Woman's Hour - Women and unemployment; Daisy Johnson; BBC Elite Women's Sport Survey 2020

Episode Date: August 10, 2020

Presented by Jenni Murray.Every few days we hear of more jobs going. The Bank of England said at the end of last week that unemployment is likely to hit 2.5 million this year. That means the jobless total would almost double by Christmas. Tonight there’s a Channel 4 documentary series starting which focuses on a job centre in Leeds and the people who use it. Jenni is joined by Olivia, who is a single mother mum and unemployed, Jan Baxter, who works at the jobcentre in Leeds and Helen Barnard, Acting Director of Joseph Rowntree Foundation.In Daisy Johnson’s novel Sisters July and September have an uncannily close relationship and one is more powerful than the other. Their mother struggles to cope and when things come to a head after a nasty incident at school they flee to a house in Yorkshire which turns out not to be the refuge they needed. Jenni talks to Daisy Johnson about horror, adolescence and the relationship between the two.The BBC Elite British Sportswomen's Survey was sent to 1,068 women in 39 different sports and received 543 responses. The survey covers trolling; funding and impact of Coronavirus; Periods and the Pill; Racism; Sexism; Abortion and Family Planning; Mental Health. Jenni discusses the findings with Becky Grey, BBC Sports reporter, Susannah Townsend, Gold medal hockey player, Priyanaz Chatterji, Scottish cricketer for Scottish Women’s Team and Tammy Parlour, CEO of Women Sport’s Trust. Producer: Louise Corley Editor: Karen Dalziel

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, Jenny Murray welcoming you to the Woman's Hour podcast for Monday 10th August. Good morning. Today's news on the jobs front is that one in three UK firms is expected to make redundancies and unemployment is likely to rise to two and a half million this year. A Channel 4 series about a Leeds job centre begins tonight. What hope is there for women who are looking for work or for benefits to help keep them afloat? The BBC's elite women's sports survey, what has been learned? And a new serial, Bird in the Hand, is by Sarah Daniels. Now Daisy Johnson is the youngest ever novelist to have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. That was in 2018

and the novel, her first, was Everything Under. She's now published Sisters. It's about July and September, named after the months in which they were born, and with only ten months between them. July is the younger and the main narrator of their story, which begins as they move, together with their mother Sheila, to settle house in Yorkshire after something terrible had happened at school in Oxford. The adolescent girls are extremely close, but their life is complicated. Their mother is a writer who's generally absent and appears depressed.

Their father is dead and the house is very spooky. Daisy, why a fascination with the relationship between very close sisters? Yeah, I'm not sure I think um as I was writing the book I became really interested in uh family and how we love our family but sometimes it can be very difficult to be in these relationships um and the sisters became as I was writing them closer and closer to one another um and have had a increasingly problematic relationship and I was interested in how um they really love one another but at the same time they're not necessarily very good for one another. How much are you drawing on your own experience of siblings?

I have very good sibling relationships happily but I do remember being, I have a younger sister and a younger brother and I do remember being you know children all together and fighting physically and verbally and being very enraged with them when they weren't doing what I wanted them to do and how intense it is to have that relationship which then grows as you grow and you know I don't think anyone knows you quite as well as those people who you grow up with. They do behave rather badly. The teachers say they're sometimes moved to great cruelty. They do contact men and call them out online. How much do you reckon they're typical of adolescent girls? I think they're extreme and that they're in this

strange relationship where they make one another do things but um I was interested in looking at what it's like to be um an adolescent particularly an adolescent girl at the moment when you're on the internet all the time um so much of your life particularly for July and September because they don't have many friends is through um through the computer or through social media and it becomes I think for them very easy to be cruel to people online. Why do they generally have such difficulties with relationships with people outside the family? I think they find it difficult because of one another you know they sort of at one point, Sheila, says that they trap one another in childhood.

And I think that's true that they they kind of hold on to one another. And neither of them, especially September, the older sister, neither of them allows the other to make relationships, even really a relationship with their mother. What was the reason for making their mother so distant from them? She clearly loves them dearly, but she's not there. Yeah, I really wanted to explore what it was like for someone who was a mother, but also was finding it very hard to be a mother. You know, she has a lot of she has a lot of mental health issues going on. She's sort of traumatized by a lot of things which happened in the past and she's finding it very difficult to be there for them um and I wanted

to explore how you know as mothers everyone's expected to be perfect and um to always put your children first and that's not always possible and I think especially with July and September who are you know they're their own cult, I think. And it's very difficult for Sheila to break in to that. The novel is very scary. What inspired the idea of the frightening house? I'm really glad it's scary. Thank you for saying that. Yeah, so I was born on Halloween and sort of grew up from a very young age, having these wonderfully elaborate Halloween parties and watching horror films and telling, you know, locking my brother and sister in the centre this house, which we as a reader are never quite sure whether it's haunted or not.

But certainly there are strange things happening there. There are insects and animals coming through the walls. The Internet isn't always working. The water pressure isn't always working. And this kind of sense of unease in somewhere which is supposed to be your home, which is supposed to be comfortable, but actually is very uncanny. I suspect you've spent quite a lot of time enjoying horror, whether it's horror films or reading horror stories. Who would you say has inspired you in the horror genre? So I've been recently rereading a lot of Shirley Jackson and I think she is just so wonderful and really does that so well, creating these houses and these characters who we are never quite sure whether to trust. More contemporary writers I really love Helena Yamey, particularly her novel White is for Witching is a really wonderful contemporary haunted house novel. I also love

writers who take aspects of the horror genre and thread them through their novels so Evie Wilde or Max Porter where the uncanny comes into their writing and not necessarily a traditional horror way. I'm being very careful not to give anything away. No spoilers, because that would be disastrous for anybody who wants to come read your novel. But how reliable a narrator is July, the younger sister? Thank you for being careful. Yes, I think I want the reader to be uncertain how reliable she is. And I always love writing with ambiguity and where, you know, as a reader, you're in charge of how you feel about the book

and about what's happening. I think July is unreliable because she doesn't really trust herself and she never really trusts the things that are happening around her. And her whole life, September has been the one to tell her what to do and tell her what to think and so she's never really sure whether she's actually seeing something or feeling something or hearing something. The reader is very much left to work

things out slowly for him or herself and see things may not be quite what they seemed. How difficult is it as a novelist constructing a story like this to work out how much the reader needs to know at what point? I think that's definitely one of the hardest things about being a writer. And is, you know, you spend so long with these with these characters and with these works of fiction. And you, you know, you know them so well, you dream about them, it's all you think about. And to try and imagine yourself as a first-time reader. And it took a lot of drafting, a lot of endless deleting, and also a lot of showing other people the early drafts

and seeing what their reactions were, seeing when they began to realise what might or might not be happening in the book. Was everybody who read it scared? Most people were scared. I think some people were more scared than others. And I was certainly scared while I was writing it. I remember sitting in my room, you know, listening to the noises. I was alone in the house and listening to the noises around me and feeling very frightened and unnerved and being pleased that the book was making me feel that way. I never realised a horror writer

actually scared themselves. Now I do. Daisy Johnson, thank you very much indeed for joining us this morning. And as I said earlier, the novel is called Sisters. Thank you. Now still to come in today's programme as unemployment is set to rise to two and a half million this year. What does a job centre have to offer to women who are looking for work or benefits to keep them going? And a new serial, Bird in the Hand by Sarah Daniels. British Women's Sports Survey 2020 is published today, covering responses to questions on trolling, funding, and the impact of coronavirus, periods and the pill, sexism, racism, abortion, family planning and mental health. The survey was sent to 1,068 women in 39 different sports,

and 543 responded. I'm joined by Tammy Parler, the Chief Executive of the Women's Sports Trust, Priyanaz Chatterjee, who plays cricket for the Scottish women's team, Susanna Townsend, who plays hockey for Great Britain and is an Olympic gold medalist, and Becky Gray, who's a BBC sports reporter. Becky, the survey hasn't been done for five years, but I think a lot has happened for women's sport, including the Me Too movement since then. How did you reflect that in the kind of questions you sent to the elite sportswomen? Yeah, so in 2015, we had 15 questions in the survey,

and this year we had 28. So we sort of boosted it a little bit. And we just really wanted to, like you say, Me Too, raised all these topics and broke a lot of taboos. And we wanted to talk about some of those in the survey as well. So that's why we included things on family planning periods and and the effect of the contraceptive pill on on performance because we wanted to look at the things that affect all women in all areas of life but you have to accept that they affect sports women quite uniquely as well um that's why we also put a racism a couple of racism questions in to look

at how how that affects sports women uniquely and then obviously we had to ask about coronavirus and the effects of that as well. Tammy why would you say a survey like this is really important? Yeah well I suppose without athletes sport doesn't happen so it's it's vital to hear their views and probably one of the great temperature checks into the sporting landscape. We've seen loads of positive momentum in women's sport, particularly in the last five years. And I suppose this is a reminder that there's still a lot more that needs to do, needs to be done. It's important that we use surveys like this, though, to understand the systemic issues that are creating this sort of environment, hold sport accountable,

track progress for all the lack of it. Susanna, today's launch is looking at the impact of trolling. What happened to you? So in 2015, I was about to step onto the pitch for training and I couldn't log into my Instagram account. And luckily, I had the login for the GB women's account so I could look and see where my account was. And unfortunately, someone I still don't know to this day who for an Olympic Games and for that to happen and to wonder how your reputation is going to be seen to everyone sort of looking through your social media it it was quite distressing. So what effect did it have over a long period because it's not your fault? At the very start of it, for me, it was a big lack of control and the anxiety as to how I was going to be portrayed. As for everyone close to me, they knew that it simply wasn't me, but everyone else looking on my social media at that time potentially thought, what's

Susannah Townsend doing? And the biggest thing for me at the time was that I simply didn't know who to go to to help me or to change it and and at that point in time even going to my my coach and saying look this is happening I just need some help. What help did you get? So I ended up obviously working with my my governing body so for me again no one really knew what do. Instagram at the time didn't help me because I had no control over my account, so therefore they didn't almost believe it was me. And then I ended up going to the BOA at the time, and a contact I had with someone called Jenny Bias,

who used to work for Great Britain Hockey, who eventually managed to get my account suspended and then eventually managed to get control over it again. But to this day, I don't have the access to be able to change my password which is also quite it's quite upsetting will you ever trust it again um to be honest potentially not it's it's something that still worries me um and anything that's on anyone's phone or social media it's their private information and for me it's I like to set a positive example and stuff like that happening you do lose trust over it and and I see it as a platform to promote who I am my sport women's sport especially and and for that to

happen I think it makes you a little bit uneasy um I'm trying my best to if I can change my password I think and have more more security around it, then maybe. But at this moment in time, probably not. Why is it so difficult to change your password? If I'm honest with you, I don't know. I don't know what actually happened. When it actually got sorted, there was literally selection for the Olympic Games a week later. And my mind had to be focused on that. So the relief when suddenly my Instagram got back and things, I mean, a couple of thousand followers were blocked, photos were deleted.

I still don't know messages that were sent. And I think at that moment in time, it was for me just a relief that someone else didn't have the handle over it and changing the password now is something that I definitely need to be able to do because if I'm honest with you again I don't know whether someone else still has control over it or not. Becky how surprised were you that 30 percent of the respondents to the survey have been trolled in some way on social media? To be honest, as depressing as it might sound, not that surprised. I would maybe even expect that statistic to be a little bit higher. It might have been women thinking it had to be quite

extreme to count as trolling rather than any sort of social media abuse. But I know that on BBC Sports social media, for example, every time we post about women's sport, someone's got something negative to say. So it's not surprising. We've actually launched some new action today to tackle the trolls on BBC Sports social media as a result of this survey, recognising that we need to stand up

because the platforms aren't really doing that much about it. What do you get if you post something about men? Do they get trolled? They do. The thing that I found working on this survey is that it's such different trolling. Women are reporting, you know, it's so sexualised. It's about stereotypical gender roles

so one of the most common things that i think a lot of people would have experienced is just being told to get back in the kitchen um you shouldn't be playing sport make me a sandwich it's that kind of like questioning women's right to even play sport or it's about their their body image so it's definitely a different type very original these trolls aren't they heavens um priyana's the service is that 20 percent of the respondents have experienced or witnessed racism in their sport what's been your experience yeah i think that i have certainly um experienced different forms of racism at various times throughout um throughout playing cricket unfortunately um i have you know one incident particularly that stands out um i you know just as an example um i joined a new uh cricket club and I went on to my first training session and one of my new teammates just kept referring to me as curry and I you know told her from the get-go that

that wasn't appropriate and I didn't want to be called that um but she just didn't really seem to get it and didn't understand why it wasn't um appropriate acceptable in any context um and it took like quite a number of weeks of me asking her not to call me that and before she finally stopped it was actually only when I started calling her racist that she stopped calling me curry did she realize that she was being racist um I don't think she understood the implications of what she was saying because i told her like i told her that it was racist and i told her that what she was saying wasn't okay but because she didn't have any malice behind it she didn't understand that it was nevertheless still racist

how did your teammates or your coaches react to what she was calling you um unfortunately i think it there was very much uh it was a relatively informal atmosphere and i think people were aware of it but no one wanted to kind of get involved and i guess because i was being quite vocal directly to her, as far as I'm aware, no one said anything to her about it. I could be wrong, but to my knowledge, no one actually challenged her other than me. How did you resolve it in the end?

I just didn't really give up. I just kept saying that she couldn't call me that. And like I said, I actually started saying that she couldn't call me that and and like I said I actually started calling her racist and then inserting her name and it was almost like that label of being racist was what was what stopped her rather than me telling her in the first place that it was and that um you know I didn't want to be called that and I I tried to kind of sit her down and have a conversation about structural racism and wider issues and kind of explaining the context of why it wasn't okay but it ended up being quite a depressing and frustrating conversation um but I think it was just time and uh persistence that eventually got

her to stop. Tammy how big a problem is racism for the women you work with? Yeah, well, sadly, it's still a problem. And it's been awful to hear some of the stories that our athletes have shared. But, you know, also not surprising, systemic racism is absolutely a reality. And every piece of data you look at proves that. And sports and microcosm of society, the whole of the UK has a case to answer for.

So, yes, of course, it affects the women we work with. I don't want to speak for them. But I do think we can help to create platforms. So the brilliant athletes like Alice Dearing, Asma al-Badawi, Sasha Corbin, and others can be heard. And, you know, frankly, I think we need to get our own house in order too and ensure that we're a more representative organisation that understands how racism affects sport and takes action to do something about it. Becky, one of the things that was shocking to read was,

a lot of it was shocking, I have to tell you, but this really surprised me, that where elite male and female teams train in the same place, the women are often expected to leave the gym to accommodate the men. How common is that? It does depend on the sport, but it's pretty common. And it's so interesting because you you say shocking and i think i've become desensitized to it um been working on this for a few months and i think the

women themselves have because we asked people whether they'd experienced sexism 65 said they had um and then we asked if they wanted to share some examples and only a couple of people kind of shared this example of being kicked out of the gym but then when I did some follow-up phone calls with some of the respondents I just sort of mentioned it like oh yeah one thing people say is is they get kicked out of the gym when when the men's team come in does that happen to you and you just got laughs back and kind of like yeah of course it happens to us um it's almost it's almost become so accepted that people don't think to report that as an example of sexism.

Susanna, the experience of sexism seems to have increased since 2015 when the last survey was done. What have you observed that you would describe as sexist behaviour? For us in hockey, actually, it's a a very equal sport which we're very lucky to have and but there's still things for example i've got a scenario where in 2016 after an olympics a after winning an olympics a male counterpart in a the same sponsor at the time was getting paid double um and for me it was it was something that I looked at and I was like this this simply isn't okay and I and I left the

sponsor and I actually took a lesser package in terms of sponsorship out of principle with someone else because for me it just didn't make any sense and these things happen every single day and in in club sport and that men are paid that women aren't um we're very fortunate that for from uk sport almost your funding is given on how successful you are and the the model itself is is brilliant and at this moment in time we have been more successful than our men and we some of us are able to actually touch a pay packet that the men can't. And I think that's very, very rare. But that doesn't mean that we're in sponsorship.

What happened, Susanna, when you challenged that sponsor? Did you not mention equal pay? Yes, I did. For them, it was someone that had been involved within the company for a while. They simply said they didn't have the budget to pay me as much, and therefore I left. And that was actually after 2016, it was 2017, and now I'm currently with Adidas, where it's a lot more equal in my sports,

and I feel a lot more valued. At the time, it was something that when you're getting offered more money than I potentially would have been, it was very difficult for me to make that decision. But actually to sign up and say this isn't right is something that I am quite proud of myself for doing. How prevalent is sexism in cricket? Yeah, unfortunately, quite prevalent, I think, in terms of the structural barriers and inequalities that exist. So it's right from the top down. And so you see that and there's unequal, there's unequal pay, there's unequal kind of coaching allocation. There's unequal kind of resources allocated to both. both it's it's i mean when becky was talking there about being desensitized to it i think that that

really does sum up kind of my experience and a lot of my teammates whereby like we're just so used to having completely unequal circumstances unfortunately tanny how surprised are you that this desensitization seems to be happening and that only 10 percent of women who'd experienced it had actually reported it not at all surprised if i'm honest i'm not sure it would have surprised any woman how safe is it to call out sexism in any environment i think a big reason that um the women's sport trust wants to make women's sport more visible is to normalise it. And then it becomes harder to act in this way. It becomes less socially acceptable. Susanna, what's been the effect of coronavirus on your training and your ability to compete?

I've been very open about this recently and I've been open about the last three, four years after Rio. I've certainly struggled to find my form again, to find my enjoyment through a few injuries and other personal circumstances. And I think for me, the opportunity during lockdown has given me the independence to train what I feel is right for me. It's allowed me to re-find my love for the sport, and I think I needed it. I was someone that had been a part of an elite set-up since 2008, 2010, and from being at school from a very young age and being on a structure, I've always been part of a very structured life, and it's a very simple thing for me to be able to be given the choice of what I do every single day and what training I do.

And Great Britain Hockey gave us the trust actually, which is quite rare in terms of they said to us, look, we're going to look after you guys mentally. If you need a training program, we give you it. But for you guys at the moment, you're educated enough to know what training is going to work for you and and that's the best thing that actually could have been said to me because it allowed me to have the choice and find that training drive again that I didn't have for a couple years. And Brianna's what about you what have you been able to do as far as training and competition is concerned? Well I guess in terms of training we're lucky in that cricket's obviously an outdoor sport so um as lockdown's been easing we've been able to to do some training in quite like strict um strictly monitored environments at the moment um there's no official competitions um lined up for

2020 i don't know if that will change change. It's obviously very hard to plan for the future at the moment, but we do have some friendlies coming up. So I think in that respect, I feel like everyone is doing their best to get some form of cricket going again, but obviously operating within the constraints of the virus. But, yeah, I still do feel that um the impact covid is going to have on the kind of progress of women's sport um i feel like there has been a lot of progress in the last few years and i don't want that to stall now we asked the sports minister nigel huddleston and what his

response to the things in this survey were. And obviously we want to look at how we can improve things. And he says, the past few years have seen fantastic progress with women's sports starting to get the profile it deserves. However, it's absolutely unacceptable that this visibility has been matched by a rise in online abuse of our sports stars. We've set out world-leading plans that will make online platforms safer for users

and we'll continue to engage with providers to see what more can be done it's a priority of mine to help women's sports recover from the coronavirus pandemic sustain its momentum and push for greater participation employment commercial opportunities and positive visibility across all forms of media. Tammy, how encouraged are you by that? It's great for the DCMS to be focusing on this. At the moment, over the past month, we've established something called an ambition project, which is bringing together the key stakeholders within the industry, including the DCMS, to define an ambition for women's sport and come up with some tangible actions that will help move it forward. We're only partway through that, but I think the emerging themes we're seeing around leadership, governance, commerciality and visibility. I'm a

glass half full, and I think COVID has created a really challenging environment but if we can use this time to take action rather than passively wait to see what happens then I think there's grounds for optimism. Becky what strikes you as the best way of addressing some of the issues we've just discussed? I think it's just about getting more women to the top, so on the boards of the governing bodies and in the coaching positions, because this survey was written by a team of women, so we put in questions there because we know what it's like to be a woman, we know how your period can affect your day at work, for example, and I think there just needs to be more people in these athletes' environments.

So I think 60% of athletes said their period affected their performance, but 40% didn't feel comfortable talking to coaches, and that was often because it was male coaches. So just think, if suddenly you had a majority of female coaches, that perspective would shift, and something like that would be something you can discuss. So yeah, that's it for me just just getting more women into positions of power in sport well becky gray susanna townsend priyana's strategy tammy parlor thank you all very much indeed for being with us

this morning and we would like to hear from you if you are an ambitious girl who would really like to become an elite athlete, let us know what you think you need. If you are an elite sportswoman and you've suffered some of the problems that you've just heard about, do send us a text or an email because we would really like to hear from you. Now every few days we hear that more and more people are losing their jobs. One in three UK firms expected to make redundancies was a headline this morning. At the end of last week the Bank of England said it expected unemployment to hit 2.5 million by Christmas. That's almost double the current figure. Well what hope is there for women desperate for work or for benefits to tide them over? Well tonight on

Channel 4, a two-part documentary is based in a job centre in Leeds. In a moment, I'll be joined by Helen Barnard, the Acting Director of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. In the second of the Channel 4 series, we meet Jan Baxter, who works there, and Olivia, a 29- 29 year old lone parent who's unemployed and they both join us now. Olivia why are you not working outside your home? I stopped working last year in October to become a full-time carer for my daughter she was diagnosed with autism last year. How hard then was it when you were trying to combine everything looking after an eight-year-old daughter with autism your own depression I think that you'd suffered from and doing the work it was really stressful um I came really close to having a mental breakdown at one point it was just

like groundhog day I was constantly on the go it was up at six o'clock every day rushing to work and then no sooner ever got to work I'd get a phone call that she'd had a meltdown or they've had to restrain her or something hadn't gone right so then I was pulled out of my job constantly to have to deal with that situation and I remember times at work when I would just sit in the corner and cry my eyes out because I was just so overwhelmed with everything now since you left the job what have you found I know you suggest that you're better off on universal credit than you would be if you were working even financially why yeah I because I was working I only worked 26 hours um and because obviously even though I was a single parent I

wasn't entitled to housing benefit I wasn't entitled to council tax support I didn't get carers allowance so I was basically working full-time hours and only getting my wage and working tax credits and that was what I was living off and I wasn't getting child maintenance off my daughter's father either um so even though I went to my local MP and I said you know this is my situation this is what I've got basically my child care for Amira was nearly like 800 pounds a month and because obviously she had additional needs she now needed Senko staff members to watch her and look after her so obviously the price of her childcare had basically doubled. Now, Jan, I know you and Olivia have worked together. What would you say is the nature of your job?

How would you describe it? Very busy. I think the important thing about the kind of work that I do as a work coach is to try very hard to look at each individual as that, as an individual, and try and help them understand what their current circumstances are and what kind of options might be open to them, and to listen mostly. Now, you signed on yourself before you began working at the Jobcentre. What did you learn from signing on?

I think it's casting my mind back quite a long way but I understand the stigma attached to going into the job centre for a great many people particularly if you've just recently lost your job one minute you know you've got a job and you've got an identity and an income and everything's fine and then the next minute it's chaos. And it feels like a sense of failure to have to go into the job centre and to claim benefits. And there's a great sense of the unknown and what's going to happen now and how am I going to be treated. So myself and my colleagues are very sensitive to that. Most of us have been the other side of the desk at some point. And so we do know what it feels like. How did you come to get at jobs in a job centre, that sounds all right.

And that was about 20 years ago, so I do caution people to be a bit careful when you come in the job centre. Especially if you're offered a temporary job, because you might be there for a very long time. Indeed. Why, though, Jan, do some people find it really hard to find work? What sort of obstacles do they face? Well, I think a lack of self-confidence perhaps I think the main thing is people not being really

aware of what their skill set actually is and that's one of the first things that I concentrate on when I'm talking to somebody at their first interview. I know we've got a lot to get through and there's not never enough time but the important thing is to try and instill that right ar eu cyfweliad cyntaf. Rwy'n gwybod bod gennym lawer i fynd drwyddo ac nid yw'r amser ddigon. Ond mae'n bwysig ceisio ceisio gwneud hynny. Nid ydych chi'n llist o'ch titlau swydd a mae pawb yn cael rhai sgiliau. Felly hyd yn oed pan mae rhywun yn dod i mewn a dweud, wel, nid wyf wedi gwneud swydd, dim ond wedi tyfu teulu neu dim ond wedi bod yn ysgrifennydd neu rywbeth fel hyn, mae'n debyg, wow, mae hynny'n rhaglenni sgiliau mawr. Mae'n rhaid i chi gwybod sut i'w farchnidu a sut i'w datblygu a sut i'w gwneud yn golygu rhywbeth i or something like this. It's like, whoa, that's a huge range of skills. You just need to know how

to market them and how to develop them and how to make them mean something to an employer. And that's what we focus on. What have you got? Now, we've heard very clearly from Olivia, this problem of being better off on universal credit than she would be if she were working, which is often a very difficult thing for people to admit to because people might be very critical. But she explained exactly what the difficulties were. How often do you find that, that it's hard for women to find or stay in work because of their other responsibilities? I think it's quite common that women do have the lion's share of the domestic responsibilities quite often in childcare and all of these things. And they'll be the first to be called on if there's a problem at school quite often.

And as Olivia explained, that was very draining forn ddwylo iawn i ni. Roedd hi'n ceisio ymchwil gyrfa ac mae'n anodd iawn i mi edrych fel person sy'n ffocws iawn a phroffesiynol os oes gennych chi bethau eraill i'w feddwl amdano. Nid yw hynny'n golygu nad yw'r gwleidydd yn gallu gwneud hynny oherwydd gallant ac maen nhw'n gwneud hynny. Ond yn aml, mae angen i ni eu helpu i ffocwsio ar sut i ddewis cyfleoedd sydd ar gael. Os, er enghraifft, rydych chi'n teimlo eich hun yn golygu eich swydd neu'n teimlo'n anodd i'w gael yn y gwaith, efallai y bydd angen i chi fynd i wneud rhywbeth, rhyw fath o addysg, hyfforddiad newydd, gweld beth mae'r siop ymarfer yn eich ardal yn edrych arno. Efallai eich bod yn edrych ar y math anghywir o waith yn y lle anghywir. training have a look and see what the job market in your area is looking for you may be just looking

for the wrong type of work in the wrong place so you know there's a number of things that we can do to try and help refocus what's going on for somebody but it is very much down to what the individual needs. Well Jan and Olivia thank you both very much indeed. Helen Barnard how worried are you about what's on the horizon, especially for women with all these job losses that we're seeing? I think it is really worrying. And it is very closely linked to the kinds of jobs that women do and the fact that women, mothers, are still responsible for a lot more childcare than men. So actually, already we've seen mothers have been a lot more likely to lose their

jobs than fathers have. And added to that, it's the families who were already in poverty, struggling to stay afloat, that have been much more likely to lose work. And so are being pulled deeper and deeper into hardship and debt through the impact of COVID. Now, last year, the Office for National Statistics said the rate of unemployment among women was the lowest since 1971. How likely are we to see that completely reversed? Well I think he's right women's employment has in a lot of ways been a real success story leading up to this and we've seen big increases particularly among mothers and single parents but I think there is a possibility it's going to go backwards

but I think it also hid the problem was the type of jobs so women were disproportionately going into low-paid insecure work work that doesn't give them a lot of protection a lot of training the chance to kind of improve and progress their work. And the fact that women were crowded into the bottom end of the labour market has left them much more exposed to the impacts of COVID. And in the sectors we know are going to be hardest hit and will be slowest to recover. So retail, hospitality, these sectors where a lot of women work, but they're not going to get back to normal very soon. We've also seen problems with things like childcare. So even before COVID,

women were working in jobs that often had variable or non-standard hours, they had trouble getting childcare. Now we've got millions of women who want and need to get back to work, and they're being told they should, but we've got a lot less childcare available and need to get back to work and they're being told they should but we've got a lot less child care available so I think we're seeing women stuck in the middle of that we haven't yet seen a credible plan to free women from that to let them and their families kind of get back to a position that's much more sustainable. Now we heard from Olivia with her situation how important Universal Credit and the Jobcentre have been for her. If there are going to be so many more in her position it's going to be very costly to provide this support. How do you expect it to be funded? Well, I think you're absolutely right. Universal credit

is a vital lifeline. And one of the problems actually is that we haven't seen anything particularly for families with children to keep them afloat. And job centres can be brilliant at getting people back to work. But it's not always working well enough for women. So the government has committed to doubling the number of work coaches which is great what we haven't seen is actually what we're hearing about which is a targeted plan for training for skills and support for all the women who are losing their jobs and who are likely to lose out when we see the next big wave and i think we need to you know be aware this is this is an investment in our economy. So the design of our labour market before all this, which trapped women in poor quality jobs, was a drag on our economy.

It hit our national productivity. Actually, this is a chance to remodel our economy, to invest in our people as well as in buildings and trains. And that will bring enormous economic benefits. But it's also the right thing to do for the families, but for our society more generally. I was talking to Helen Barnard, Jan Baxter and Olivia. On the sports survey, ALF emailed regarding the gym use, whereby the women have to make way in the gym for the men. Please just provide the names of the men involved. Ask them why. Interview them.

Name and shame. Jonathan said, just listening to Women's Hour this morning on sport and with the COVID-19 situation, I think we're seeing this happen every day, i.e. men's football and cricket back on the pitch the women's game still on hold if one then not the other and joe said well i don't think they're being supported in raising objections to unfair male-bodied participation in women's categories are they Are they? Now do join me tomorrow when I'll be discussing a film called Yes God Yes with its director Karen Mayne. It's a film set in Midwest America in the early noughties about a 16 year old Catholic school girl called Alice. During a chat on AOL she discovers masturbation and she's overwhelmed with guilt.

She attends one of the school's religious retreats to try and suppress her urges. And Karen says it is a semi-autobiographical film. Join me tomorrow, two minutes past ten. Bye bye. Hello, it's me, Greg Jenner, the bloke from that funny history podcast, You're Dead to Me. Big news, we are back. Once again combining the talents of comedians and expert historians as we explore stuff like ancient Egyptian pyramids, Genghis Khan, and 19th century vampire literature. Search for You're Dead to Me on the BBC Sounds app. I'm Sarah Treleaven, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered.

There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started, like, warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this?

From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now.