. Thank you very much for joining me on Weekend's Woman's Hour. It's been a pleasure to have your company this Saturday. Remember, you can listen to any of our programmes throughout the week on BBC Sounds. Emma Barnett will be back Monday morning, just after 10am. who's 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.