Since 2018, every year on 22 June, the UK celebrates Windrush Day, honouring the arrival of the Empire Windrush at Tilbury Docks in 1948 and celebrating the generations of Caribbean people who came to Britain to help rebuild the country after the Second World War. Their contributions helped shape modern Britain, from the NHS and public transport to schools, factories and communities across the country.

To mark this year’s Windrush Day, we had the privilege of sitting down with six extraordinary women at The Positive Network in Balham, South London. Carmen, Beryl, Veronica, Betsy, Zena and Alicia all came to Britain from Jamaica or Guyana during the Windrush era, many of them as teenagers or women in their early twenties.

Their stories are different but all of courage, sacrifice, hard work and a determination to build a better life. Every woman we spoke to was proud of the life she had built here. Not one regretted making the journey.

Carmen Hinkson

When Carmen Hinkson left Clarendon, Jamaica, in 1956, she was just 18 years old and had never travelled by sea before. “I came by boat, it took 17 days. I’d never been on one in my life,” she laughs. Carmen arrived in Southampton in June and travelled straight to London Euston. “It was raining,” she remembers. “I’ll never forget the first thing I ate was liver and bacon.”

Carmen had come to Britain to join her boyfriend, who would later become her husband. He had already made the journey after his sister came to Britain during the war and trained as a nurse. “I was hoping he would come and send for me too,” Carmen says. “And that’s exactly what happened.”

Like many young people arriving from the Caribbean, Carmen had grown up hearing Britain described as the “mother country”.

“I expected Britain to be very nice. And the people to be friendly. I expected it to be a bed of roses,” she says. “But it wasn’t.”

Just two weeks after moving into a rented room, the landlord gave them notice to leave. Carmen remembers him walking into the house one Sunday morning as she was making tea and turning off the kettle. “He said, ‘You’re not allowed to make any tea. You don’t live here anymore.’ Just like that.”

When her husband went to the police for help, they told him there was nothing they could do. Carmen was devastated. “I was walking through Balham crying, thinking, ‘My mother was right. I shouldn’t have come here’.” When she returned, her suitcase had been left outside on the street.

Out of desperation, Carmen approached two men she saw walking nearby and asked if they knew of anywhere she could stay. One simply replied: "Follow me." Nervous but with nowhere else to go, she followed him to a small back room with an outside kitchen and toilet. "I was so desperate," she says. "I'd have taken anything." That same day, Carmen and her husband moved in.

They ended up staying for over a year. "Him and his family were so nice to me." Soon, Carmen was helping to look after the family's children while the adults were out. "They'd say, 'Miss, could you look after the children until we come back?' I'd say, 'Certainly!'"

There were difficult moments throughout those early years. Carmen remembers signs in windows that read: ‘No Blacks. No Irish. No Dogs.’ She remembers how Britain had called on people from the Caribbean to help rebuild after the war, but “they had no preparation for us coming. There was nowhere for Black people to live. Some used to sleep down in Balham tube station.”

Carmen refused to be defeated. Once she started work and built a circle of friends, Britain slowly began to feel like home. Weekends were filled with parties and laughter, neighbours gathered in one another’s homes.

Her first job came through a cousin, who told her about a Jewish woman who owned a factory making clothes for Marks & Spencer. The only problem was that Carmen had never used a sewing machine in her life. “I said, ‘Yes man, I can do it’,” she laughs. “It was a lie.”

On her first day, the sewing machine caught fire. Panicked, she confessed to the woman sitting beside “to tell you the truth, I’ve never used a sewing machine before.”

“’Don’t worry, my love. I’ll help you,’ she said.” Only later did Carmen realise she had been speaking not to another employee, but to the factory owner herself. “I didn’t know it was her business!” she laughs. The owner not only kept her on, but helped relatives of Carmen find work too.

Seventy years later, Carmen has spent her entire life in Britain living in Balham. What kept her going through the difficult times? “My family. Everybody looking to me to keep going and help them all.”

And if she had the choice again?

“I’d do it all over again. I would right now.” She says, smiling.

“I have no regrets. Even though it was hard, it made me tougher and stronger.”

Beryl Palmer

Beryl arrived from Jamaica in 1961 aged 22, joining relatives who had already settled in Britain. “After they come here, they try to help you instead of sitting there doing nothing,” she says. Her parents paid her fare and a cousin helped her find somewhere to live. Within days, Beryl had found work. “As soon as I came here I got a job. And since then I was never been out of work. I’ve never been on the dole. I’ve always worked.” She tells us proudly.

Her first job was at a cotton mill in Stockport. It was there, just a year after arriving, that she met Noel, the pair married in 1963. More than sixty years later, they are still together, both attending community sessions at The Positive Network - they even recently received a congratulatory letter from the King. “We worked and we put our money together,” Beryl says proudly. By 1967, they had bought their first home — a semi-detached house they paid £2,500 for.

Over the years, Beryl also worked at a brewery, and had a job sewing (which she learnt to do on the job!) and later worked at Trinity Hospice, travelling back and forth between Britain and Jamaica while caring for her ageing parents. “I always thought it was the right choice,” she says of coming to Britain. “I was fully occupied. Working five days a week and getting paid.”

Beryl speaks fondly of the independence Britain gave her. “You used to be at your parents’ home. So coming here meant you became independent.”

Her advice to her younger self? “I would give myself more holiday,” she laughs. “I used to work so much.”

Otherwise, Beryl looks back on her life with satisfaction — proud of the home she built, the marriage she has cherished and the life she created from the opportunities she found here.

Veronica McLean

When Veronica McLean left Guyana for Britain in 1960, she was in her early twenties and ready for a new adventure. She travelled on a large Dutch ship with a group of friends — refusing to fly because she didn’t trust aeroplanes. Her husband had already arrived separately, studying mathematics at Cambridge University.

Like many young people in Guyana at the time, Veronica saw Britain as a place of opportunity. “A lot of people left the country to do nursing or some other kind of study,” she says. In Guyana, she had attended commercial school three times a week - something she is still proud of herself for. Before Veronica travelled to England, she decided nursing was the path for her. Armed with a reference from a doctor her mother worked for, Veronica arrived at a hospital, sat an entrance exam and passed. “Then I went to live on the wards,” she recalls.

Before arriving, Veronica hadn’t expected England to be very different from home. Friends who had travelled back and forth told her that life was much the same. The biggest surprise? “We thought all the houses were factories,” she laughs.

Veronica eventually “packed in” nursing, and found a new career at The Dorchester Hotel, where she worked for 16 years. “I had a good time working at The Dorchester, it was quite nice. The people were quite nice too.”

Later, she devoted her time to raising her family while her husband established his career as a solicitor.

Visits home were rare. "I never had much money to go back on holiday at that time," she says. "People who got kids couldn’t afford to travel." But she speaks about this without regret. Life, she says, was challenging wherever you were. "Everywhere was hard at the time. England as well. There were no beds of roses over here and no beds of roses there. Everywhere you went, same thing."

Veronica embraced the life she had built. "You got to get used to the place a little while and then move about and see what you can do."

Veronica says that she never regretted moving here.

Betsy Osbourne

Betsy Osbourne was just 19 when she left Jamaica and came to Britain with her aunt.

“I suppose I came because I had family here,” she says. “As a young person, you want to venture out and see different things.”

What did she know about England before she arrived? “Nothing at all,” she laughs. And her first impression? “It was cold in London. Very cold.” In fact, she remembers turning to her aunt and saying, “I want to go home.”

But Betsy stayed. Within three weeks she had found her first job making injection needles, and she began to build a life for herself. Settling in was both easy and hard, she says. “Because I knew people, then you make more friends. And at the weekend, you go out and things like that.”

Over the years, Britain became home. Looking back now, Betsy is proud of the life she built through hard work and determination. “I am proud that I was able to work myself up and do something for myself, you know, make my life better. And have my four children.”

Zena Josiah

At 92, Zena Josiah still has the warmth, humour and energy of someone half her age. She talks to everyone on her street, knows all her neighbours and regularly hosts parties to welcome new people to the road. “I love life,” she tells us. “I love meeting people.”

But when Zena arrived in Britain from Guyana in April 1956, aged 22, life looked very different. She had travelled to join her fiancé, who had come to England three years earlier after the war to work in printing. Zena flew first to Trinidad, then boarded the SS Antilles for the journey to Britain. “Oh, I was sick all the way,” she laughs. “There were nine girls coming to join their fiancés and I was the only one that was sick.”

She arrived during what was apparently the hottest April England had seen. But much of Britain still came as a surprise. The houses especially. “At home you have garden space around you,” she says. “When I saw these houses joined together, I’d never seen that before.” She was also astonished by the crowds in London. Growing up in Guyana, she remembered seeing photographs of football matches and wondering, “Where are all these people coming from?”

Zena and her fiancé began married life in a single rented room, paying £2.50 a week. Then came a frightening setback when her husband became seriously ill and was hospitalised for a long period. “I thought he was going to die,” she says quietly. “I was very upset because I was here alone.” Thankfully, he recovered and together they carried on.

Zena threw herself into work, working in Junior Miss on Oxford Street. “Because I was so tiny, they used to use me like a model before the clothes went into the store,” she says with a smile. She worked long hours and took every bit of overtime she could while she and her husband saved for a home.

Eventually, they had enough money for a deposit on a house. But just before the sale completed, they were told expensive work needed to be carried out on the property — money they didn’t have. The next day, Zena went to work upset. Her employer, Mr Goldman, noticed immediately.

“He said, ‘Zena, you mean to tell me you have a problem and you didn’t come and ask me?’” she recalls. He sent his son to the bank to withdraw the money she needed. “When I went home with that, my husband was so shocked. We got the house.”

Zena still becomes emotional telling the story. “I’ll never forget that man,” she says. It was in that house that she and her husband raised their children and built the life they had dreamed of.

“I never thought I had made a mistake coming here,” Zena says firmly. Together, she and her husband worked hard, raised a family and achieved their goals. “I’m proud to know that my husband and I made it in life. Through it all, we made it.”

After working in fashion, Zena went on to spend 20 years working nights in a hospital before moving into care work, which she says she “really did love”. Now retired, she remains deeply involved in her community. Her beloved husband died five years ago, just short of his 90th birthday, but her optimism has never faded.

Her advice to younger generations is the same philosophy she has lived by all her life, “whatever you want to do, do it with confidence. Don’t be negative. Be positive in everything that you do. Don’t say you can’t do something. Do it and see how it works out for you.”

Alicia Henry

Alicia Henry was 25 when she left Guyana and came to Britain to train as a nurse. It was the early 1960s and life at home had become difficult. She was married with four children but saw nursing as her chance to build a future for herself and her family.

“I left the children with my parents and I came over,” she tells us matter-of-factly. She passed her entrance exam, moved into nurses’ accommodation and threw herself into her training. Within a few years, Alicia had secured a mortgage through the council and bought her own home in Battersea. She then brought her four children to Britain, alongside the baby she had in England. “So there were five of them I had over here,” she says proudly.

Supporting them all meant extraordinary sacrifice. Alicia worked night shifts for 25 years so she could be home with her children during the day. “I couldn’t do days because I’d have to pay somebody to look after the youngest,” she explains. “So permanent nights for 25 years.” Even now, she laughs, the routine has stayed with her, “That’s why now I can’t sleep at night.”

Life was not always easy. Her husband “went off with another woman” and she found herself raising five children and paying the mortgage alone. When the council questioned whether she could keep up the repayments, Alicia stood her ground. “I said, ‘What are you going to do for me? Are you going to take back the place?’” She set up a standing order, never missed a payment and “never heard from them again.”

Nursing remained her passion throughout it all. She went on to specialise in burns and plastic surgery at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, a career she still considers her greatest achievement. “What I’m most proud of is my work,” she says simply.

As her children grew up and married, Alicia downsized to a smaller home in Croydon and found time to travel, visiting Guyana, Canada, America, Ireland and Australia, where her youngest daughter was living.

Then, just before her 90th birthday, Alicia discovered a lump on her arm. It was cancer. Faced with the possibility that it could spread, she made the decision to have her arm amputated at the age of 89.

Alicia - and indeed all the women we met at The Positive Network - have stories that are full of hardship, sacrifice and obstacles that would have defeated many people. Yet they tell them with humour and immense pride in what they achieved. Their resilience, work ethic and determination to build better lives for themselves and their families are the very essence of the Windrush generation and the extraordinary contribution they made to Britain.

The group is now raising funds to secure a permanent home of its own, so it can continue supporting members and expand its vital work — any donation would help make that possible.

Donate here

Women have been playing football for centuries. One of the earliest references appears in a 1580 poem by Sir Philip Sidney, describing girls playing football with their skirts tucked up. Even Mary, Queen of Scots, is said to have owned what may be the oldest surviving football.

Although football was a popular pastime, it wasn’t until 1863 that the Football Association created a standard set of rules. The new laws helped make the game more organised and opened the door for greater female participation.

The first recorded women’s match took place in Edinburgh in 1881, when teams representing Scotland and England faced each other. Interest quickly grew, with crowds of more than 1,000 attending matches in Sheffield and thousands more turning up to watch the pioneering British Ladies Football Club in the 1890s. One of the era’s leading figures was Nettie Honeyball, founder of the club and a passionate advocate for women’s sport.

Women’s football truly flourished during the First World War. As women entered factory work in huge numbers, workplace teams sprang up across Britain. Factory football became a major attraction, and in 1917 the Munitionettes’ Cup was launched. The most famous team of the period was Dick, Kerr Ladies, who played hundreds of matches, raised money for charity, and featured legendary striker Lily Parr, one of the greatest goal scorers the game has ever seen.

By 1921, around 150 women’s clubs existed and some matches attracted crowds of 45,000 spectators. Yet just as the sport was booming, the Football Association dealt it a devastating blow. On 5 December 1921, the FA banned women’s football from affiliated grounds, declaring the game unsuitable for women. The ban forced teams into parks and smaller venues for almost 50 years.

Despite the restrictions, the game survived. The English Ladies’ Football Association was formed days after the ban, while clubs such as Manchester Corinthians kept women’s football alive through the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, even touring internationally and winning trophies abroad.

The tide finally began to turn in the late 1960s. The Women’s Football Association (WFA) was established on 1 November 1969 with representatives of 44 clubs attended the first meeting in London. After years of pressure the FA finally lifted its ban in June 1971. Women's football could now be played on FA-affiliated grounds and registered referees could officiate at women's matches.

That same year saw the first Women’s FA Cup, while England’s official women’s team played its first recognised international match in 1972.

The following decades brought steady progress. England reached the final of the first UEFA women’s championship in 1984, and the 1990s saw the launch of a national league structure, the first strategic development plans, and increasing support from the FA. Women’s football was also growing worldwide, helped by the introduction of the FIFA Women’s World Cup in 1991.

Since the turn of the century, women’s football really transformed. By 2002 in England, it had become the top participation team sport for women and girls. The FA achieved this target three years earlier than expected. In the same year, Lily Parr of Dick, Kerr Ladies was posthumously inducted into the National Football Museum Hall of Fame, the first woman to do so.

England hosted the UEFA Women’s EURO in 2005, the Women’s Super League launched in 2011, and record crowds began filling stadiums. The Lionesses became regular contenders on the international stage, reaching the World Cup semi-finals in 2015 and 2019.

A defining moment arrived in 2022 when England won the UEFA Women’s EURO at Wembley in front of a record crowd, inspiring a new generation of players and fans. The Lionesses followed that success with a first-ever FIFA Women’s World Cup final appearance in 2023 and another European title in 2025.

Another historic milestone in 2022 saw the original 1972 Lionesses finally awarded their official bespoke England caps, 50 years after their inaugural international match. The team's achievement - a 3-2 victory over Scotland on November 18, 1972 - was celebrated with a special legacy cap presentation at Wembley Stadium.

England’s back-to-back victories had an immediate impact, with searches for women’s football opportunities rising 196% the day after the EURO 2025 final. Five months later, participation was up 5%, while the number of female coaches and referees had increased by 12% and 29% respectively.

It also accelerated progress towards equal access to football for girls. The target for 90% of schools to offer equal access through Key Stage 2 and 3 PE lessons, originally set for 2028, was achieved three years early, giving 2.6 million girls access to football in PE, up 31% since 2020/21.

We're really only just getting to see what the sport can become when women are given the support, investment and visibility they deserve.

Reflecting on the success of 2025, Sue Day, Director of Women’s Football & Para Football at The FA, said: “2025 will be remembered as a historic year for women’s sport… That victory has ignited something powerful, strengthening a special connection with fans and driving more women and girls than ever before to play, coach, referee and get involved in football.”

“With record levels of participation in schools and clubs, there is so much to be proud of this year – but no room for complacency. We must use this momentum to drive the game forward. It’s up to all of us to keep building on the legacy of the Lionesses, ensuring the game continues to thrive for generations to come.”

In 2026, a commemorative plaque was unveiled in Nuneaton to mark the site of England Women’s first official home fixture against Scotland in 1973, as part of celebrations for the Lionesses’ 500th match and to honour the pioneers who helped establish women’s football in England.

After missing automatic qualification for the 2027 World Cup, the Lionesses must now progress through two play-off rounds. England will first face Greece over two legs between 7–13 October, and if they advance, will play either Slovakia or Ukraine between 26 November and 5 December for a place in Brazil.

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My chat with Florrie feels less like an interview and more like catching up with a friend who’s moved abroad, like we haven’t spoken in a while, but the conversation slips effortlessly into place - warm and easy.

Over the past two decades, Florrie has built a career that’s spanned both sides of the music industry. First making her name as the drummer behind some of British pop’s biggest acts - including Kylie Minogue, Girls Aloud and Pet Shop Boys through the legendary Xenomania production house - before stepping into the spotlight herself as a singer-songwriter.

She’s has just announced her latest album, Magic For A While, due for release in October, with new single The Times already out in the world.

As we settle into our video chat, she’s every bit as down-to-earth as she is accomplished.

I begin by suggesting it must be a good feeling to finally be at the point of sharing the album with the world.

“Yeah. This album journey was quite a solitary experience for me. I really enjoyed that actually, I really loved just keeping it close to my chest, really believing in what I’d made without letting anything external influence me.”

Do you think you may be at a point in your life where you're much more comfortable doing that?

“I don’t know what happened to me last year,” she laughs. “But I turned 36 and something literally switched in my head.”

For someone who describes herself as a “lifelong people pleaser”, the shift has been significant.

“I do think it’s an age thing. It’s a great feeling. The older I get, the less I care - in a good way - about what other people think of me. Because I am someone that throughout my life has really cared.”

Florrie wrote the album during a period of uncertainty while living in Los Angeles.

“I was in this transition period of not knowing whether to stay or whether to come back,” she says. “It got me thinking about all these other times in my life where you’ve chosen to go down one path and it’s led you somewhere. But what if you had taken another one?”

This, she explains, is the “overarching theme of the record”.

So where are you finding magic in her own life right now?

“First of all, I love nature,” she says. “The older I get, the more I appreciate being quiet.”

“Seeing my best friend become a mum. That’s really magical. And she’s nailing it. I mean, she doesn’t feel like she is, but she is nailing it. I think I see a lot of magical things around me in a really nice way.”

It’s an answer that says a lot about where Florrie is right now. Less concerned with chasing validation and more interested in appreciating the people and moments around her.

Throughout her life and career, Florrie has been inspired by different women.

“I started this job at Xenomania as the drummer. It was this big house in the countryside, there were like 30 people there, musicians, writers, all different ages. But the lady who ran it was called Miranda Cooper.”

“Before then [the people working around me] were all guys and bands really… I guess there wasn’t anyone in my sort of everyday life who I looked up to.”

“But Miranda was one of the most prolific female songwriters in the UK. She was lovely and she really empowered everyone else around her,” Florrie says. “Miranda was a real leader.”

“I was actually quite nervous of her,” Florrie admits of first meeting Miranda. Looking back now, she sees it differently, remembering Miranda as a “really big” role model in her early years of being a musician.

Closer to home, however, her biggest inspiration has always been her mum, a single parent who ran her own business. “I’m so close to my mum. I speak to her once, if not twice a day, every single day,” Florrie says. “In my head she just balanced everything. She just made it all work. I don’t think she really feels like that, but she was a big inspiration growing up. She’s just my absolute champion.”

Another woman who changed the course of her life was Cassandra Gracey, who spotted something special in a young drummer she’d met briefly in a lawyer’s waiting room.

Months later, Cassandra called with an opportunity.

“She called me maybe six months later and said, ‘This is going to be really random, but I got your number because I remember you from this lawyer’s office. I thought you had a really sort of special energy. And I’ve got a friend who’s looking for a drummer to be part of this team.’ She was amazing. She really championed me as well.”

That connection became Florrie’s introduction to Xenomania.

Although music remains heavily male-dominated behind the scenes, Florrie considers herself fortunate that her earliest experiences in the industry were unusually inclusive.

“Being part of Xenomania, I was very protected from the wider sexism in the music industry,” she says. “It was an incredible environment to have the first ten years of my musical life in.”

In fact, Florrie says she didn’t encounter much sexism at all during the first decade of her career. “It’s only the last six or seven years where I’ve seen it.”

When it did happen, it came as a surprise.

“I was actually shocked when I first experienced very blatant sexism, where someone refused to talk to me and directed everything at a male colleague, even though it was something that I dealt with.”

The confidence she’s developed in recent years has also changed the way she sees herself.

“When I first started out, I definitely felt like I had to look and be a certain way,” Florrie says. “I felt like I had to be thin and pretty and make sure I was always wearing makeup every day.”

Now?

“I literally couldn’t care less.”

So what has changed?

“I trust myself more. I’ve got more confidence in my own decisions. When I make a decision now, I don’t need external validation. I was a real worrier back in my twenties. Whereas now I’m just feeling a lot more sure of myself and just a lot calmer in everyday life.”

I ask her if “stop worrying” would be the advice she’d give to her younger self?

“The thing is, you just can’t say ‘stop worrying’. Does it ever work? Does it? No.”

“I’d probably just say: trust your gut a bit more.”

“There were a lot of times where I had quite a definite feeling about something, and some label exec would be like, ‘No, that’s a stupid idea’. And I would think he must know better.”

Now, Florrie knows that’s not the case.

“Creatively, you know yourself better than anyone else ultimately.”

As our conversation comes to an end, I ask how she hopes people will listen to Magic For A While.

“I would actually love for people to just sit with it. Just them and the record.”

The album is introspective, she says, and deserves a quiet moment to absorb it.

“And then tell everyone about it.”

Florrie’s single The Times is out now

The full album Magic for a while is out in October 2026

Just four months later, we were invited to speak to Sir Keir Starmer again about the government’s goal for Britain to become first country in the world to make it impossible for children to take, share or view nude images.

The statistics for for online abuse and pornography viewed by children are shocking:

• 91% of online child sexual abuse reports recorded in 2024 contained self-generated content from children themselves and the average child now views pornography by age 13.

• 39% of teenagers aged 13–17 experience emotional or physical abuse from a partner.

• 52% of all child sexual abuse and exploitation cases involve children aged 10–17 offending against other children.

Progress to tackle online child sexual exploitation has been slow - something Jess Phillips acknowledged when she resigned as Safeguarding Minister in May 2026 to protest the Prime Minister’s leadership.

Now the Prime Minister has announced Big Tech firms like Apple and Google must introduce safety measures on children’s smartphones and tablets to detect and block nude images for children - with the government prepared to legislate if they do not act.

If companies do not act within three months, the Prime Minister has said legislation will be brought in to force them to activate the technology. This will include fines for companies with criminal liability for tech bosses who fail to comply also a possibility.

Speaking exclusively to us at London Tech Week - albeit it for just five minutes to tackle such a crucial safeguarding issue - Sir Keir Starmer spoke about the responsibility of Big Tech to protect children and changing the law to enforce it if they don’t act swiftly - and we told him The Female Lead community is frustrated at the lack of action, demanding more be done to protect women and girls in Britain.

On Jess Phillips stating the Sir Keir Starmer had dragged his heels on legislation to force tech companies to ban nude photos on children's phones - and The Female Lead frustrated at the slow progress

“Let me record my respect for Jess Phillips and what she has done and continues to do. This is an area we announced back in December when launched our Violence Against Women and Girls strategy, that we would take action in relation to the ability to children to send and receive nude images. I’m pleased to say that since we’ve made that announcement some companies have taken necessary measures. Today is about taking it up, putting the bar higher, saying to all tech companies, ‘You’ve all got to do this now. And if you don’t do it, we’ll change the law to ensure that you do’. These tech companies are brilliant innovators, this is not beyond their ability so it’s a question of will, their will to do it and our will do something about it if they don’t.”

On Australia and Germany having strong take-down regulator models in place with Big Tech

“As tech and Ai have developed, very many people, particularly parents, are getting worried. Each country is looking at what can we do to protect children better? So we are looking at what other countries have done and talking to other countries about it. This device level control to stop children sending or receiving nude images will make us a world leader.”

On banning social media platforms in the UK if they don’t comply

“I do expect all tech companies to comply. There is no question this can only apply to some and not others, it has got to be everyone across the board. I genuinely believe they have the ability to do it. This is to say, ‘You must have something to stop these images being sent or received by children. It’s pretty common sense.’ There are no excuses for anyone. It does need to be backed up by us saying, ‘If you don’t do it we’ll change the law.’”

On The Female Lead wanting a deadline and more action to protect women and girls

“You’re right to keep pushing it. It’s a personal priority. Working with you and others, there’s always this question of pushing us further. Quite right too. That’s what accountability is about. People having the right to say to their government, ‘I’m glad you’ve done that, but go further, go quicker’.”

After just five minutes talking to the Prime Minister at London Tech Week, we left him with one ask: Do better, do more.

Watch the full interview here:

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Last year, I was lucky enough to see Malala Yousafzai speak at the Southbank Centre in London about her newly released book, Finding My Way. I couldn’t quite believe that this Nobel Peace Prize winner, world-famous activist, and poster girl for women’s rights and education was just like me.

This week, I was lucky enough to watch her speak again. And actually, I think that’s exactly what she’s trying to tell us.

The first question host Pandora Sykes asked was why she felt ready to write about her life in such a vulnerable and honest way.

“When you have a public image and people can look you up on Wikipedia, there is a fixed story of you. You are changing, but that story isn’t changing. Time passes by, you grow, things happen that teach you a lot in life.”

Whilst Malala did something rare and extraordinary, the world often forgot that she was still a teenage girl.

She shares a similar misconception in her book. After becoming known worldwide for being attacked by the Taliban, the media painted her as a kind of “mythical heroine”. As she writes, people began to describe someone she didn’t recognise: “a serious and shy girl, a wallflower forced to speak out when the Taliban took away her books.”

But Malala’s reality was different.

“Growing up in Mingora, I was a troublemaker. At school, I ferried bits of gossip back and forth between groups of girls and cracked jokes that made my friends laugh and scold me in the same breath.”

It was this perception that led Malala to approach university the way she did.

“At Oxford my only goal was to make friends - I signed up for everything... rowing society, Christian society, Hindu society, cricket, baking. I chose the social life because I thought this was the only chance to meet people my age.”

“I may have heard a rumour that the Christians brought baked goods to your dorm room, and the Hindus threw the best parties,” she writes in her book.

It sounds humanly impossible to be doing this much whilst also studying PPE - widely regarded as one of Oxford’s most demanding degrees - and even Malala admits she probably went overboard at the start.

“When you are sitting with presidents and prime ministers, you are expected to be a very serious person. I wanted to be a normal student at college. I wanted to separate myself from the work that I did.”

Her excitement to embrace every aspect of university life is a reminder that, despite her status as a Nobel laureate, she was also a young woman figuring out who she was.

It was especially moving to hear her say: “When I think about the Malala who entered college and the Malala who graduated, they are two completely different people and that is the biggest success of my education.”

Malala married her husband, Asser Malik, in November 2021, but before that she had publicly questioned marriage altogether. The reasons behind those views really stuck with me.

“Growing up in Pakistan, I knew that protecting yourself from marriage was so important for girls because that is the only way you can have a future. Girls were married whilst they were still children. I saw it happen to friends at school. So I thought, to protect myself, I have to stay away.”

“Even as I got older, that didn’t change. I realised that often women still have to make more compromises than men.”

“I thought about all the women throughout history who took that burden on their shoulders and still do.”

Ultimately, Malala got to a point where marriage felt right.

“We were on the same page. We had respect for each other... I realised he was the right person.”

But even with that reassurance, she describes feeling as though she was “making a decision for all women.”

It’s a striking example of the pressure placed on women who become symbols. Even deeply personal choices can feel political.

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Malala has been fighting for girls’ education since the world first heard her name in 2012, so it may be less surprising to hear that her passion for the issue remains as strong as ever.

“There are so many girls who lost their opportunity to complete their education because of marriage and other reasons. It’s so hard for girls to break out and beat the cultural expectations and stereotypes. Education means they can learn about their rights, to stand up for what is right and wrong in their lives.”

Of course, she’s right. The scale of the issue remains enormous. According to the UNESCO, around 122 million girls worldwide are out of school, while millions more are at risk of dropping out because of poverty, conflict, discrimination and child marriage.

“Everyone should have access to education. It shouldn’t be a privilege, it should be a right. No one should be left behind because of their gender. I want every girl to be able to go to school and complete their education.”

“Education is so much more than learning. It is empowerment. It is emancipation.”

Watching Malala speak, I was struck by how she is both extraordinary and ordinary. She has addressed world leaders, survived an assassination attempt and become one of the most recognisable activists on the planet. Yet she also worried about making friends at university, questioned whether marriage would limit her future, and spent years figuring out who she wanted to be.

Perhaps that’s what makes her such a compelling role model. Not because she’s superhuman, but because she isn’t. Behind the activist is a woman still learning, changing and finding her way - just like the rest of us.

Over a hundred years ago, my great-grandmother lived in a women’s space – a community that centred women. She wasn’t a radical, nor was she living in an experimental, alternative commune. This was just how her centuries-old matrilineal society functioned; it had been shaped by and for women, and sustained across generations.

I only learned about my ancestral women-led living space in southern India through a chance conversation with a distant family member, and I found myself wondering why this part of my family’s history was spoken of so little. In trying to better understand my great-grandmother’s life, I also began a search for current-day women-led spaces and societies around the world.

I began listening to the women who created and care for these communities, some of which have existed for several hundred years. I listened to the women who invited me into their private spaces and explained how they function and why they came to fruition.

What I found inside was powerful: across continents and civilisations, women-led communities have reshaped culture, reimagined economies, driven political change and fostered peace. They’ve provided refuge, resilience, and deeper connections to the land. However, they are by no means perfect societies. Not all of them offer women freedom or autonomy.

The more I explored, the more I became convinced that there was an urgent and layered story to be told about women-led spaces and societies. A story not just for women, but for anyone willing to learn from them.

A place for women

When you picture a women’s space, what comes to mind? Is it an imaginary place, like Themyscira, Wonder Woman’s island? Or historic, like a suffragette meeting? A gathering where men are still somewhere on the periphery, like a girls’ night out? A sports team?
I picture the world of Herland, a novel published in 1915 by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

The story starts with three unlikeable American men who hear rumours of a women-only country high in the mountains, hidden within an unnamed continent. When the men reach the settlement hidden within a plateau, they find a 2,000-year-old advanced social structure, free from fear and violence.

The country in Herland is meticulously organised: clean, efficient and harmonious. Forests are cared for, food is abundant and waste is managed sustainably. Even the ‘jail’ is a cosy room. Each woman may become a mother only once, via an asexual process, to prevent overpopulation. Still, no woman is overburdened. Child-rearing is shared, spaces are designed for safety. There is no money, crime or worship of tradition.

There was a glaring omission that I was missing as a reader. Herlandian women were capable, athletic, strong and fearless. They were also all white. Herland may be a trailblazing imagining of what a country created by women could be, but it also offers an important accidental lesson. Advanced feminist ideals do not automatically include all women, and do not always align with anti-racist values. Like many who speak of equality, Gilman’s feminism was selective and exclusionary, and there is no ambiguity that she held racist and supremacist views.

Acknowledging this makes the experience of reading Herland complicated. Could a reader admire writing as visionary as Herland while being repulsed by the racist views of its creator, I asked myself.

Then I had a video call with my cousin Tushanka – an educator for girls in India and an avid reader. As I was explaining the plot of Herland, Tushanka interrupted me. “Sounds a lot like Sultana’s Dream,” she said, going on to describe a short story written by Bengali feminist Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. Sultana’s Dream was published in 1905, a decade before Herland.

Sultana’s Dream imagines a women-led country called Ladyland (which is what Terry calls the unnamed women-led country in Herland). In Sultana’s Dream, women move freely and men are hidden away behind murdahs – a reversal of the gender-seclusion practice of purdah. Ladyland is peaceful, clean, and powered by solar energy – a fringe concept in the early 1900s.

The women of Sultana’s Dream and Herland are engineers, teachers, farmers and scientists who keep their societies functional and free of combat. They are confident and free from the timidness that comes from fearing a predator. The message is clear: when women are undistracted by war and division, they innovate.

Women’s only spaces

In our world, no country has been built with women’s security and comfort at the forefront. More than thirty countries have no laws addressing domestic abuse. Globally, a woman or girl is killed by someone in her own family every eleven minutes.

We are nowhere near the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of achieving gender equality by 2030, and if we’re going at the current rate, it will take more than 135 years for women to be represented equally in positions of leadership in the workplace.

In a world that is so hostile to us, it’s unsurprising that women have created pockets for ourselves where we feel understood and safe. Places, both physical and online, where we can be vulnerable and feel the support of friendship and encouragement from other women.

I learned that a friend of a friend had grown up in an Irish Traveller women-only squat that banned entry to all men, including male cats. In almost every place I have visited, there has been at least one women-only corner. I’ve met lesbian women in Burundi who built a home where they gather to love and have sex, away from their husbands. I’ve stretched my legs in a fenced-off garden near a tea plantation in Malawi, where girls meet for a ‘radio club’ and plot how to avoid early arranged marriage and to stay in school. I’ve spoken with women who are trying to set up a ‘mommune’ in the US, where young and single mothers share accommodation to alleviate financial pressures.

These parallel worlds, quietly healing the failures of the mainstream, are everywhere – the shadow governments cementing the potholes of societies that have let them down.

Worlds without men

I was interested in women’s spaces long before I heard that they existed in my own ancestral home. The seed was planted when I was nineteen years old, in my second year of university and living as the only woman in a houseshare with five men, when I first read about much more desirable lodgings that had existed almost a thousand years earlier. I was transported to the 1200s, a time when Northern European women had two choices of submission: marriage or the convent. However, many pioneered a third way. They chose to live together in a beguinage.

A beguinage was a walled compound for financially independent women from all social backgrounds. These were the women who did not want a husband and did not want to be nuns – the ones who actively resisted the script of mother- hood, wifehood and state-controlled worship. By the 1300s, hundreds of beguinages existed across Northern Europe.

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The beguinage was a society that strictly excluded men, an almost thousand-year-old community that upended the expectations placed on women by our masculine societies. I felt bubbles of excitement, and so began my voyage to places where women thrive without men. It was the start of a curiosity that has lasted decades, and taken me around the world.

I stayed for hours at the Senate House and Maughan libraries in London, obsessively researching. I became fixated with the beguines, the women who lived in these communities. Their homes – the beguinages – ranged in size from fewer than a dozen women to several hundred. They sprang up in France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands. While they did have their lodgings donated to them by wealthy church- going families, they were not presided over or instructed by men from a church in the same way as nuns. The beguines were referred to by writers as the ‘sœurs grises’ (grey sisters), because of their humble grey tunics and head coverings.

Unlike nuns, though, these women had to earn a living. Their jobs were diverse, ranging from weaving to childcare and even brewing beer. In the evenings, they were free to return to their all-women haven – behind the high walls and a lockable gate – and they could leave this lifestyle any time they chose.

The beguinages were leaderless, with no founder and no formal way of life. They were urban single-sex phenomena, which produced writers like Mechthild of Magdeburg, Hadewijch, and Marguerite Porete – women who were accused of heresy and strongly criticised by wider society’s patriarchal leaders.

I convinced my friend Rachael that we needed to catch a train from London to Bruges in Belgium and see a beguinage in person. I was sure that we were going to visit an ancient but advanced women-only civilisation – some kind of Pompeii of matrilineal preservation.

When Rachael and I entered the beguinage, we were both disappointed. We’d loved walking from the historic centre of Bruges, over the arched Wijngaard Bridge and through the gatehouse and into the beguinage, which had existed since 1245. It was beautiful, but not revolutionary. I didn’t feel we had entered an alternative matriarchal dimension, a sci-fi alterworld, a Disneyland of historic feminism. Instead we found cobbled streets under pale steep-gabled A-frame houses around a central courtyard of lime and poplar trees. The collection of houses had separate sleeping quarters but communal indoor gathering, shared gardens and a church.

It was pretty and peaceful and dull. We couldn’t visualise the sœurs grises who once lived in self-sufficient simplicity – as single women who had chosen a life away from marriage – in this women-only compound.

“Would you have lived here in the 1200s?” teenage-me asked teenage-Rachael as we sat on a bench to eat ice cream. “Definitely not,” I recall teenage-Rachael replying. “I went to an all-girls school. I absolutely would not spend the rest of my life in a beguinage.”

We left to find a bar.

We didn’t speak about it again that day. But I began thinking about women’s spaces more and more. Over the years, after dozens of women I knew sought shelter and strength in women-only communities – and after needing them myself – the topic was pushed to the front of my mind.

I mentally ran through all the gender-separate spaces I had visited as a tourist in my personal and professional life – from sleepovers to sports clubs and religious ceremonies to safe- houses. I questioned what point they had served, and still did serve, in my life as a woman.

I started asking women around me about places they went to without men.

Stories started emerging from the shadows.

Herlands is available to buy now.

By Freja Love, Social Producer at The Female Lead

I went in knowing very little about John Proctor, Is The Villain (and about The Crucible, sorry!), but I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

Written by Kimberly Belflower, John Proctor Is the Villain drops us into a small-town Georgia classroom in 2018, where a group of 16-year-olds are studying The Crucible as the fallout of #MeToo hums in the background. As their awareness of what’s happening - both globally and within their own community - sharpens, the girls begin to question things. Beth, an enthusiastic high-achiever, is spurred on by new student Nell to set up a feminist club, with their attentive and outgoing teacher, Mr Smith, stepping in to support it. What starts as literary analysis quickly spirals into something far more personal: a messy, funny, devastating interrogation of power and belief that dares you to reconsider something you thought you understood.

But if the play interrogates power, it centres something else entirely: teenage girls. And crucially, without trivialising their problems.

“One of the biggest takeaways is to take teenage girls seriously,” Director Danya Taymor tells me. “To really listen to what they’re saying.”

It sounds obvious, but apparently it isn’t.

Dónal Finn, who plays the charismatic teacher, Carter Smith, points out just how rare it is.

“Other dramas that are about that time in your life can make it seem quite trivial,” He says “Problems that you have as a 15 or 16 year old are treated with a kind of flippancy, like, ‘it’s not that important’ - but they are really formative years of your life. Things that happen to you absolutely shape your worldview.”

Clare Hughes, who plays privileged Ivy, puts it just as clearly: “It’s really easy to dismiss how big your feelings are at that age… but they’re going through completely life-altering moments.”

The play refuses to trivialise what the young women have to say. Instead, it treats their experiences with the same weight you’d give any “serious” drama - something Danya was intentional about from the start.

“I approached it like it’s Shakespeare or Chekhov,” she explains. “When you treat the text seriously, you take the characters seriously too.”

Lauryn Ajufo, who plays new girl Nell, describes it as watching a group of girls try to make sense of something they know isn’t right: “There are things happening in the play that are not normal, but society has allowed it to be… and what you see is a group of girls who discuss and debate that, and try to find the right within the wrong.”

“It’s a really beautiful, messy portrayal of young women,” Clare adds, explaining how every character makes mistakes, but isn’t reduced to them.

Belflower’s dialogue perfectly captures the way young girls talk to each other with humour, vulnerability, and an undercurrent of everything they’re absorbing about the world around them.

These girls aren’t perfect feminist archetypes - they contradict themselves and get things wrong. And it’s this refusal to simplify things that gives the play its edge.

Instead, it becomes a brilliantly accurate reflection of teenage girlhood: the intensity, the certainty, and the lack of language for what you’re actually feeling. They’re figuring things out in real time - feminism, identity, friendship, love, anger - and, in doing so, begin to find their voices.

“It’s about finally being able to say, wait, I have opinions,” says Molly McFadden, who plays their well-meaning guidance counsellor Miss Gallagher, “I can disagree with what I’ve been told is right.”

That gut feeling - when something doesn’t sit right, even if you can’t fully explain why - came up again and again.

Holly Howden-Gilchrist, who plays naive but eager Beth, described it as a physical feeling before it was a verbal one: “I remember being 14 and not having the words to express how I felt… it was just a full-body feeling of, ‘this is injustice.’”

Clare shared something similar. She described that time in her life as the first moment she felt truly fired up by what she believed in - particularly when it came to defending her friends. “Some men were being truly awful,” she said. It wasn’t about standing up for herself yet, but “batting for your friends” - an early, instinctive feminism built on loyalty and anger.

I asked the cast what they want audiences to leave with.

“I’d like people to leave with more questions than answers,” Lauryn said.

“When the system fails, you turn to your community,” Sadie Soverall said. She plays Shelby - witty, sharp, and awkward - who returns to school halfway through the play carrying more than her fair share of emotional baggage. “That’s a really important message right now.”

Danya echoes that same complexity when she talks about the play. There is no singular message, because there can’t be.

“Things are not black and white. There are no absolutes. Real life is complicated and messy and hard to unpack.”

“I just hope audiences feel,” She says.

I don’t doubt that for a second.

John Proctor Is The Villian runs at the Royal Court Theatre in London until 25th April

The ensemble cast include: Sadie Soverall (Saltburn), Holly Howden Gilchrist (I Swear), Lauryn Ajufo (Boiling Point), Clare Hughes, Miya James, Dónal Finn (Hadestown, Young Sherlock, The Other Bennet Sister) , Molly McFadden (Finding Joy), Charlie Borg and Reece Braddock, directed by Danya Taymor.

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Society has a tendency to talk about girls as future leaders, future innovators, and future change-makers. But across the world, many of them are already doing the work - often in ways that are practical, specific, and rooted in everyday experience.

For Maegha Ramanathan, the catalyst was sport. After facing sexist comments from male teammates as a young athlete, she realised how widespread the experience was among girls around her. At 13, she founded Girls4Sports to challenge the inequality, creating a global organisation that has since reached more than 1,000 participants, building confidence alongside opportunity.

In Australia, 16-year-old Jayashruthi Palanisamy designed the Echo Glove, a wearable device that translates sign language into speech and spoken words into text. Inspired by the limitations of existing communication methods, it proposes a more immediate, intuitive way for deaf and hard of hearing people to connect.

At age twelve, Rebecca Young designed a solar-powered blanket that stores energy during the day and releases heat at night, after first developing the idea at a school engineering club. Motivated by seeing people experiencing homelessness in Glasgow, she wanted to create a simple source of warmth that did not rely on power. The blanket is now being used by homelessness charities in Scotland, turning a straightforward idea into an immediate, practical impact.

In India, 14-year-old Vinisha Umashankar reimagined a familiar sight after noticing a street vendor discarding charcoal on her way home from school. Curious, she began researching its impact, uncovering links to lung disease and deforestation. Her solar-powered ironing cart replaces charcoal with clean energy, reducing harmful smoke while keeping the same function, offering vendors a more flexible, practical way to work.

Other changes can start with something as ordinary as a school uniform. At eight years old, Georgia from Ipswich questioned why the girls’ trousers in Sainsbury’s did not have proper pockets. She wrote to them, receiving a reply saying her feedback would be considered: “I’m sorry, currently girls’ school trousers do not have pockets. I agree they should,” a representative for the store said. She also organised a petition at her school, and later found pocketed designs in stores. Whilst Sainsbury’s has not commented on whether Georgia’s campaign influenced this, her actions are a reminder that even small voices can spark change, and that noticing what’s missing is often the first step toward fixing it.

Sometimes the starting point is even more personal. At 11, Millie, from Salford, designed colour-changing glasses to make reading easier for people with dyslexia - an idea she first had at eight after struggling with visual stress herself. The glasses use interchangeable lenses to reduce discomfort and improve focus, turning her own experience into something that could help others read more comfortably.

Many of these ideas have been recognised beyond their local contexts. Publications like Time and The Guardian have increasingly highlighted young innovators tackling issues from climate to accessibility, often before they have finished school. What links these stories is not scale, but clarity - each begins with a problem that is seen, felt, and understood.

Taken together, these young women show that change does not always start with expertise or authority. Sometimes it can start with noticing what is missing, and deciding to fix it.

Christina Koch made history this week as mission specialist on NASA’s Artemis II mission as she took off with her fellow astronauts to become the first woman to fly around the moon.

The astronauts – three Americans and one Canadian – took off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on 1 April on the 10-day voyage, the first time in half a century that humans returned to the vicinity of the moon.

Christina, 47, an engineer and physicist who became an astronaut in 2013, spent 328 days aboard the International Space Station back in 2019, a record for the longest continuous spaceflight by a woman. She was also part of NASA’s first three all-female spacewalks alongside Jessica Meir.

Historically, nearly 90% of astronauts have been men so Christina’s role as a leader in STEM is crucial for inspiring young women and girls. “It feels like an incredible privilege and responsibility,” Christina has said of being part of the Artemis II crew. “We are at a time when everyone who has a dream gets to work equally hard to achieve it.”

On the Artemis II mission, Christina has taken handwritten notes from people close to her for her personal item, a “tactile connection” to loved ones back on Earth.

Surprisingly, the mental load doesn’t seem lighter even when there’s zero gravity. In an interview before takeoff, Christina told reporters that her husband Bob would have to fend for himself at home and not be able to call to find out where lost items are.

“He’s not going to be able to ring me and ask where something is in the house,” she laughed. “He’s going to have to find it.”

In ancient Greek mythology, Artemis is the twin sister of Apollo, who was the namesake of the last Nasa missions that went to the moon. Artemis is the goddess of the hunt, the wild, and - mostly importantly - the moon itself.

And Christina isn’t the only woman shaping the future of space exploration:

Charlie Blackwell-Thompson made history as NASA’s first-ever female launch director, leading the 90-strong Exploration Ground Systems Program. She made the final call, delivering the electrifying “GO!” that sent the mission into the sky. Charlie previously commanded the historic first test flight of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft, Artemis I, guiding the mission all the way to launch.

Laura Poliah, Lander Ground Operations Expert, is part of the Lander Ground Operations team at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and previously served as a lead test engineer for the Orion spacecraft. Her role was to oversee rigorous testing across the crew module, service module, and launch abort system which are vital in keeping the Orion astronauts safe. Laura and her team have been working on testing for Artemis II and Artemis III.

Erica Sandoval is the Program Manager, Abort Motor, Orion Launch Abort System, After completing a degree in mechanical engineering, she worked in rocket motor manufacturing and now leads the team that builds the abort motor for the Orion spacecraft’s launch abort system (LAS). “I had a roundabout path into the space industry, but I love it here,” she said. “I would’ve never imagined that this is where I would end up, but it is an exciting industry and humbling to be a small part of the space industry team.”

Vanessa Wyche is the director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, overseeing spacecraft development, astronaut selection and training, and the iconic mission control room. The centre is home to NASA’s astronaut corps and programs such as the International Space Station, Orion, and the Lunar Gateway, with Vanessa guiding missions to the Moon with Artemis, and laying the foundation for future journeys to Mars.

Meta’s AI glasses are being marketed as the next step in wearable technology, a hands-free way to capture content, access information and essentially interact with the world. But as they become more widely used, concerns about how they are already being misused are growing - particularly when it comes to women’s safety and privacy.

You’ve probably already seen the videos. Women being filmed without their consent by men wearing the glasses. Because the camera is built discreetly into the frame, recording is far less obvious than pulling out a phone. There is meant to be a small LED light that signals when filming is happening, but tutorials online show exactly how to cover or disable it, making it easy to record people without them ever knowing.

So this is not hypothetical.

Journalist Jess Davies, who has been reporting on the impact of tech on women for Glamour, notes that these kinds of videos are on the rise. One woman, Annika, told the magazine she was “being used for content without even knowing the video existed”, adding that the man filming her had deliberately covered the recording light. She described it as part of a wider pattern - the “constant hijacking of tech to harm and humiliate women”.

Meta has said its devices include safeguards such as the LED indicator and tamper detection, and that users are responsible for complying with laws and using the product respectfully. The company acknowledged that a “small number of users” misuse its products, adding that it continues to review ways to improve safety.

However, reporting from the BBC suggests the issue is more widespread. Women have described being unknowingly filmed in public and later finding those interactions uploaded to social media, often attracting large audiences and abusive commentary. One woman said she felt “afraid to go out in public” after discovering a video of her had been posted online without her consent. Another described feeling physically sick after a filmed interaction at the gym was shared and quickly gained thousands of views.

In both cases, the women had no indication they were being recorded at the time. And while the videos themselves were distressing, the aftermath - including sexually explicit and derogatory comments - exacerbated the harm. As one woman put it, the most frightening part was how “out of control” the situation felt.

Advocates say this kind of misuse is not unexpected. Rebecca Hitchen, from the End Violence Against Women Coalition, told the BBC that the use of smart glasses in this way is “sadly, very predictable”, pointing to existing patterns of harassment and abuse directed at women and girls online.

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Beyond how the technology is already being used, reports of what could come next are even more worrying. Reporting by The Independent highlights warnings from charities about the potential introduction of facial recognition features in smart glasses - tools that could allow wearers to identify people and access information about them in real time.

Domestic abuse organisations, including Refuge and Women’s Aid, have warned that these features pose a “direct and serious” risk to survivors. Emma Pickering, from Refuge, explains that stalking is already a common tactic used by abusers, and that tech enabling instant identification could make it easier to locate and track victims.

Charities argue that women’s safety should be considered a “foundational principle” in the design of new technologies, rather than something addressed after products are released. Data from Refuge shows a significant increase in cases involving technology-facilitated abuse, confirming a broader trend in how digital tools can be misused.

Taken together, these reports point to a wider issue. While smart glasses and AI-powered devices are often presented as innovative and convenient, their real-world impact depends heavily on how they are used - and misused.

There is, of course, nothing inherently harmful about a device that records video or uses AI to interpret the world. But the experiences being shared suggest that, in practice, these tools are entering an online culture where boundaries around consent and privacy are already blurred.

And that is where the major concern lies.

While companies emphasise safeguards and responsible use, the reality described by women in these reports is one where those safeguards can be bypassed, and where the consequences of misuse fall disproportionately on them.

The technology may be new, but the pattern is not.

It was out of her own personal curiosity that documentary filmmaker Stacey Tenenbaum began working on her project Tough Old Broads.

“I’m heading towards middle age,” she says. “I was wondering what it was about these ladies that allowed them to break barriers, especially in a time where things were even more stacked against women.”

The documentary follows three pioneering women whose work helped reshape the worlds of sport, environmental activism and civil rights: marathon runner Kathrine Switzer, Canadian Inuit activist Siila Watt-Cloutier, and photographer Sharon Farmer. Each became the first woman to achieve something significant in a male-dominated space, and each has continued working for change well into later life.

Stacey initially imagined the film would explore ageism. But as production unfolded, that theme ended up slipping into the background.

“The same thing that allowed these women to be trailblazers has sort of protected them from ageism,” she says. “They just don’t care. They move ahead.”

That attitude and instinct to push forward rather than wait for permission became one of the film’s defining ideas. While age discrimination is definitely real, Stacey found that these women’s long histories of activism and public respect had insulated them from some of its effects.

Stacey began by researching female “firsts”, discovering Switzer through the famous photograph of her being attacked by a race official while running the 1967 Boston Marathon.

“I was looking for trailblazing women who were the first to do something in a man’s world,” she explains. “But I also wanted people with different backgrounds and lived experiences, working in completely different areas.”

It took nearly three years to find the right balance of stories.

Activism had not been her starting point, but all three women turned out to be lifelong campaigners. Kathrine Switzer fought for women’s inclusion in long-distance running, Siila Watt-Cloutier has spent decades advocating for climate justice and Arctic communities, and Sharon Farmer broke barriers as the first Black woman to photograph a sitting US president as Chief Official White House Photographer.

“That was a happy surprise,” Stacey says. “I didn’t go out specifically looking for activists, but that’s what ended up happening.”

In many ways, that coincidence strengthened the project. By following women who had spent decades fighting for change, Tough Old Broads is less about historical milestones and more about endurance - the long, often exhausting work of activism.

“Change is possible,” Stacey says. “But we have to stick to it and keep at it.”

Despite some logistical hurdles, Stacey had some extraordinary experiences from the production. One of her favourite moments involved travelling north to spend time in Arctic communities while filming with Siila Watt-Cloutier.

“It’s such a beautiful place,” she says. “Being welcomed into that community was really special.”

But the most meaningful part of the project, she adds, was the friendships that formed with the three women.

“Getting to know these women so well, that’s the real blessing,” Stacey says. “You don’t get to meet people like that a lot in your life.”

Working on the film also changed her personally. Spending time with lifelong activists reshaped how she thinks about her own role in political and social movements.

“I’ve been radicalised,” she says, only half-joking. “I go to way more protests now than I did before.”

What Tough Old Broads tells us about activism is deliberately broad. Rather than presenting one model for change, the film highlights the different ways people contribute to movements - through public protest, storytelling, advocacy or community leadership.

“Everybody has different skills,” Stacey says. “The idea is to figure out what you care about and what you can bring to creating positive change.”

And it’s this philosophy that shaped the audiences she had in mind while making the film. The first is older viewers, who she hopes will feel encouraged to remain active and engaged in their communities.

“There’s a lot of depression in older communities,” she says. “I wanted people to see that you can still take up space and contribute.”

The second audience is younger people, who she hopes will carry forward the work begun by earlier generations.

“Climate change, civil rights, women’s issues - these aren’t things that will be solved in one generation,” she says. “Young people need to take up the fight where these women leave off.”

Stacey explains that the film’s success isn’t festival recognition but audience response. She recalls screenings where viewers laughed, cried and left the cinema energised by the stories they had just seen.

“People come out wanting to do something themselves,” she says. “That’s what matters.”

The documentary also addresses another issue close to her: the lack of representation for older women in film.

“There’s still a lot of sexism in the industry,” she says. “Women-focused stories don’t get as much attention, and older women get even less screen time.”

Spotlighting these voices was part of the point.

“What you see on screen shows what’s possible,” she says.

Ultimately, Tough Old Broads is less about celebrating the past than about continuing a conversation - one that begins with the question: what can each of us do, in our own communities, to make things better?

Real change rarely begins with grand gestures.

“Sometimes it starts with just one person thinking about what they care about,” she says. “And deciding to keep going.”

You can learn more about Tough Old Broads here.

By Freja Love

Documentary maker Louis Theroux has weighed in on the ‘manosphere’ and it’s as bad, if not worse, than we thought.

In the 90-minute Netflix show, we meet UK-born influencer Harrison Sullivan, better known as HSTikkyTokky, and his close friend Ed Matthews. From the US there’s Myron Gaines, Justin Waller and Nicolas Kenn De Balinthazy, better known as Sneako.

Five men, different platforms, but broadly the same worldview: a messy Venn diagram of beliefs about masculinity, success and women’s place in the world. Most of it, I hope, will shock viewers.

We should all be worried. I have two younger brothers, and after watching this documentary they’re the first people I want to talk to about it. This is what scares me the most.

These men present their opinion as fact. I should have counted the number of times something was described as “the truth” - whether that was advice about making money, how to be “proper boys” (not “these little soy boys or gimps that walk around in the modern day”), how to live “outside the system”, or which conspiracy theories to believe.

One topic they are particularly confident about is women. What we want. What we should be.

(Did any of you get the call because no one asked me?)

According to Myron Gaines, because he “understands” women, he also “knows what’s best for them”

“Better than they do?” Louis asks

“Yes in many ways. That’s how women want it. They want a man who can lead and dominate them”

Cringe.

At one point, standing on a balcony, Justin Waller gestures towards the buildings around him, claiming, “Men build, invent and maintain society, that’s a fact.”

Louis looks unconvinced. “Don’t women do that too?”

Apparently not.

Justin is firm. Women are “by and large looking for husbands and want to have families”.

Another moment comes during Myron Gaines’ late-night livestream. He plays a video of a supposed neuroscientist claiming women “absorb and retain the DNA of every man they’ve been with via the sperm”.

“Ever wonder why a kid resembles an ex more than the father?” the clip asks. “This is usually why.”

(I have never wondered that, personally.)

Louis quickly points out the misinformation, but Myron doubles down, claiming there has been “some scientific data that reflects this”.

I dread to think what other nonsense has been shared as gospel across the thousands of episodes where Louis Theroux was not there to push back.

HSTikkyTokky, who promotes and profits from OnlyFans creators on his Telegram channel of around 500,000 people, repeatedly expresses disgust for women doing the very work he monetises.

“I think she’s disgusting bro. I think she’s absolutely repulsive as a person,” he says about Bonnie Blue. In the same breath he happily shows Louis a video of himself being “sucked off by a girl the night before”.

His latest venture was House of Heat - an OnlyFans content house where adult creators lived together and cross-promoted one another. He boosted their accounts across his own platforms, taking a percentage of the income generated.

He and Ed Matthews also film so-called “cheeky” content rating women at beaches and festivals, looking for girls in “the tartiest outfits”. Ed, who films women without their consent for these videos, also posts “predator sting” content… It feels contradictory.

Elsewhere, Myron invites a group women onto his podcast seemingly for the purpose of humiliating them. Their knowledge, jobs, “body counts” and appearances are all fair game but when they push back - which I’m certain is the point of the segment - they are labelled “pressed”, “triggered”, or told by viewers to “shut the f**k up”, along with a lame insult about their looks.

There is a word for this. It’s gaslighting. And the whole thing is grim.

The most baffling thing, though, is that all of these men insist they love women. Which means they are teaching young people that this is what loving women looks like.

At best it is backwards. At worst it is dangerous. And with two younger brothers navigating the world online, it’s beyond concerning.

The dangerous effects are starting to show. A study recently found that 31% of Gen Z men in their teens and twenties believe “a wife should always obey her husband”. The study’s co-author says social media has played a “huge role” in shifting attitudes worldwide, exposing boys to “shocking levels of misogyny, both online and offline”. Terrifyingly, many young men are simply “mimicking what they see online without really understanding what that actually means”.

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Platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram have all taken action against prominent figures, such as Andrew Tate, who was banned for violating policies on hate speech. But while governments try to keep up with big tech and implement new laws to govern the world online, it can feel like a losing battle.

So what exactly is it about women that these men claim to love?

Not much, it seems.

Across the entire documentary there is barely a single moment where these men describe liking a woman for who she is. The women they speak about exist mainly in terms of what they provide: children, loyalty, domestic labour, sex.

Justin praises his baby mama, Kristen for giving him two children and being open to threesomes. The “lanes they’re in”, he explains, are clear: “she handles diapers and cleaning,” while he “provides”.

That is about as deep as the description goes.

I am not sure whether these men genuinely know nothing about the women in their lives, or whether this really is all they care about. Probably both.

Young women reading this, please, please choose a partner who wants to know - and appreciate - everything about you and likes you for something real. I promise you, they do exist.

Another thing that frightens me is the sheer volume of content people like this are producing. If you are ‘doomscrolling,’ as so many teens and young men are, it would be almost impossible to avoid it entirely - and once you hear something often enough, what stops it starting to sink in?

Research has found social media algorithms amplify extreme content, such as misogynistic posts, which normalises harmful ideologies for young people. In an algorithmic modelling study by UCL, the University of Kent and the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), the level of misogynistic content in the “For You” page of TikTok accounts increased fourfold in just five days on the platform.

The documentary is full of young men approaching the manosphere influencers, shaking their hands, asking for photos, shouting their names and consuming their content. They say young people’s brains are sponges, and these men are lucky for the cognitive plasticity of youth.

HSTikkyTokky insists that 13-15 year olds are not his main demographic, but it does not take much digging to see that younger boys are very much part of the audience. At one point, Justin Waller even congratulates a “13-year-old follower who is making more money than their parents”.

So they know who is watching.

And the reality is that many teenagers probably know more about influencers’ lives and opinions than they do about the people around them, even their own families. Spend enough time on TikTok or Youtube Shorts and those voices start to feel familiar, even authoritative. Before long, the language spreads: boys barking at female teachers, repeating misogynistic phrases, absorbing the idea that there is only one acceptable way to be a man.

The men in the documentary want to make it very clear that they DO NOT CARE what other people think, or how they come across online. But whenever Louis pushes for deeper answers about why they do what they do, the mood shifts. They become cagey.

“Here we go, you’re setting me up…” Justin complains at one point. HS calls him a tw*t.

They hate that Louis Theroux, the investigative journalist, is ‘digging’.

But if they genuinely do not care what people think, how do we hold them accountable?

We can tell young people the content is misleading or harmful. We can warn them not to take it seriously. But if the voices on their screens are louder, more constant and more confident, we may already be fighting a losing battle.

And that is something I find hard to shake.

The documentary itself is compelling - I watched in equal parts fascination and horror - but when it ended I mostly felt sad.

Sad for the young men absorbing this worldview. Sad for my brothers who could have this nonsense pushed to them in feed or have a friend influenced by the dangerous narrative after seeing it too many times online. At least my brothers have me to tell them what’s up.

I’m angry for the young women who will be forced to deal with the dangerous consequences.

And disappointed that, somehow, this is where we are again.

Like many new parents, Lawrence Price and Mat Carter anticipated sleepless nights and logistical chaos when they became fathers. What they did not expect was the emotional and psychological shift that came with it.

Mat experienced postnatal depression during the first year of fatherhood - something he did not even know fathers could experience until later. Around the same time, Lawrence began dealing with severe anxiety for the first time in his life. Years later, when the two compared notes on those early months, they realised something surprising: neither of them had been remotely prepared for what becoming a parent would do to them.

That conversation became the starting point for Secret Life of Dads, a podcast and community project that explores modern fatherhood with curiosity rather than certainty.

“We realised there was very little information or guidance out there to guide dads through this challenging but amazing journey,” Lawrence says. “So we decided to dive into it ourselves.”

What followed was not a neat parenting guide, but a series of conversations. Through interviews with experts, Lawrence and Mat began exploring the science, psychology and social realities of fatherhood - covering everything from neuroscience and evolutionary anthropology to mental health and identity.

Along the way, they discovered something men are rarely told: becoming a father can involve real biological and emotional shifts.

“Dads also go through a number of changes,” Lawrence explains. “There are shifts in identity, social isolation and modern economic pressures that fundamentally change who we are.”

In the early days, Lawrence and Mat were not entirely sure what the podcast would become. Parenting is a vast topic, and at first they were simply trying to figure it out themselves. Slowly, though, a rhythm emerged. Conversations about parental mental health sat alongside discussions of psychology, science and relationships.

“Most of our early growth was actually from mums,” Lawrence says. “They were incredible at validating the mission and sharing the podcast with the men in their lives.”

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At one stage, roughly 75% of listeners were women sending episodes to partners, brothers and friends. Only more recently has the audience shifted towards an even split between men and women.

That dynamic reflects a core belief behind the project: fatherhood conversations are not just for fathers.

“This is a podcast about dads, but for all parents,” Lawrence says. “The strongest relationships are built from understanding each other with compassion and communicating in a healthy, emotionally mature way.”

In other words, understanding dads better is good for everyone.

One of the biggest lessons Lawrence and Mat discovered during the process was that parenting is less about controlling children than about managing yourself.

“It sounds naive looking back,” Lawrence admits, “but we did not realise quite how much parenting would invite us to do the inner work.”

The unpredictable nature of raising children - the emotional swings, the lack of control, the constant learning - forced them to reflect on their own reactions, habits and expectations.

Two years into the project, both say they are different men from the ones who started.

“Yes, it is a public podcast,” Lawrence says. “But most of all it is a very personal journey of growth and self exploration for us.”

The project has also expanded beyond the podcast studio. Today, Secret Life of Dads exists in several different forms.

There is the podcast itself, where guests reflect on everything from their relationships with their own fathers to the experiences that have shaped the kind of parents they have become. Alongside that are street interviews - short conversations with members of the public that get straight to the heart of questions around parenting, identity and modern life.

Then there are the in-person gatherings. One of the most popular, particularly on social media, is the community event Pints and Ponytails.

The activity, in collaboration with Braid Maidens, is for dads to come together to learn how to style their daughters’ hair but what unfolds is something much bigger than that.

What followed, Lawrence says, was one of the most special evenings they have been part of. Fathers compared braiding attempts, helped one another figure out techniques and, perhaps most importantly, spent time talking and connecting in a space that rarely exists for men.

The first meet up was in February 2026 with 10 dads. By the next event, 35 fathers walked through the door.

“It is about honouring our daughters and connecting dads,” Lawrence explains. “But it is also about redefining the role of the modern dad and breaking outdated stereotypes.”

The gatherings create a space where vulnerability and parenting struggles are normal topics of conversation. There is a growing recognition that men often lack these kinds of supportive environments while mothers’ networks are more visible and socially accepted.

And the online response has been incredible:

Projects like Secret Life of Dads are an invitation for men to talk, learn and grow together.

“We see community as being the bedrock of this modern dad’s movement - getting curious dads, who are willing to grow together, in the same room and seeing the enthusiasm and openness to connect has been humbling.”

Lawrence says success isn’t measured in downloads or event attendance.

“We often say it is impossible for us to fail on this project,” he says.

“Success is being able to take what we have learnt home and deepen our relationships,” he says. “If we can show up as better dads for our children, that already feels like a huge win.”

During our interview with the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street, we asked questions about the Violence Against Women and Girls strategy directly from The Female Lead community, including:

• Making misogyny a hate crime in the UK

• The need for men to call each other out for sexism and misogyny

• Investigations into the British men named in the Epstein Files

• What action is being taken to deal with the increase in domestic violence during men’s football matches

• The influence of Andrew Tate on boys and young men

The Prime Minister on the new law which demands tech platforms to detect and remove intimate images shared without consent

“This is really important stuff. You might think that platform providers would want to do it really quickly, but we have to keep pushing.”

“We have to be very tough with platform providers. This is not an area where you can say everything that needs to be done has been done; we’ll be constantly looking at what more we can do. One of the most worrying aspects is the age of some of the victims here, and tragically, the age keeps going down; every time you look at it, it’s gone down a bit and down a bit.”

“I remember being profoundly depressed when I gave up being the chief prosecutor, and there was a piece of research out at the time which showed that the group of young women most at risk of violence were 16-19 year olds in relationships, which really took me aback.”

“We’ve got a government commitment, my personal commitment that we are going to half it [VAWG], which is a really big challenge but one I absolutely intend us to rise to.”

The Prime Minister on Reform’s plans to scrap the Equality Act

“I was really shocked by the news that Reform, the political party, want to tear up the Equality Act. This is an act that goes to our core values, one of which is women should be treated equally with men.”

The Prime Minister on the investigation of British men accused of criminal behaviour in the Epstein files

“We have to start with the victims. And one of the great tragedies of a lot of the coverage and discussion in the last few weeks has been that it hasn’t been focused on the victims. It’s been focused on others. I very strongly believe that all of those that have got any information in relation to Epstein or any of these cases, should come forward and tell the appropriate authorities what they know. And equally, that the law should go wherever the evidence is.”

On influencing boys and young men to disrupt the influence from the likes of Andrew Tate and others

“Firstly, I’m really worried about this. The amount [of misogyny] that is aimed at young boys and men now, Andrew Tate is an example of that. On the one hand, this apparently successful man but coming with absolutely bags of misogyny and young boys look at that, and it’s a confusing world for them. That’s just an example. We need to work doubly hard with our young boys at the moment who are being bombarded with these messages. Much more than in the past.”

The Prime Minister on misogyny in politics

“In politics, there’s a lot of misogyny. You only have to look at the abuse all politicians get and then put it into two categories, men and women, and there’s far more abuse for women than there is for men. I feel like it’s a daily duty to call it [misogyny] out in politics.”

“Why is it that women get so much more abuse than men? It’s not rocket science, but we need to discuss it. Having the discussion is part of the answer.”

“We have to call it out. We have to be clear about our responsibility as well, the way we behave. Constantly checking one’s own behaviour. If you want to change culture, then you have to lead from the top. If people hear you saying you want change but you’re not modelling it, you’re giving license to them.”

Watch the full interview on our YouTube here:

When Kathryn Ferguson’s first drama short Nostalgie (2025) was shortlisted for a BAFTA, it marked a new chapter in a career already defined by fearless storytelling, feminist conviction and emotional precision. Known for her award-winning documentary Nothing Compares, the definitive portrait of Sinéad O’Connor which premiered at Sundance Film Festival 2022, Kathryn’s move into drama feels less like a pivot and more like an expansion to answer the same questions: who controls stories, whose voices are amplified, and what happens when women refuse to be quiet?

“I’m always putting women front and centre,” Kathryn tells The Female Lead without hesitation. “That’s been the through-line of my work for the last 15 years.”

Irish women, rage and revisionist history

Kathryn grew up in Northern Ireland during The Troubles and came of age in an Ireland where women were, in her words, “second-class citizens”. The weight of church and state in the south, the absence of bodily autonomy on both sides of the border, and a culture steeped in shame left a mark.

“I was aware of gender injustice from a very young age,” she says. “And I think Irish women are furious. But honestly, women everywhere are furious.”

That rage, she believes, is not only justified but necessary. She points to the repeal of the Eighth Amendment in Ireland in 2018 overturning a near-total ban on abortion as proof of what happens when anger is shared and mobilised. “Once that genie was out of the bottle, it couldn’t be put back.”

Reclaimed narratives run through all her work. Nothing Compares reframed Sinéad O’Connor not as a ‘difficult’ woman, but as a visionary artist punished for telling the truth too early.

“What happened to Sinéad is happening to women everywhere now,” Ferguson says. “Silencing. Erasure. On a mass scale.”

From documentary truth to dramatic fiction

BAFTA-nominated Nostalgie is Kathryn’s first drama project, adapted from a short story by Belfast writer Wendy Erskine. Set in contemporary Belfast, it centres on an ‘80s pop star who licences his music without interrogating where, or by whom, it will be used.

“On a purely cinematic level, I could just see it,” Kathryn says. “It was so self-contained and visual. But once I sat with it, I realised the themes were exactly where my head already was.”

That headspace was shaped by years immersed in Sinéad O’Connor’s life and legacy. Working so closely with an artist who fiercely protected her work made Kathryn acutely aware of what it means to release art into the world and lose control over it.

“What happens to your work once it’s out there?” she asks. “Once your ‘babies’ go off into the ether, you can’t control how they’re used.”

In Nostalgie, that question plays out against the backdrop of modern Belfast. “There’s this idea that post-conflict cities become cultural destinations,” Kathryn says. “But there’s so much unresolved pain still in the air.”

No film school, no shortcuts

Kathryn’s career path was anything but conventional. She didn’t attend film school, instead studying at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art in London, imagining her future as a writer, war photographer or even a gardener. Film arrived almost accidentally.

Her graduation project included a short film that drew more attention than the magazine she’d spent months producing. “That was the first signal,” Kathryn says. “But I had no idea how to move forward.”

She made work independently, often without budgets, while juggling teaching, lecturing and commercial projects to pay the bills. An early commission by Dazed & Confused magazine with Lady Gaga before global superstardom opened doors, but still didn’t guarantee stability.

Later, a residency at Selfridges making documentaries, music videos and short films proved seismic. “They trusted me,” Kathryn says. “An all-female team just saying: here’s the money, go and explore. That’s where I really learned how to say what I wanted to say.”

Trusting your intuition

If there’s one piece of advice Kathryn has for young women interested in film making it’s this: make your own work.

“No budgets. No commissioners. Just make the thing you want to make,” she says. “The work that cuts through is the work that’s authentic, not the work you think people want to see.”

Kathryn’s candid about the reality of rejection. “There have been so many knocks. There still are.”

Now in her forties, with a six-year-old son and over thirty award nominations internationally, including Emmy, Critics Choice, IDA, and PGA Awards, Kathryn’s also learned the importance of boundaries.

“I work hard in my working hours and then I close the door,” she says. “I didn’t protect my nervous system for a long time. Now I know I have to.”

Women in film

Despite high-profile conversations about equality, Kathryn’s clear about the state of the industry.

“It’s much harder to get films funded if you’re a woman. It’s much harder to be listened to,” she says. “And what’s terrifying is that we’ve gone backwards.”

Recent figures show a sharp drop in women directing major films, a regression she sees as part of a wider patriarchal backlash. “Why would the film industry be any different from the world we’re living in?”

In response, Kathryn’s helping to build community, recently co-founding a peer group of independent UK directors to share experiences, rescources and support. “We’re so siloed. We need to talk, honestly, about what this industry is like.”

And women are at the heart of her future projects too. Kathryn is now developing Matrescence, a feature documentary based on Lucy Jones’ incendiary book about the neurological and political reality of motherhood. Combining hard science with lived experience, the project aims to make the invisible undeniable.

“We’re filming with neuroscientists who can literally show how the female brain changes during motherhood,” Kathryn says. “This isn’t opinion. This is fact.”

There’s also another feature drama in development, again centred on women. Kathryn believes art rooted in integrity, anger and empathy still matters.

“Keep putting women’s stories into the world,” Kathryn says. “Keep raising the vibration. That’s what we do.”

And right now, it feels like exactly what we need.

Christina Lamb has spent more than three decades reporting from wars most people know only through headlines: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine. She has survived moments that, by any reasonable measure, should have killed her.

And yet, when she looks back on her career, it is not the danger that defines it.

“What has affected me far more, is what happens to women,” Christina, chief foreign correspondent for The Sunday Times, tells The Female Lead in an exclusive interview.

Christina’s route into war reporting was almost accidental. At 22, while interning at the Financial Times, she agreed to attend a lunch in place of the Foreign Editor. Seated beside a senior figure from the Pakistan People’s Party, she was asked if she would like to interview Benazir Bhutto [Former Prime Minister of Pakistan], then living in exile in London.

“Of course I said yes,” Christina recalls.

When Christina arrived for the interview, Bhutto had just announced her engagement to Asif Ali Zardari. “Her room was full of bouquets of flowers,” she says. “We got on well, and soon after, Bhutto returned to Pakistan to raise a movement for democracy.” Christina went back to working as a trainee reporter in Birmingham.

Months later, Christina came home to what she describes as “the most beautiful, gold-embossed invitation I had ever seen” – an invitation to Bhutto’s wedding in Pakistan.

She had never been to the country before. What she found there changed the course of her life. “It was like something out of the Arabian Nights,” she says. “So colourful, but also intensely political. I couldn’t imagine going back to work for central TV in Birmingham”

So she handed in her notice and moved to Pakistan. The last story she covered in Birmingham, she notes wryly, was about a man who had turned his car back to front.

Convincing British newsrooms to care about Pakistan was not easy. Afghanistan, however, caught their interest. As conflict intensified between the Mujahideen and Soviet forces, Christina began travelling with fighters across the border, reporting from the front lines.

Since then, she has reported from Angola, Mozambique, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Colombia, and across South America, covering, as she puts it, “most of the wars of the past 20 or 30 years”.

She is matter-of-fact about the risks. Being ambushed, shot at, forced to run for hours under fire – strangely, these are the stories people expect from a war correspondent. Christina recalls one of her closest calls in our most recent episode of In Her Words.

But these are not the experiences that haunt her.

What has stayed with Christina, is how sexual violence is used against women, not as a side-effect of war, but as one of its tools.

“People will always say there has been rape in war, which is true,” she says. “But what I’ve seen is that sexual violence is increasingly being used deliberately as a weapon.”

This is not a controversial claim. It is a documented one. The UN has repeatedly confirmed that sexual violence in conflict is often systematic rather than opportunistic. A tactic, not a by-product. As former UN commander, Patrick Cammaert put it, “it can be more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in an armed conflict”.

“I cannot think of a single war where this has not been the case,” Christina admits.

The scale is difficult to comprehend, partly because the numbers are incomplete by design. In most cases, the data “seriously underestimates the actual numbers of victims, most of whom never report to authorities”.

Even so, estimates suggest that hundreds of thousands of women were raped during the Rwandan genocide, tens of thousands in Bosnia and Sierra Leone, and at least 200,000 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since the mid-1990s.

For Christina, the reality of this violence became impossible to separate from her reporting in 2014, when Boko Haram abducted 276 schoolgirls from Chibok in northern Nigeria. Some escaped. Others were released. More than 80 remain missing over a decade later.

What troubled Christina just as deeply was what happened to the women who returned. Some were raped again by soldiers who were meant to protect them. Many were rejected by their communities, treated as “sullied or brainwashed”.

This pattern repeated itself elsewhere.

In northern Iraq, Isis fighters carried out mass abductions of Yazidi women and girls, selling them in slave markets.

In Myanmar, Rohingya women fleeing military attacks described being “tied to banana trees and gang-raped”.

Some of these women escaped or were “rescued by brave people”, the stories they shared, Christina describes as “some of the most horrific I’ve heard”.

Yet almost no one was held to account.

“You had these situations where women spoke and nothing happened,” Christina explains. “One Yazidi girl messaged me and said, ‘We told our story. What difference did it make?’ I couldn’t answer the question.”

Out of that silence came Christina’s book, Our Bodies, Their Battlefield, which documents sexual violence across modern wars. Since its publication, it has already required multiple updates, expanding to include Ukraine and Palestine-Israel.

“People will no doubt say that Sudan should be in there as well” Christina adds.

What frustrates her most is not a lack of awareness. The laws exist. The resolutions exist. The language is well rehearsed.

“What’s missing,” she says, “is political will. Accountability remains the exception.” Prosecutions are rare. Consequences are rarer still.

There have been times when Christina questions the cost of her work.

“I’m taking risks, I’m putting people at risk. What difference does it make?”

But recently, while speaking with a group of Ukrainian women who had survived sexual violence, Christina was reminded why. They told her that having their experiences recorded mattered.

She recalls one young Yazidi girl who insisted on telling her story despite the pain it caused. Christina offered to stop the interview.

“No,” the girl told her. “I don’t want anyone to be able to say they didn’t know.”

This, ultimately, is what Christina’s work insists upon. That ignorance is no longer accepted. That sexual violence in war is not inevitable. It is strategic. And it continues because the world allows it to.

It’s 2026. The fight for gender equality in the workplace - equal access to opportunities, resources, pay and quashing biases - is exhausting and quite frankly, boringly repetitive. And looking at recent reports, we’re now asking: where have all the women gone?

In an uncomfortable truth, in some of the most influential industries in the UK and globally, women are no longer inching forward and in several cases, they are actively slipping back.

The disappearing act at the top

According to the Financial Times, female barristers made up just 23 per cent of advocates appearing before the UK Supreme Court in 2025, lower than it was in 2009, the year the court was created. Seventeen years on, progress has not just stalled but quietly gone backwards.

Around 40 per cent of barristers in England are women, up from 32 per cent twenty years ago. Law schools are packed with women. But among King’s Counsel (KCs), the elite rank given to the most senior and respected advocates, women now make up less than 15 per cent, down from 26 per cent which is the highest proportion of women advocates in the Supreme Court in history.

This is not just an internal problem for the legal profession. The Supreme Court adjudicates on issues that disproportionately affect women: employment rights, reproductive autonomy, domestic abuse, immigration, healthcare, and family life. When women are absent from the advocacy, perspectives narrow, even when judges themselves are diverse.

Male dominated boardrooms

In the UK’s largest companies, women are losing ground where it matters most: executive authority. While boardroom diversity targets have improved headline numbers, the number of women in executive director roles across FTSE 250 companies has fallen over the past two years. Executive director roles dropped sharply from 2022 to 2024 (an 11% decline) with women now representing only about 12 % of executive positions despite overall board numbers rising.

While women now occupy 43% of roles on company boards and 35.3% of leadership roles across the FTSE companies, up slightly from 34.5% in 2023, female representation in senior decision making positions is lacking.

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According to the Women in the Workplace study by McKinsey and LeanIn.Org published in December 2025, women in the USA remain underrepresented at every level of the corporate pipeline, especially in senior leadership, where they make up just 29 percent of C-suite roles, unchanged from 2024. The report stated women face less career support and fewer opportunities to advance as companies show declining commitment to women’s progress. While women are as dedicated to their careers as men, there is a gap in their desire for promotion.

And globally, women are losing representation in sectors traditionally associated with female employment. Retail, accommodation, food services, consumer services, wholesale and real estate have all seen a decline in women’s share of the workforce.

Who gets to tell the story?

As award season kicks off, it’s a depressing fact that the percentage of women directors of the top films at the North American box office fell to a seven-year low in 2025. According to the latest report, ‘Inclusion In The Director’s Chair’ published in December 2025, the number of women directors of the 100 highest-grossing films of the year dropped nearly 40% year-on-year.

Looking at both gender and race/ethnicity, six directors in 2025 were women of colour (the same as in 2024), marking the first time in the 19-year span that women of colour outnumbered white women directors (three). The report noted that 73% of the top directors were white men.

When women disappear from cultural leadership, stories narrow, perspectives flatten and power quietly recentres men.

Why women leaders disappearing matters

The most dangerous myth of the past decade was that gender equality was inevitable. Clearly that’s not the case. While progress is not linear, we can see representation slipping away.

So when we ask “Where have all the women gone?”, the answer is uncomfortable but clear. They’ve been filtered out by systems that even in 2026 reward sameness, lean into traditional malecentric business boardrooms and biases which refuse to push for gender equality.

We want to see a tide change and support women to get a seat at the table they deserve to be at.

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When Lisa Billard first climbed into a kart at seven years old, she didn’t know any female racing drivers. Motorsport didn’t look like it was for girls. But the moment she sat in the seat, her future was set.

“At first it was something to do with my dad for fun, but I just knew,” she tells The Female Lead via video call at home in France. “That was the place I needed to be for the rest of my life.”

Growing up in Normandy, France, karting began as a hobby to spend time with her dad who loved motorsport. It wasn’t a career plan at that age. But Lisa soon became hooked and her passion and determination took hold.

By the age of eight, Lisa wanted to be a professional racing driver.

Making history aged 12

Motorsport is expensive, complex, and still predominately male. By 12, Lisa had joined the French Junior Karting Championship, becoming the first female driver ever to compete in it. She finished third overall, represented France at the World Championship, and placed second in Italy.

Then, in 2022, she made history again: the first girl to win a race in the championship.

“Everyone was shocked,” she says. “I didn’t even realise I’d won. I didn’t raise my arms, I was still focused on the race. When I got out, people were congratulating me and that’s when it hit.”

Lisa smiles when remembering the day. “I’m proud of 12-year-old me. She didn’t realise that was the moment that should make her future dream to become a professional driver come true.”

The following year, five girls entered the same championship.

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“That made me really proud,” Lisa says. “For two years I was the only girl. Now it’s starting to feel more normal.” The word normal matters. For Lisa, progress is about reaching a point where gender no longer needs to be part of the conversation.

“A driver is a driver,” she says. “When we put the helmet on, we all have the same goal, to be the best.”

The cost of chasing her dream

Behind every win is the reality of funding her passion. Motorsport careers don’t move forward without sponsors, and Lisa is open about how hard that’s been.

“Very quickly we had to look for sponsors to keep going. It was very expensive and I just wanted to become a professional driver. The hardest obstacle is money,” she says. “Every winter, you don’t know if you’ll have the budget to continue. It’s stressful for me, for my parents, for everyone who believes in me. My parents have made a lot of sacrifices for me.”

That uncertainty has shaped her mindset as much as any training programme.

“It taught me to never give up. To take every opportunity and push myself to the limit every time I get the chance to drive.”

At 14, Lisa left home to attend a specialist sports academy, balancing racing with education through school lessons and online learning. She lives away from her family during the week, travelling home by train at weekends.

“It sounds like a sacrifice to leave home at 14,” she says, “but honestly, it doesn’t feel like one. It’s a choice. I love what I do.”

Her parents’ support has been unwavering, and so has that of her younger sister, Juliette, a 10-year-old gymnastics champion. “She’s my biggest fan,” Lisa says. “I’m very grateful.”

Becoming a role model

When Lisa was younger, there were few women to look up to in motorsport. One of her earliest inspirations was a male driver who came from the same karting track and coach in France, proving that it was possible to reach Formula One without vast financial backing.

Later, women like Susie Wolff and Katherine Legge (the first woman to win a Formula 3 race) showed her what sustained excellence at the highest level could look like.

Their advice has stayed with her: ‘If you want something, don’t wait for permission.’

Lisa doesn’t spend energy worrying about what male competitors think - “I don’t really pay attention to what boys think because I focus on my goals” - and instead works on preparation, physical training, and mental resilience, knowing that racing demands peak athleticism, regardless of gender.

“Yes, women sometimes have to work harder physically,” she says. “But we are just as capable.”

Fuel for the future

Lisa became the Women’s Champion at the 2025 French F4 Championship at Le Mans, and the first female to win a race in the French Junior Karting Championship, earning her a Wild Card entry for Round 6 of the F1 ACADEMY season in Singapore.

In 2026, Lisa became the youngest female athlete ever to join the Gatorade roster aged 16, a milestone that still feels surreal.

“It’s a dream come true,” she says. “Sport is my life. To be recognised like that, and to be able to inspire other girls, it’s incredible.”

Gatorade’s elite athlete roster includes WNBA stars Cailtin Clark and A’ja Wilson, tennis champion Serena Willams and Olympic hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. “I’ve been lucky to meet A’ja Wilson on video call, which was very cool. She gave me some advice, like trust yourself in your training, be confident and stay determined,” Lisa says.

At Gatorade’s training camp in Florida in January this year - her first visit to the United States - Lisa took part in advanced sports science testing, strength and conditioning sessions, and nutrition and hydration education.

“For the first time, I had serious advice about recovery,” she says. “In racing, you can lose up to four kilograms in a race. Single-seater racing pushes your body to the limit. Learning how to fuel and recover properly makes such a difference. I’m so excited to take on my first season of F1 ACADEMY with the support of Gatorade behind me.”

When asked if she considers herself a feminist, Lisa’s answer is simple and grounded.

“I want women to have the same rights as men,” she says. “And to be able to dream bigger, and have the same chance to realise their dreams. Things are changing but we still have work to do.”

And for the next generation of female racing drivers - and girls dreaming of being in spaces where they don’t yet see themselves reflected - her message is clear: “If you feel it inside you, don’t wait. Don’t wait for permission. Don’t wait to be perfectly ready, you never will be. Just try. And never give up until you achieve your dream.”

This season, Lisa will race across the world, from Shanghai to Montreal, Silverstone to Las Vegas, chasing podiums and reshaping what the future of motorsport looks like.

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TW: This article contains references to sexual exploitation, self-harm, and suicide.

When Roxy Longworth was just 13, she began receiving messages on social media from an older boy at her school. She was flattered and thought she was being noticed. In reality, Roxy was being groomed.

It began with chatty messages from a 17-year-old boy at her school. He was popular. “Everyone knew who he was, and I was just incredibly flattered,” Roxy tells The Female Lead.

It didn’t take long for the messages to change and take a sinister turn. He began asking her to send photos. When she refused, the response was not acceptance. It was a threat.

He told her that if she didn’t send what he wanted, “he would tell everyone at school that I was frigid and then no one would ever want to speak to me.”

“At the time - I was only 13 - that felt like a genuine threat,” Roxy tells us.

Roxy was coerced into sending intimate images. “I started sending photos in revealing tops or in a bikini.” Each image was met with compliments and praise. “It was this huge high, this rush,” Roxy explains. “I think I became a little addicted to that validation in the evenings.”

Eventually, she stopped. “I just felt too gross and was starting to hate myself.”

Then another message arrived. This time it was from a different boy at her school, also 17, someone she didn’t know. He asked her to send him a new photo. When Roxy ignored the message, he sent her four images he already had of her, shared without her consent by the first boy who groomed her. “That was just when my life imploded around me,” she says.

“I didn’t know this man and he owned me. Those boys controlled me from the very moment I sent that [first] photo,” Roxy tells The Female Lead.

The 17-year-old told her that if she didn’t send him whatever he wanted, he would send the photos around the school. “That was not an option,” Roxy says. She blocked him everywhere and waited.

When the images began to spread throughout the school, the emotional impact was overwhelming. “I just felt so small and guilty, and I felt so much shame,” she told us. “I thought my life was over and it was my fault.”

When the school became aware of what had happened, they punished Roxy, and not the boys. “I didn’t question when they didn’t contact the police.”

Roxy’s mental health deteriorated rapidly. “I started self-harming because I really believed that I needed to be punished more, that I had done this terrible thing,” she explains.

She stopped sleeping because of nightmares and tried to keep herself awake. Roxy began hearing voices and was eventually hospitalised, experiencing a psychotic episode, spending several months on suicide watch.

Roxy’s mum later became a critical source of support, staying with her constantly during her recovery. As the images circulated, her friends stopped speaking to her, and she was subjected to bullying.

Roxy survived that period of her life and returned to school, but withdrew socially and focused on her studies.

She later began campaigning with the NSPCC as an ambassador. “I was frustrated that people were not going directly to young people and hearing what their experiences were growing up online,” she says.

That frustration led Roxy to create Behind Our Screens, a platform designed to help young people talk openly about online harm. “Just to get young people talking about this stuff openly without the stigma, without the shame,” she explains. “That it could be a normal conversation, and you can go and ask for help without it ruining your life.”

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For Roxy, prevention must focus on those who cause harm, not those who are harmed. “Education is so important,” she says, “because there needs to be education to the person asking for the photos, which is regularly boys, about the impact that can have on the person on the other side of that phone.”

Her story shows how easily a child can be coerced, how quickly images are shared, that sadly, the victim can internalise shame, and how institutions fail to protect those most at risk.

Roxy is sharing her experience as the UK Government announces new measures to tackle image-based abuse and the use of AI ‘nudification’ tools, as part of its wider strategy to address violence against women and girls.

And she’s welcomed recent commitments to ban ‘nudification’ apps and strengthen device-level protections, saying that if safeguards like these had existed when she was 13, “my life would have been completely different.”

Find out more about Behind Our Screens here.

If you or someone you know, has been affected by any of the issues raised in this article, help is available. In the UK, you can text SHOUT to 85258 for free, confidential support 24/7, or contact Samaritans on 116 123.

Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok is facing international scrutiny after it emerged that men have been using the tool to generate sexually explicit images of women and girls without their consent. Campaigners say it lays bare how quickly new technology can be weaponised against women, prompting the UK communications regulator Ofcom to make “urgent contact” with X and its parent company, xAI, to question what legal and safeguarding steps have been taken – and why they weren’t in place to begin with.

The controversy follows a December update to Grok, which made it easier for users to upload photographs and request alterations. While Grok doesn’t technically permit full nudity, it has repeatedly complied with prompts asking for women’s clothing to be removed or altered, placing them in revealing underwear or sexually suggestive poses. According to reporting by the Guardian, the feature was rapidly exploited, with a significant proportion of @Grok mentions linked to image-generation requests using terms such as “remove”, “bikini” and “clothing”.

Women soon began discovering manipulated images of themselves circulating on X. Many described the experience as ‘deeply violating’, regardless of whether the images depicted full nudity. Some images appeared to show women stripped to their underwear, while others included degrading sexual elements. In some cases, images of children were also altered.

For Jess Davies – presenter, author and podcast host – what is unfolding feels like a grim escalation of a problem she has been tracking for years. Her and others work with Glamour have closely followed Grok’s impact on women’s online safety, reporting on earlier controversies involving the chatbot, from bodyshaming and rating women’s appearances to its creation of so-called ‘semen images’.

Jess has been tracking explicit deepfakes since 2021 and says AI ‘nudification’ tools have steadily become more sophisticated, allowing users to select a victim’s age, body shape and intimate details. While she was already aware of Grok being used to create fake semen imagery last year, seeing the harm “unfold en masse” on a mainstream platform with more than half a billion users marked a dangerous escalation. She describes the enthusiasm with which users exploited the feature as “a depressing reflection of how deep-rooted misogyny is in our society”.

And for those who say that AI images are harmless because they’re ‘not real’? Talking exclusively to The Female Lead, Jess tells us this misses the point entirely. “The images themselves may be artificial, but the trauma response of having your consent, control and bodily autonomy taken from you is very real,” she says.

Jess believes the behaviour is fundamentally about power, that sexual objectification has long been used to shame and silence women, and that this wave of abuse sits within a broader cultural backlash. “It is no coincidence this is happening at a time when women are making ground towards equality,” she says. “Sexually objectifying us is the oldest trick in the book. This is a power tactic.”

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That power dynamic became personal when Jess herself was targeted. After speaking publicly about the harm caused by Grok, users prompted the chatbot to generate images of her without clothes, including fake semen imagery. For her, the intent was unmistakable. “It was a direct response to me saying ‘this isn’t okay’,” Jess says. “It’s men saying, ‘how dare you put a mirror to our face’.” She draws a clear line between this and more familiar forms of online abuse, from harassment to rape threats, arguing that AI has simply handed misogynistic men another weapon.

The fact that this abuse is happening through a mainstream, publicly available AI tool is, Jess says, particularly damning. She contrasts government attempts to criminalise nudification tools with what she sees as a permissive culture at X. “When the richest man in the world signals that this is acceptable, it normalises harm,” Jess says. “This isn’t normal. It’s predatory, abusive and exploitative.”

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Other women have reported similar abuse. Metro reported that Evie Smith, 22, had her image sexualised by Grok more than 100 times after trolls exploited loopholes such as requests for a “see-through bikini”. Another report by the same outlet found that two UK Cabinet ministers were targeted after Grok was prompted to generate bikini images of them within minutes. A government source described the incidents as “deeply disturbing”, saying Ofcom was right to be acting urgently.

The issue has raised particular alarm where children are concerned. AOL reported that Grok had been used to generate sexualised images of minors, including 14-year-old Stranger Things actor Nell Fisher. In response, Grok’s official account acknowledged “isolated cases” where safeguards had failed, saying it was urgently fixing the problem and reiterating that child sexual abuse material is illegal.

In the UK, Ofcom has confirmed it made urgent contact with X and xAI to establish how they are complying with their legal duties to protect users, and said it would assess whether a formal investigation is required. The European Commission has also said it is “very seriously” examining complaints about Grok’s use.

X has said the issues stem from “lapses in safeguards” that are being fixed, and that users who generate non-consensual sexualised images will be suspended. It recently warned users not to use Grok to generate illegal content, including child sexual abuse material, with Musk adding that anyone who prompts the AI to create illegal images would face the same consequences as if they had uploaded them themselves. Critics, however, say the response falls short, pointing to how easily users continue to bypass restrictions. Musk has also been criticised for publicly treating the image-generation trend as a joke, sharing AI-generated images of inanimate objects and public figures in bikinis while women report feeling violated.

Jess is scathing about the response. “They have the money, the means and the capacity to change this,” she says, accusing Musk of prioritising notoriety over user safety. “For someone who likes to paint himself as such an alpha, it’s pretty loser behaviour for Elon to allow an AI chatbot to remove women’s clothes for ‘lols’.”

Meaningful action, she argues, would include immediate guardrails to prevent the creation of intimate images, an option for users to opt out of Grok altogether, and regulators using their powers to fine platforms for the harm caused. Jess also calls for urgent enforcement of legislation passed last year to criminalise the creation and request of non-consensual intimate images, provisions that have yet to be implemented.

“This isn’t just what happens to women online,” Jess says. “It’s misogyny by design. And we can demand better.”

And in case anyone was worried, X’s solution (as of today) appears to be limiting Grok’s image-editing tools to paying users only – so don’t worry, the ability to undress women without consent hasn’t gone away, it’s just now a premium feature.

Most recently, Sir Keir Starmer has spoken out on the Grok scandal, warning that Elon Musk’s X could face the full force of the UK’s Online Safety laws. He said Ofcom has been asked to explore “all options,” including heavy fines or even banning access to the platform, and described the AI-generated sexualised images as “disgraceful” and “unlawful.” Downing Street has also raised the matter directly with X, with Starmer insisting the company must act to remove illegal content or face serious consequences.

This story is still unfolding.