Woman's Hour - Weekend Woman's Hour - Women in the metaverse, Author Vanessa Chan, Women and negotiation

Episode Date: January 6, 2024

Police are investigating what is possibly the first crime of its kind: a British schoolgirl playing a game in the metaverse was allegedly sexually assaulted by a group of online strangers. Given that this happened in a virtual reality game, it is not yet clear whether there is any crime here to prosecute. We hear from Helen Rumbelow from The Times, and her colleague Sean Russell, who has gone into the metaverse as both a man and a woman, and was struck by how different it was.How much of your daily life do you spend negotiating? Perhaps at work, or with your children – or even in-laws? Mum and a mic on Instagram, Jane Dowden, discusses the negotiations she has with her twins, and clinical psychologist Catherine Hallissey tells us what goes on in our brains while we’re negotiating, and the best way to do so with family.Is farming getting easier for women? New research out this week suggests that women working in agriculture are finding life worse now than they did 10 years ago. This comes as more women are showing an interest in pursuing farming as a career – with some agricultural colleges enrolling record numbers of girls onto their courses. We hear from Emily Norton, a female farmer and agricultural commentator, as well as Bridgette Baker, a young farmer who recently graduated, to find out their experiences in farming.Violinist Izzy Judd trained at the Royal Academy of Music and was an original member of the string quartet Escala, who shot to fame on Britain’s Got Talent in 2008. She met her husband Harry on the McFly Wonderland tour. Following marriage and three small children, Izzy has written two books - Dare to Dream and Mindfulness for Mums. She has now returned to her love of playing the violin, with a forthcoming EP - Moments, and a single - Somewhere in My Memory. The Storm We Made is a new book by the debut author Vanessa Chan. Set in what we know today as Malaysia across two timelines - British colonialism and Japanese colonialism - it follows bored housewife Cecily who risks it all to become a spy for a general. But her decisions have huge repercussions for her and her family. Vanessa Chan tells us about her book which was fought over in a seven-way auction by publishers in the UK.Steph Daniels gave up hockey in her 30s to teach PE and English and manage an all-female synth pop group called Zenana. However, in her 70s, she saw an advert for Bedford Hockey Club and decided to dust off her sticks. Since then, she’s even attended a trial for the over-70s England team and vows to try again next year. She tells us about reigniting old passions.Presenter: Clare McDonnell Producer: Rabeka Nurmahomed

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, this is Claire Macdonald and you're listening to the Woman's Hour podcast. Hello and welcome to Weekend Woman's Hour, where we bring you some of the best bits from the week just gone by. On the programme today, we hear how a British schoolgirl playing a game in the metaverse was allegedly gang raped by a group of online strangers. We discuss what is happening in the metaverse and hear about the experiences when your avatar is female. We hear also from the classically trained violinist turned influencer Izzy Judd on her return to playing violin and her new EP of Lullabies and the art of negotiating in our everyday lives with our loved ones.

When I'm working with parents, and especially when they're talking about conflict with their teenagers, I say, you know, your job now for this week is listen, listen, listen. And when you feel like you've listened enough, listen some more. The author Vanessa Chan will take us to Malaya, known to us today as Malaysia, during the Second World War as she discusses her debut novel. And we'll be discussing reigniting a passion for something you did earlier in life with Steph Daniels, who's returned to hockey in her 70s.

I'd never really heard about walking hockey. And I thought, oh, have I still got my stick? Would it still be the right shape? Could I still play? Would I still have my skills? So I thought I'd go along and see. It's a wonderful group. It's a wonderful community of walkers, men, women, all ages. But first, police are investigating what is possibly the first crime of its kind. A British schoolgirl playing a game in the metaverse was allegedly gang raped

by a group of online strangers. Given that this happened in a virtual reality game, it is not yet clear whether there is any crime here to prosecute. The National Crime Agency has previously warned that police will need to be ready to deal with virtual sexual assaults in the future. Does the fact that the girl's alleged attack happened virtually mean it didn't really happen at all? Or, given that more and more time will be spent in a virtual world, could our new reality be a wild west in which male sexual predators have the time of their lives? Helen Rumbelow from The Times has looked into what is happening in the metaverse, and her colleague

Sean Russell has gone into the metaverse as both a man and a woman and was struck by how different it was. First Helen explained what the metaverse is. The tech bro billionaires that increasingly rule our lives would like us to transfer so much of what we do in the real world, shopping, working, going to concerts, socialising, into this virtual world. And it's not just through a screen, it's using a VR headset. So it feels very different to a screen, you feel like you're actually going to a different place. And you've been looking into this to research or are you someone who goes into this with these worlds and and has those experiences by choice for pleasure I do not normally do it and I have to say come Christmas time you see everyone with the VR headsets and I think they look faintly absurd so I'm not someone that

normally does this and I went in and spent a few hours yesterday morning to research yes and how did you find that world I actually found it amazingly gender imbalanced so I was very conscious when I went in as a woman or I should say as a female avatar because you can't really be sure what who people are in this place um that I was very much in the minority, I would say, like at least 20, 30 to one. And as a woman, I did have a distinctly different experience than when I went in as a male avatar, which I think is something that Sean also experienced. But I felt like it was pretty cruisy as a woman. So I was getting guys trying to connect with me a lot,

which was actually interrupting whatever I was trying to do, play or whatever. And then when I was a man, I did see, I went into one particular game where there was only one other, there was only one female avatar, I was then a male. And the boys were like, let's kill the girl. So they all teamed up to kind of shoot at the girl simply because she was a girl. Coming to this particular case that I mentioned, which has brought this conversation to the fore and prompted, you know, you and I to be talking and you to be looking into this world. What is alleged to have happened to this schoolgirl?

So we don't know many details and they're actually kind of not releasing many details to protect her. But similar incidents have happened in America to women. And it's something like in these other incidents that their female avatar will be surrounded by male avatars and they will simulate something like a sexual assault in the real world you know but obviously it's you know it's it's it's similar but it's also very different um you know the word rape is used here i can see it's being used in the media i think that's the wrong word i'm not sure we actually have the vocabulary yet to describe what is happening here. In some senses, you know, this is a sexual assault. At the other extreme, you know, some people say it's simply a fiction, what's happening, you know, that your little sock puppet is doing something terrible or has

something terrible done to them by another little sock puppet. It's made up, it's make-believe, you know, and I think probably we have to work out this is uncharted legal territory. We have to work out. I mean, at the moment, for me personally, I think it falls under the bracket of sexual harassment. That would be the closest I could come to it. Okay. And I suppose the reality of this virtual reality is, it sounds worse in some ways than the world you walk around in here right now in the UK.

But in other ways, some would say these places reflect the society that we live in. Yes, I think they reflect a bit of a sort of Lord of the Flies reality, what happens when there's no one looking, I think you would say. And I think it's, you know, a lot of people like when I wrote the article people were commenting and getting in touch with me and saying well you can just take the headset off you know you don't have to be here but I felt like I understand what they mean this is a kind of optional experience uh at the moment it may increasingly be less optional but um you know it's it's a bit concerning that argument because it's a little bit like saying

if the streets are unsafe for women at night women shouldn't go out at night you know i think if this is a place where we are increasingly being asked to be we have to make sure it's you know safe or even safer than our real world yes let's bring in sean to this you've been gaming for some time from being much much younger and before we get to what it was like to try and be and pretend to be a woman in this space what did you notice about women's experience when you were gaming from a young age? Yeah so when I was growing up I'd say the first sort of early games I played were things like Habbo Hotel which is a kind of an early version of a virtual world where there's no microphones, but you would type out messages and things. And I remember even as early as that point, sort of reflecting what Helen just said, when a female avatar appeared in a game like this, there'd be a swarm around of generally male avatars trying to chat to this person trying to sometimes it was completely just

trying to sort of approach and speak in a sort of non-threatening way if that but then sometimes it would be sort of sexually charged comments and things like that uh and then as i got older i would notice on sort of online let's say shoots and much like full of duty or halo if you had a a nickname or gamer tag that was that suggested that you were a woman um the treatment would be different uh you'd start to hear um porn noises being played over microphones you'd start to hear um some of it was sexual some of it would be oh there's a woman on our team it's good we to lose. It's just sort of abuse for no reason other than having your game attack suggesting you're a female. And now when you get to the most sophisticated that these games have been

and you've gone in and you've had the experience both as regular players, yourself as a man, but you've gone in as a woman, what did you find? What I was expecting, basically, I think having played for about 19 years, I'd seen this from the outside, I wasn't quite ready for how quickly it happened I changed my avatar to a female avatar and within seconds someone came over and said something like um want to see my balls and then minutes later I have a boner and those are things that just hadn't happened to me as a male avatar and also in 19 years of gaming as well so what happened in the space of say 10 just hadn't happened to me as a male avatar and also in 19 years of gaming as well. So what happened in the space of, say, 10 minutes had never happened to me in 19 years.

And they sort of came over and say this and then oftentimes would disappear when I didn't. I wasn't interacting myself, so I didn't even do anything. I literally was stood there and this happened. And then I would just kind of move the character around and something else would happen. And eventually it kind of stopped and it became really rather boring. The game in general, there's not really much to do as far as I could figure out. Certainly in the world that I was in,

there's multiple worlds to go into. It was just shocking to me that as a male character for say half an hour in this world, nothing happened. No one approached me. No one talked to me. I just kind of walked around. And then as soon as I changed my avatar, things changed and people approached me and people started playing songs over their microphones. I should say that in the world, you have to be close to the person to hear their microphones.

So it required them to come to my avatar physically for me to hear those things. I mean, it's going to be different, I suppose, in different worlds. But there is, just coming back to the original story, which prompted this conversation, we've had a woman text in who describes herself as a woman who works in tech who says, if a virtual rape is possible in the metaverse, it's because the code allows it. Addressing the end result is too late.

Look at how the metaverse is constructed and coded and by whom. If they don't want virtual sexual assault to happen, it could be prevented. And there have been such things as described as personal boundaries put in place on some of these, in some of these worlds, depending on who they're owned by. But what do you say to that as a long time gamer, Sean? I think these things have definitely gotten better. The privacy settings are better than when I was younger. Things like the personal boundaries.

And I know that these conversations have changed in that time. We're so much more aware of privacy and personal boundaries and things like this. And I know that, for example, certain games will record X amount of minutes whilst you play. So if you were to report someone, it should be fairly easy to kind of see what they're doing and get that person banned um but definitely i think in the sort of short term these developers have to be on top of this as you say we have it's probably one of the good uses of ai is can it spot these things on microphones do you have to report this yourself? Or how can we improve these places and make them safer? And I'll come back to Helen in just a moment.

But, you know, having now gone through this, having our thoughts about it, explored it, seen how it's changed, actually in some ways for the worse, although things have improved, like you talk about, our knowledge of privacy. What's your view of, you know, your fellow man doing this? And what's going on there in the culture? Because it's always easy to say, well, these are other people. This is, you know, people not like me. They're not like my friends. But we do have to face up to

this. And there is a mirror that technology provides sometimes in a way that's much clearer. Yeah, it's tricky tricky i think i've been as i say i've kind of seen this for a long time online and you kind of wonder what kind of man is doing this and why they're doing it and a lot of the time i say in the article a lot of the time it's peaking men that you imagine wouldn't say any of this to women in real life but at what point do they do something horrible uh in real life and then it change and also like you say isn't like you'd like to think oh i don't know anyone like that but i wouldn't know necessarily if my friends are like that i've always taken the position of reporting

anything that i see and blocking these people and um these days to be honest as as a 30 year old i completely sort of have a zero tolerance and just block this stuff but I it is hard to sort of understand what man is doing this and you feel like you don't know them but someone is someone is some men are doing this and it's not something that's been comfortable with me and it's never been comfortable with me unfortunately I've not been vocal enough about it in the games in the past and probably perhaps I should have been do you think you will be moving forward? Yeah I'd like to think I would be especially when I don't play games as often as I used to to be honest. No no but just having gone through this experience it might be something that. Yeah

yeah it was it was shocking to me I think I mean I was always like I said I've always been aware of these things happening but the speed at which it happened to me I was just it really shocked me and I didn't quite understand what it was like and so yeah I feel like going forward it's something I'm definitely more aware of. Helen Rumbelow let me just come back to you there's a couple of messages that come in I like to bring in our listeners when I can and Julia has gone a bit along some of the lines I think you've had in your response aren't there enough problems she says in the real world without stressing about the metaverse nobody has to enter the metaverse if they don't want to.

The phrase first world problems comes to mind. But Gem has written in, he's listening in Paisley, we cannot go down the road of telling women to exclude ourselves from the online world. We went through this in the early days of the internet. The internet now is essential to participate in public life and gain employment opportunities. There should be no space that's so unsafe

we need to exclude ourselves. It's up to the gaming industry to fix this problem, as the writer Laura Bates says, fix the system, not the women. Helen, what do you want to say, kind of starting to think about this now moving forward? Yeah, I think it's naive to say you can just retreat. I agree with Gemma. I think that this is very reminiscent of, let's say, you know,

workplaces that were male dominated, had a very macho culture, and, you know, were not legally excluding women, but were excluding women through their culture. And I think that, you know, the tech bros, to an extent, have created a world in their own image. And that has to change. But they didn't create those ills in the first place, did they? That's the other argument that always comes back. You know, you create the world, you see what happens, and the world gets reflected back to you. True.

But I think part of the problem here, as Sean has talked about, is that they don't experience or see how those worlds feel for a woman. And I think actually this is interesting and exciting as an experiment, isn't it? How quickly and easily you can change avatar because you can experience those things. And I think it's duty bound really for men to try it. That's Helen Rumbelow and Sean Russell from The Times talking to Emma. On New Year's Day this week, Hayley Hassel presented a special programme for Woman's Hour all about women and negotiation. She spoke to women who have been involved in negotiations

that changed the course of the world, from international conflict negotiation to climate negotiations at COP28. But she also heard about negotiations a little closer to home, those everyday domestic negotiations. Whether it's negotiating with a five-year-old to put their shoes on or negotiating with a friend over holiday dates, negotiating is something we do more than we may realise. Hayley was joined by Jane Dowden, aka Mum and a Mike on Instagram,

who shares her parenting highs and lows on that platform and on TikTok as well. And clinical psychologist Catherine Hallisey to discuss how we can better negotiate in our everyday lives. Hayley started by asking Catherine what goes on in our brains when we're negotiating with loved ones. There are so many emotions involved, you know, so, you know, anger might be the emotion that gets triggered and anger then is likely to trigger the fight state, you know, the fight or flight. Or you may feel anxious

and that then will trigger the flight state and you may want to avoid conflict at all costs. And we know that both of those emotions, when you bring them into the negotiation, they do lead to poor outcomes. And the line here that I use is the power is in the pause. So if you can just pause, keep those words in your mouth and process the feeling that's going through you, and then you are able to respond much more thoughtfully. So when I'm working with parents, and especially when they're talking about conflict with their teenagers, I say, you know, your job now for

this week is listen, listen, listen. And when you feel like you've listened enough, listen some more. And I know you've looked at this in particular, because there is a difference between men and women, isn't there? Women have different skills when it comes to negotiating. What do you see as them? So in terms of men and women, I don't think these are inbuilt differences. I feel that these are gender biases that are conditioned from an early age. So women and girls tend to be conditioned to be nice and likable above all else. And boys and men are conditioned to be assertive slash aggressive. And these gender biases, I feel that they restrict both of us. But typically assertiveness is interpreted as aggression in

women. So women tend to really foster other skills, for example, empathy, perspective taking, staying at the table, no matter what, seeing seeing things through and we know that persistence and patience are actually incredibly helpful in negotiation so these are strengths that that women when you become aware of them you can actually really enhance them and also when you become aware of the ones that are less helpful in negotiation so for example changing your behaviour so you're more likeable or changing and having porous boundaries because you want to be nice. So when you are aware of that, you can actually become more aware of your own behaviours then that actually may be harming your negotiation or your conflict resolution skills. And talking of family relationships,

Jane, I want to turn to you now because you've got twin boys. I do. Seven years old. How much negotiating do you have to get into? Oh, so much, so much. Just getting out the door. You know, put the shoes on, brush your teeth, eat your breakfast. Can we get in the car? I mean, I've cried in the morning before going to the school from pure frustration of just, oh my God, just get in the the car why does this have to be so difficult and actually on the times when I've got the perspective to just bring it down a notch chill and just sort of I guess give them time to know that you know okay you can have two more minutes but then we really have to go because if we're late then that's going to put pressure on mummy and I don't want to you know start my. Do you want to start your day feeling like this? I don't want to.

And actually, you think in the moment by stressing it, come on, go, go, out, out, now, now, now. It's not actually quicker. Actually taking that time to have a breath. And I didn't really know that's what I was doing, but now I do. To kind of just go, OK, what's going on here? Calm down, everybody. This is what we need to do. Actually, when I do that, the morning's more pleasant. I feel like when you're more human with your children, it's a lot easier to negotiate when you just, you know, don't have to be this figure up high that

gets to set all the rules. I think if you just come down to their level and talk to them like a human, that sometimes gets much better results. And I feel better about myself as well. So for the rest of us who are still crying on the bottom step, what are your top tips? Like how do you negotiate with children? Pick your battles, I would say, is one of the most important things. Sometimes it's just not worth getting in the trenches for. We went to something a couple of weeks ago

and it was an event where my children would, you know, look smart in a suit and they both wanted to wear their crocs you know like sandals and I really didn't want them to and they really wanted to and I actually just took a step back and I was like actually in the grand scheme of things if they feel more comfortable going out today with their crocs on the issue is mine it's not theirs and so that's one thing I'd say just just picking your battles because what would that be worth them having a meltdown leaving the house feeling bad about themselves because they're not wearing their cool dinosaur you know shoes with holes in um so pick your battles trying to diffuse rather than escalate is there anything that's non-negotiable do you think

um yeah there are some stuff for some reason, my children are obsessed with horror films. I don't know why. And obviously that's got to be age appropriate. So there's some, they keep going on about Alfred Hitchcock at the moment. I don't know why. They've heard something about Psycho and they want to watch it. Now that's a non-negotiable. They're not allowed to watch Psycho at the moment.

With some stuff, you know, if a video game's too violent, that's a non-negotiable. I think they get a sense from me whether there's room for a conversation and I think if there isn't I think they can sense that and they'll probably drop it quite quickly because it's not up for discussion and what about with your husband do you work well as a negotiating team because it is quite common that one's softer than the other yeah we're do you know what we flip depending i think we try to i think on the important stuff we try to back each other um but we're not perfect again you know who is so there are times when i don't and the kids get wing you know wind of that straight away and they will

play play one of the other um but i think on the important things we do and we try and reinforce as well so if something's been done that we don, and we try and reinforce as well. So if something's been done that we don't deem acceptable, and my husband's talking to them about that, I will interject to sort of say, you know, we are united on this. That wasn't unacceptable. I don't appreciate you talking to that. As a team. Yeah, yeah, I can see that. And Catherine, just to bring you back in, what would your top tip be for our listeners when it comes to negotiating with a partner or a loved one or someone that is that close to you? Well, I'm smiting listening to Jean because I have five children, including twin girls at the end. So I can really identify with everything you're saying.

I think to pick out some really important points in terms of choosing your battles, it's also important that as parents, when we get stressed, we can default to a no state all of the time. And that tends to come from stress because the more stressed we feel, the more we want to control everything. So the more we can mind ourselves, I think that really enhances our ability to navigate potential conflicts. And then this empathy and perspective taking. So let's say with your partner, being able to put yourself in their shoes. And can that be said the same for in-laws or grandparents? Because that can be another level of difficulty, couldn't it?

Oh, definitely. You know, and I have a really good process for navigating conflict with your in-laws. And it's simply that the person who has the primary relationship is in charge of negotiating boundaries. That person who has the primary relationship, they have to be the one because, of course, their relationship is stronger. Then, like, let's say it's you with your in-laws. If you're coming in and setting boundaries, there's huge potential for divided loyalties. And I think you can easily step on landmines, whereas if your partner steps on that same landmine, they have a much stronger buffer in their relationship to be able to repair that and go on and make peace. Jane Dowden and Catherine Hallisey there speaking to Hayley Hassell. And you can hear that whole programme on women and negotiation by heading to BBC Sounds. It's the programme for

the 1st of January. Has working in farming become easier for women over the past decade? Well, apparently not. According to a new report out this week, a survey of nearly 2,000 farmers carried out by Farmers Weekly suggests many aspects of working life are actually worse for women now than they were 10 years ago. 60% of the women asked thought gender bias was holding them back from reaching their career goals and carrying out the type of work they wanted to do, as well as from having the influence on farms to match their experience. Meanwhile, there are some indications that girls and young women are increasingly interested in pursuing a career in agriculture. Last month, Borders College in

Scotland reported record numbers of girls enrolling on farming courses. I talked to Emily Norton, a farmer and agricultural commentator, and to Bridget Baker, who's 23 years old and recently graduated from the Royal Agricultural University in Cirencester. I started off by asking Emily how long farming has been in her family. My grandfather founded our farm back in 1947 and it's been through various changes and iterations since then. I'm currently farming with my parents on about 157 acres of land which in farming terms is not very much. Wow it sounds a lot to me you didn't though it wasn't a natural given that you would go into farming was it? No not at all I had a younger brother and as many farming families family farming daughters know in

particular if there is a brother on the scene then you automatically have to fight a little bit harder for your space but thankfully it eventually transpired that my brother was not interested in farming at all and so it was an easier pathway um at that point um but I think from my perspective my heart was always absolutely in farming and absolutely in agriculture and it was obvious from day one that I was going to come back I was the one as my father would say who was born in muddy boots you went off and did law though didn't you't you? Because it was, this isn't for me. Well, not so much it wasn't for me, so much as it wasn't for me at that particular time. And I was, it was suggested I did law because I was good at arguing and didn't know what else I wanted to do.

So, and yet now it's an absolute perfect combination. I do a lot in the policy sphere and really understanding how our government systems are incentivising or hindering farms. So in that way of kind of marrying skills with passions, it's all come good. Absolutely. It's all come together. Brigitte, you come from a farming family. And again, you had a similar experience to Emily, didn't you? Yes. So I'm a fifth generation farmer and I've got a sister but yeah we started with my great great gran was the lady started our farming family but yeah it's been male ever since. I think all the females from our family we've been pushed to office work and things like that and my dad always jokes that um he thought he had two girls

and he's like I'm gonna retire early that's that's it now but um I did take an interest after rearing calves for D of E as a skill and that's interesting it was the Duke of Edinburgh that actually got you interested rather than you know where you were growing up yeah definitely I think for safety I wasn't really on the farm much yeah I started and then just sort of proved to everyone that I was interested I graduated uni and um yeah with young farmers there's definitely more girls it's like equal to girls and boys of college age that are enrolled in college and they're both very interested in it is very nice I think for the younger generation we definitely got a strong generation of female farmers coming through now why do you love it I like the responsibility

I started agricultural college at Hartbury College because I was wanted to go into ag journalism and on the farmers weekly um they said they wanted you to have a course in agriculture rather than literature or else I would have done a level English English. So I started that and I thought, I can't do practical agriculture. That's just ingrained in my mind, I suppose, from my other family around me that I can't do the practical side. So I do the writing side of journalism. But at college, they made you very practical. And I was like, this is good. I can do this. And now I'm sort of doing both currently.

Oh, that's great to hear and Emily that I mean what we're hearing from Bridget there it kind of is borne out by this survey isn't it it's the assumptions of people around you not your own desires that often lead you down a particular path in agriculture. I mean talk us through some of the more sort of jaw-dropping aspects of this I mean 60% of women thought gender bias was holding them back from reaching their career goals in agriculture. Is there an assumption, as we were just hearing from Brigitte, about what you might do? You can do the admin, you can do the running of the farm, but you shouldn't be getting your hands dirty. Yeah, I called this out. I'm at the Oxford Farming

Conference at the moment. And there was a presentation this morning where again, the presenter was using gendered language to describe who may inherit and pass on the farm. So it's from father to son and from uncle to nephew. And I called him out on it because we hear it again and again and again, this bias, this perception that it's something that's passed between men and only the men can do the job. And it's ridiculous because so often we describe farming as a family business, which means immediately there's multi-generations and men and women working within the same organisation. However, there are some major barriers to women participating equally within this, and these largely come from childcare duties

and inadequate childcare in rural spaces. So within the kind of, I guess, the natural roles that people fulfil, the man goes off and does livestock work and works around the weather and sacrifices time and energy and effort to do the farming job in the best possible way. And the woman sacrifices herself in order to raise the family. And it's this sort of stereotype of farming businesses that have perpetuated through multi-generations that have resulted in these gendered roles becoming the norm. But increasingly, it doesn't have to be that way. And it's all the time trying to find these alternative models, inspire people to think about things differently,

not assume it has to be a family business, it has to be a multi-generational business. Think that you can do it for a career for 40 years and then sell it. It doesn't matter. It's all these different models of success and vibrancy that we can bring to the industry if we begin to just challenge some of these stereotypes that have really perpetuated over the last 40 years and digging down into this survey uh complaints when when people were asked complaints range from not being taken seriously by fellow male workers and company sales reps who when confronted with a woman would ask to speak to the person who was really running the farm non-existent parental leave policies, and not being able to operate machinery which is designed by men for men. Just a quick word, Emily, from you on that before I get, you know,

the on-the-ground experience from Bridget. Bridget might find the same as me. I mean, I've been told, you know, can you go and pick the small gate up, please? And you go to the small gate and it's still heavier than you can lift, right? Because it's just been used to being picked up by men. And it's all sort of designed around a kind of a mindset of it just being easy to do from a physical perspective and relying on physicality. But there's some super interesting stuff happening in robotics, in thinking about our farming systems differently, which kind of take that kind of physical strength element out of it and mean that we can actually think about designing our farming systems

in a much more feminine and a much more sympathetic way. And it's so much optimism. And that really came across in the Farmers Weekly work as well. There's a lot of optimism and people encouraging girls to come into the sector as well because we need softer skills. We need more sympathetic skills. We need more sympathetic skills. We need more ecological skills and really different ways of thinking about things. The skills and the thinking and the mindset that got us to where we are now

as a country and as a countryside are not going to be what we need to sort of fix and address all of the multiple challenges that we're facing in the rural space, from climate change to rural depopulation and everything. You know, it really is this sort of wholesale shift that's going on that is opening up all of these opportunities for women. Bridget what do you say to Emily's point that you know in a predominantly what has been a predominantly male dominated environment that there can you know it can feel like a threat when women come in but women have a whole different skill set. They're not trying to match men, replace men. They're there to enhance. And as Emily was saying, it's a crucial moment for farming for the entire country, isn't it?

Yes, definitely. I think males think that it is welcoming for females, which is good, but sometimes it isn't. But I definitely feel like at home if a sales rep like a feed sales rep comes dad just chucks him at me now which is good but it's not as bad personally but I'm not knocking it down I've heard some women who do like talk about women in farming saying everything's fine you just got to believe in yourself and it's like but it's bad to sort of say that it's not happening because it is and you can't really knock down another woman's experience the voice there of Bridget Baker I spoke also to Emily Norton still to come on the program the author Vanessa Chan

will take us to Malaya during the second world war as she discusses her debut novel. And Steph Daniels tells us about reigniting her passion for hockey in her 70s. On Wednesday, Emma was joined in the studio by the classically trained violinist turned influencer Izzy Judd, who was an original member of the string quartet Escala. They shot to fame on Britain's Got Talent back in 2008. She met her husband Harry on the McFly Wonderland tour. Following their marriage and three small children, Izzy now has a large following on Instagram and has written two books. But she has returned to her love of playing the violin with a forthcoming EP of lullabies called Moments and a single Somewhere in My Memory, which she performs with her brother Rupert. She told Emma about her musical family. I grew up in a musical family.

My parents ran a music school. My three brothers are all musicians, so there was no hiding it. And in fact, I remember once being on a train with my violin and someone asking me what it was and me thinking, it's a violin. It was that normal. It was like brushing our teeth in our family. Yes, and your brothers went to be part of the choir of King's College, Cambridge, and you couldn't.

No. So my brothers. Yeah, exactly. My brothers left home at eight, joined wood choristers at King's. And when I think I was about four or five, I walked into the magnificent chapel and looked up at my dad and said, the problem is, Daddy, I'm a girl. But I got to enjoy many, many services at King's. It is the relationship with your brother that I wanted to hear a bit more about today because it's a very special track on this EP, Somewhere in My Memory, is recorded with your brother Rupert, who's dueting on the French horn. And you've shared a video of this online and there's some beautiful images, very, very moving, of you both growing up as children and then now in your adulthood.

Because something happened to him when you were young. Yeah, my family experienced a real tragedy. When he was 18, he had a serious car accident and has been left brain damaged. And he now lives in a residential home and has done for the last 20 odd years but miraculously the part of the brain that wasn't damaged was his music and even though he had extensive surgery part of his brain removed the metal plates on his face aren't around his jaw so the reconstruction has meant he can still have the sensation to play the French horn so when I decided earlier this year to go back into the studio and go back to my roots as

you were saying and going back to music it just felt appropriate to have Rupert with me for Somewhere in My Memory which was a piece actually he played at our wedding and there's a lyric in it which is all of the family all of the music home here with me and I think it sums up what music has meant to my family it's been a language that we've used when words have been too difficult to speak um so having Rupert with me on this track has been really really important and special how did that change your family words are very difficult to explain how a trauma like that changes your family um for me personally that sort of innocence of my brother came home one night and then the next day he didn't come home and i have a clear image of his bed um made up from the night before and you know there's always somebody missing even though we're living he's here we're still grieving the loss of what might have been he was such uh

he was just full of life and he was vibrant and he he was marmite you know people either loved him or hated him and he and he still is you know he still walks into a room and and people like to meet rupert he's he's got that zest um you know for life and energy but it's just so sad to see somebody you love um having to have gone through the fight he went through. And I mean, he has care around the clock, doesn't he? He has care around the clock. And, you know, with somebody like Rupert, who has a head injury, it's very much a hidden disability, because you don't, because he looks a certain way, you expect a certain type of behaviour. And actually, he's not capable. He's lack of inhibitions.

And I've had to really learn to remember that it's not my place to have to explain. And that hopefully by talking about Rupert and brain injury, there's an awareness that disabilities can be hidden. Yes, but it is incredible that he could still play. I bet that was a real moment again for the family when you found he could still make music. Yeah, it was. He lifted up his horn after we hadn't had any communication with him

and he started to move his hands in time with the music. But I think as well, you know, having gone through having children of my own and especially when my youngest,ie was born I realised I hadn't picked up my violin for so long and how disconnected I felt from me and I just think imagine how Rupert must feel if he doesn't play the horn how disconnected he must feel from himself so for both of us to be able to to perform and play is, yeah, very important. Do you feel that you had lost yourself in motherhood? Because not playing is one of those symptoms, if I could describe it as that,

of not doing something you were doing before. Absolutely. We really struggled to start a family. We went through IVF and it became my whole life and existence I just you know I had no control over the future and then when I went on to have Lola my son Kit came along very quickly and unexpectedly and so I think life was it just threw me into kind of chaos. I was sort of still trying to get over going through IVF and becoming a mother and then finding motherhood difficult and feeling guilty for finding it difficult because of how hard it had been to get there.

And then suddenly my son arrived and he was a completely different species to my daughter. And it was only then, four years later, when I had Lockie, that I realised I haven't picked up my violin and he was really fractious it was one tea time and I got my violin out and I was like everybody's soothed Lockie's soothed I feel soothed why have I not played why have I lost touch with who I am and how important it is to reconnect to ourselves. And that's something you can do in the house. You don't need to book it.

You don't need to, because lots of people, you know, myself included, you know, you try and rebuild after becoming a mum and reform around the space that is around the edges. But I was also imagining if that had gone wrong and adding a violin to a fractious tea time had sounded even worse than the tea time that was going on. Well, fortunately, it didn't go that way. And I started to just pick up and play all these different lullabies. And I realised my older two were feeling calmer too. Yeah, it was, luckily it went in the right direction. And I mentioned that you also happen to be married to a musician, Harry Judd of Muckfly,

who I believe also has left you alone quite a lot lately, races around the world with his mum, if people watch that. So that was nice of him. It was. What are you going to do to get out of some childcare? I'm going to go on a race around the world with my mother. Exactly. Oh my goodness, that was such an intense month. I think they could have done, yeah, a series of what it was like at home.

I've now got an image of you just in the corner playing the violin, ignoring everybody else. Yeah, something like that. Izzy Judd and the EP Moments is out on February the 16th. Now, let's take you to Malaya, known to us today as Malaysia during the Second World War.

A new book, The Storm We Made, is set in two timelines across British and Japanese colonialism and follows housewife Cecily, who becomes an unlikely spy for a general. But her decisions have huge repercussions for her and her family. It is the first book by debut author Vanessa Chan and was fought over in a seven-way auction from publishers here in the UK. Vanessa joined me from Brooklyn on Thursday and I asked her how she felt about that seven-way bun fight over her novel. I was actually in Malaysia when the auction was going on and it was during the earlier part of the pandemic where I was still under quarantine

when you had to, if you travel somewhere, you had to quarantine somewhere. I was actually quarantining with my father. And when I came out of quarantine, the auction had closed and my life had changed. Yes. And many things happened to you, didn't they, during lockdown? You had a lot of personal loss, didn't you? I was in New York City in April 2020 when it was the epicentre of the pandemic. And during that time, both my mother and my uncle passed. And I, you know, at this time was trying to write a novel about home and I was trapped. I couldn't go home. I couldn't be with my dying mother. And it was an incredibly challenging moment of grief for me while I was trying to write this novel. And I know obviously that's had a profound impact on you and how you approach the novel.

But just to go back a little bit to what you were doing before you decided that you wanted to write. You'd scaled the heights. You were in Facebook, communications director of the company, hanging out with tech bros, which you write about rather amusingly, about how often it was just you and Sheryl Sandberg in meetings with however many Marks or Daves or Mikes. And you thought, I've had enough of this? Exactly. That's a simple way of looking at it. But yes, I found myself frequently in meetings with a series of men with the same name and me and one other woman, you know, often Sheryl Sandberg. And I did that for six years. You know, I started as a manager and ended up as a communications director. It was actually during this time that I switched immigration status from requiring a work visa to getting residency, which was when I was no longer tied to an employer and I was able essentially to freely pursue whatever it is I wanted.

And I was stymied by this. I'd never had this freedom as long as I worked. I was always, you know, an immigrant who required a visa, who had to check her paperwork before she left the country, who worried about being told that my visa was expired or something had happened. And all of a sudden, I had this incredible freedom to do what I wanted. And it took me several more years to figure out what it is I wanted to do. And I decided it was time to write that novel that had been stewing inside of me for a while. Well, you made the right choice. Let's talk about the book now. It's absolutely brilliant, The Storm We Made. It flicks between two time periods, the 1930s and the 1940s, between British-occupied Malaya and Japanese-occupied Malaya with a central character, Sicily, and what she does to try and escape the domesticity of her life between the roles of mother, wife and spy. It's not often written about, is it, this period of the British occupation of Alea and the Japanese occupation of Alea?

Why did you decide to make that the backdrop? You know, growing up, I'd heard some of these stories from my grandparents and from other family members about the Japanese occupation. But like you said, our history books don't cover this period. And part of that is because, you know, our families are reluctant to talk about their trauma publicly. But part of it is just the nature of history is that Europe is centered, right? America is centered. And the Pacific theater of the second world war

is very much not covered in history books, in fiction. And it seemed to me like it was time. It was time that these stories that I'd had swirling in me, these stories that I'd been told, I laid them down on paper because that's the only way that you create a history that hasn't been written. If you take the stories passed down to you through time and lay them down somewhere so that other people can read them.

And especially from a female perspective, you talk about how your grandparents' generation didn't want to talk about it. Is that because of the brutality of it, of the brutality, especially to women as well? You talk about comfort women in the novel, too. Do you think there's a shame attached to that? Or there's a desire just to not dig up a period of history that's so incredibly painful. I think all of that is true. I think it was an incredibly brutal period of history. I think the common statistic is in four years of occupation, the Japanese killed more people than the British did in 50 years. This is not to say one colonizer is better than the other, but it was a terrible period of brutality and a particularly brutal period for women because girls as young as seven or eight years old were being kidnapped and recruited to work at comfort stations for Japanese officers.

And the comfort station, could you explain what that is? A comfort station is a place where comfort women are essentially kept as prisoners of war to service Japanese soldiers, you know, service their urges as they emerged. And the reason that these exist is because they did not want Japanese soldiers to go into cities to pillage and rampage. So they decided to build stations where women would be available to them. But at these stations, the women who were there were obviously not there by choice. They were kidnapped and kept, you know, and used in the worst possible ways. And some of them were children. Many of them were children because children do not get pregnant. This book has been picked up by a publisher in Japan. Just a final thought on that. You say the only way you kind of recreate a new history is to write it down.

I mean, does that feel revolutionary to you that this is now Japan wants to read your fiction, but read what actually happened. This book is, as you would expect, incredibly critical of Imperial Japan and what happened during the war. But we received an offer from a Japanese publisher who wrote me an extensive and touching letter that said, it is time for the Japanese people to learn about our history, not just from the perspective of soldiers going to the front, or from the perspective of Japanese people. It is time that the Japanese people learn what happened to other people because of Japan. And it was a shock and incredible revelation to realize that this book will be in the hands of Japanese readers who will be learning about their own history. I was talking to Vanessa Chan and The Storm We Made is out now. Now, if you reignited a passion for something you did earlier in life,

what have you gone back to recently and how has it brought you joy? Steph Daniels gave up hockey in her mid-30s, but after seeing an advert for Bedford Hockey Club, she decided to pick up her sticks once more and even attended trials for the over-70s England team. She took me back to the start of her hockey career. Like most school children in England, I started when I was 11 at school, joined a club when I was 16, went on to play county hockey, middle and juniors hockey, and played until I was about 35.

Okay, so why did you walk away from it? Well, I was a former PE teacher. And anybody who knows a PE teacher, from the moment they get into school from eight o'clock in the morning till they leave about six o'clock, you're so busy. At the weekend, there's school matches. At the weekends, I was playing club hockey, county hockey. At weekends, tournaments, Easter holidays, Christmas holidays. And I thought, you know what? I think I want to do other things with my life. I don't just want my life to be about hockey as much as I I enjoyed it, I thought, no, enough. Enough is enough. Yes, so the thing you had a passion for just started to feel like a chore.

It did. It did. I wanted to go to the theatre. I wanted to go to concerts. I wanted to go away for weekends. And I had so little time before. So you took a break, quite a long break, and you came back to it. So what was the impetus? What did you see? What caught your eye? Well, I saw a picture in the local Bedford paper,

an advert about walking hockey, and I'd never really heard about walking hockey. And I thought, oh, have I still got my stick? Would it still be the right shape? Could I still play? Would I still have my skills? So I thought I'd go along and see it's a wonderful group it's a wonderful community of walkers men women all ages and during the pandemic it was a lifesaver for all of us because we could play outside we could have fun we could have contact with people and get fit so the physical and mental health of health walking hockey is fantastic and the skill level I mean they say it's walking hockey, but people say I don't always walk,

which is probably why I joined. Well, you went back to the running version, didn't you, for a bit? I did. I did. I did. I'm still playing. In fact, I went to training last night. Yeah, fantastic. And tell me about the kind of cross-generational aspect to this

because here you are over 70 and people listening might think oh well you're all in the same age bracket and you're all walking around the same pitch it's not that is it I know well the proper hockey last night there were 12 of us and a coach and I think seven of them were still at school and five of us older older ones and I was the I was the older one so we got 14 15 16 and we've got people in their 30s, 40s, 50s and me. How does that work though as a team? Our team is kind of a development team.

We're trying to teach them to pass the ball because it is a team game and not just keep it to themselves. And they do a lot of the running for us. We also run. And the banter, you you know training last night you hear about all the problems at school not getting the homework in time we talk about Israel and all the problems in the world and it's just lovely to have this real mixed event mix of ages.

So anybody listening to this who has a passion that they've been thinking I mean we just heard wonderful texts from one of our listeners saying I bought bought roller skates. I don't know who I was waiting to get permission for to start roller skating again myself. What would you say? Oh, go for it. I mean, that's the thought. I mean, I used to love roller skating. We just used to do it around the streets.

But yes, I mean, not everybody's into sport. I mean, you can do music, you can join a choir. I mean, to do a team, something in a team is so unusual for women. Once you leave school, most women don't ever play in a team again. So to play a team sport or being in an orchestra or a choir or just going down to the gym and being with other people, go for it. There's so many things women can do these days. That was Steph Daniels. Do join me again on Monday when I'll be speaking to the actor Kush Jumbo

in to talk about her new TV drama Criminal Record. From me for today, though, have a lovely rest of the weekend and goodbye. I'm Sarah Treleaven and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who'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.