2.3 The concussed female brain

If you ask any woman whether she’s happy with her contraception, chances are she’ll say no - but that she’s settled for the best of a bad bunch. In this episode, Caroline asks why our options are stuck in the 1960s. We take a deep dive into the history of family planning; we investigate the hurdles standing in the way of progress; and we uncover some ground-breaking forms of contraception that could one day be coming to a clinic near you. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Caroline is sent photos of women’s toilet queues on an almost daily basis, since writing in her book Invisible Women about how women’s queues are always longer than the men’s. In this episode, she investigates the history of public conveniences, what impact they have on women’s participation in society and why councils and businesses seem unable to get it right. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In October 1975, the women of Iceland took a 'day off', leading to national chaos. It highlighted the importance of women’s roles in the economy, of which unpaid care work - cooking, cleaning, caring for family - is a vital part. In this episode, Caroline asks whether the Covid pandemic could be the shock we need to finally fix perhaps the greatest gender data gap of all. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The standard piano keyboard is too big for 87% of women and 25% of men, limiting the range of pieces they can play. But how did pianos end up this size? Is it time we came up with an alternative? The Visible Women team investigates. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that periods are terrifying. Well, men have certainly seemed to think so. All the way back to Roman times, the male chroniclers of the human condition have agreed on one thing: menstruation is unseemly, ungodly and just plain horrible. The resulting taboo means we know really very little about periods, with obvious knock-on consequences for women’s health. Now, researchers are investigating the healing powers of period blood, and how it could hold the key to developing treatments for conditions like endometriosis. In this episode, the Visible Women team asks: what could we gain from breaking the taboo over periods. Subscribe to Tortoise on Apple Podcasts, or join Tortoise as a member to get this, plus even more content and invites to exclusive newsroom events with the code Caroline50. Visit tortoisemedia.com/Caroline Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.