216. Penny East

0:02This is a Global Player original podcast. I was interviewed by a male journalist. That was his first question was, why do we need the forces society anymore? Why do we need women's organisations? It's done. You've done it. And it just feels so kind of discombobulating because actually, if you look at the stats and you look at the evidence of what's happening, not only is it not done, but in lots of ways, things are unfortunately going in the wrong direction. because medical research is so skewed to men so for example with a heart attack uh you often will think that a symptom of that would be say a sharp pain and all the rest of it but actually the most common symptom for women is nausea before they have a heart attack yeah and it's just completely kind of so when you god i didn't know that thank you that is such a public service it's announcement penny but to your point about kind of this pushback for men there's such a positive reaction on things like instagram and then i went on twitter or x or whatever it's called nowadays and there were all these men saying what kind of man wants more than two weeks with his baby

1:20Penny East is the newish Chief Executive of the Fawcett Society the UK's foremost campaigning charity for women's rights that campaigns against misogyny since 1866 it supports women on many issues we can we'll go over a lot of them including the more topical ones like pregnancy discrimination fgm domestic abuse as well as the kind of normal run of equality pay and pain equality which i know you want to get into penny's a seasoned charity boss and campaigner who helped shape the domestic abuse bill in 2021 she also launched the uk's first domestic abuse perpetrator program and she has my brief tells me also held senior roles in mental health international development and other major public campaigns including working with the un refugee council comic relief london 2012 olympic legacy team and more she's also a claw social fellow specializing in gender equality and this is the bit that i kind of got my attention yeah you hold an ma in investigative journalism Yes, I do.

2:28So listen, before we get on to the Faucet Society, a bit more about you. Where have you actually, leaving that biography aside, because everyone knows all that now, what don't they know about you? Gosh, what don't they know about me? Well, the bit about the investigative journalist, I absolutely started wanting to be a journalist. Went to City University, did an MA in investigative journalism after going to LSE, and was absolutely committed to that. it was around I must have done that in 2007 and then the recession hit in 2008 and I found myself using my journalistic degree by I think I uh was a Santa's little elf once I did market research I mean I worked in every single bar you can think of in Soho could not find a job in journalism for love nor money um did do a little bit of uh freelance journalistic work for a bit but then soon started working for kind of non-profits and charities doing research so what a shame I mean If you were going to do a long form series of some of an investigation now and somebody said to you, I'm going to pay you a full salary to investigate this.

3:34Would you have an idea of what you wanted to do? Well, actually, we think there's a few themes that force it that we think you're doing. And one of them I'm particularly interested in, which if someone was saying, here's a full salary, go and look into this, would definitely be about the future of the labour market for women in terms of things like the gig economy, in terms of things like OnlyFans. So the fact that there is kind of technology is encouraging women to make money, not in the kind of traditional employment routes, but instead on kind of platform economy basis. So things like cleaning apps where you set your own hours or indeed kind of obviously sexualised apps like OnlyFans, where it's kind of being sold to women and girls as be your own boss, set your own hours, make your own money, don't give in to the man, you know, hustle, hustle, hustle.

4:23But actually, obviously, there's deeply kind of exploitative and coercive elements to that. Obviously, very clearly with things like OnlyFans, but also with some of these other apps. Well, hold on. I've done stuff on OnlyFans and it's supposed to be empowering. Women are supposed to be taking control of their sexuality, controlling the content, only revealing as much as they want to to those who want to view it and pay. so what what's the objection to it well it's not an objection in terms of a whole obviously women definitely are free to uh use their bodies in the way that they please but i think that that is very few money very few women make serious money from it most women are making hardly any money whatsoever and actually there is evidence that there is coercive elements to it in terms of um you see uh evidence of men unfortunately using apps to coerce like tiktok and snapchat to coerce girls and women into starting OnlyFans accounts.

5:17Oh, I didn't know that. So, of course, it's just one of those elements. Please do that. Yeah. I'd definitely report on that. Yeah. So I think there's also elements as well in terms of employment status as well. So broadly on, obviously, a lot of the kind of gig economy has been focused on very masculine type roles, like being an Uber driver or a delivery driver. But actually, in the gig economy, there's things like there's cleaning apps where women are self-employed. and again set their own hours etc all the kind of empowering good sounding stuff but actually if you look into it if you're self-employed you are not protected in the way that you are employed and it's just a very gray murky area about things that are kind of being sold as liberating but possibly not as liberating as they might seem do you you've you've obviously got a social conscience because of the work you've done and but you've also said that you know you You failed to get a job in journalism, so you went into the charity sector.

6:10So has your social conscience been forced upon you or was it always present? Yeah, I was very, very honest in the beginning. Failed journalist. No, I think it has always been that. I mean, certainly women's rights has been something that I have had from a very young age. Like, I don't have any memory of not being interested in it. I had an older sister who had, you know, lent me Germaine Greer books from a very young age. So it was very kind of in me. And you read The Female Unit? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I remember, you know, all these magazines that were in the kind of late 90s and early noughties when I was growing up, being very against them and talking about them at school and talking about them in college.

6:52And so, yeah, it's very much been in me the whole time. And tell me about your parents. I mean, did you have a good relationship with your father? that this is a very, very important relationship to make women feel they can do anything, basically. Did you have one of those dads? Yes, definitely. Yes, I did, in terms of encouraging me career-wise. I think there was a lot of importance put on careers, not necessarily in terms of social good, but that you needed to want to do something. You needed to decide what you wanted to do. And then really go for it. And that you should have the confidence to go for it.

7:31But I definitely don't think that they, either my mum or dad, with those parents that are kind of, what's the word? Aspirational? Well, no, aspiration. They were aspirational, but they weren't like, you can do anything. You know, sometimes some parents nowadays are like, you can do whatever you want. The world is yours. I think they were slightly more realistic than that. So very quickly, tell us your age. You've told us that you went to LSE and then City. Yeah. Where did you grow up? In what kind of family? Okay, so I grew up... Actually, my mum and dad moved around a lot, but not very adventurous.

8:10Why was that? I don't know. What? Were they nomads or gypsies? No, I mean, when I say they moved around, it was mainly in the area of Reading. So we're not... Okay, I know. So we're not talking, like, around the world. Right. um but no my mum really uh I think that kind of desire of oh if we move house if we move somewhere else we move schools we move jobs start again that feeling of you know kind of we'll start somewhere new um so I moved around a lot um but we did go to Yorkshire for a bit when I was 10 but that only lasted for about 18 months and then we moved back down to Reading yeah so I think I'd lived in like about 18 houses by the time I was 18.

8:48This is unusual. Yeah it is unusual yeah that is an unusual part of me growing up and then my brother and sister uh I have a brother and sister but they're much older so they had moved out by the time I was kind of eight or nine so yeah did it was I mean I moved around a lot as well um and I remember never really making bothering to make friends at schools because I knew that you'd leave them and you'd have to go make a bunch of new friends so I we became a very tight little gang but you couldn't do that because you had older siblings yeah yeah I sometimes struggle to make friends at school but also I think it made me quite adaptable I think must have gone to six or seven schools so I got the kind of gift of the gap like you certainly have how to make friends quickly the forces society I should say immediately I feel I have a personal fondness and connection with although it's probably quite tenuous because my mother's maiden name was Fawcett okay and I'm a distant descendant of Millicent Fawcett, the suffragist after whom the society is named.

9:54And actually on the tube, I was thinking, I wish my mother had called me Rachel Fawcett Johnson in the way that my, you know, my nieces are called Johnson Wheeler rather than just Johnson. Yeah. Because it's a very storied name when it comes to human rights, not just women's rights, human rights. and also it is the most famous society that promotes women's rights too. You've only been in this job a year. Why did you aim for it and what do you want to get out of it? So I worked in domestic abuse for quite a few years, as you said, kind of looking at things like the domestic abuse bill. And certainly I felt that when I was there, there was a push sometimes to remove the gendered aspect of domestic abuse in a kind of effort to be inclusive there sometimes felt like a pressure kind of public pressure to talk about it as if it was a non-gendered crime whether of course it men of course can be victims and women can be victims but there is absolutely a gendered element to it yes I mean can we just give the statistical background to that in terms of crime it's sort of 90 something percent of sexual or domestic abuse is is carried out by men against women exactly carried and one in four women will experience some sort of domestic abuse in their lifetime um and there are many men who experience domestic abuse but it is often of a lower risk um category um and so the kind of root cause of domestic abuse which is often misogyny and a kind of belief that a man has a right to control a woman in some way um that was always an area of real interest to me and so then when i saw the job at forcet because forcet is kind of focused on that root cause so it's got such a broad strategy whether it's talking about women's health whether it's talking about women's pay um the the kind of overview is very very broad but the the root cause is structural misogyny which will show up whether you're talking to your doctor whether you're talking whether it's your own husband whether it's your boss yeah that feeling of being treated as lesser than is is what we're interested in you've raised two really interesting things already one this the the male anger and the root cause root causes of male domestic or sexual abuse being the sense of entitlement which were enshrined in the in the marriage vows not so long ago by a love honor and obey and the man didn't say that and also the male anger about being called out on this and the way they say it's not just men who abuse and it's not obviously we all agree it's not all men can you say a bit more about that that even when you try and improve the lot of women there is pushback there is a backlash yes certainly i mean i think that that comes up a lot you see a lot on social media a lot of that kind of male pushback on social media when often women are just speaking on their own terms and sometimes the rage from certain men about things that seem pretty middle of the road pretty safe i remember i'm going to forget her name now but there's was a campaign in scotland who was doing a lot of work about getting sanitary products into toilets and schools and that is a kind of non-controversial you know she's not down with men she's just something that she's spotted that her school friends need and death threats rape threats you know what yeah that level of rage about things that are seen as somehow confrontational to men but are actually just positive changes that are improving the lives of women um and you really really do see it Obviously, I mean, it is a point that's been obviously discussed at length over many years, but, you know, that social media has such a role in driving that.

13:54I mean, you saw it with the Grok story at the beginning of the year of when there is the tools to do it and others are doing it. This was people being put in bikinis or undressed. Yeah. Women being put in. It kind of just makes it permissible and it snowballs. Yeah.

14:16The other aspect to all this is the anti-DEI movement. Yeah. And also the assault on reproductive rights in the Republican states, in the red states, which have elected maybe to criminalise abortion after six weeks before many women even know they're pregnant. So the fact that the Faucet Society, the work is still so important. Do you ever feel that the battles are won or do we have to keep fighting the same battles? When I first took the job, it was actually around Millicent Fawcett's birthday. And there was a kind of local, well, not local, but a small news feature on it. I was interviewed by a male journalist.

15:04That was his first question was, why do we need the Fawcett Society anymore? Why do we need women's organizations? It's done. You've done it. and I think he used Rachel Rees being chancellor as like the example of you know come on and it just feels so kind of discombobulating because actually if you look at the stats and you look at the evidence of what's happening not only is it not done but in lots of ways things are unfortunately going in the wrong direction I mean well they I mean in most Muslim majority countries they are I mean Afghanistan we might come to and people would say probably to you why do we need a forces society here when women have all the rights they need by law, whereas in Afghanistan or Saudi or Iran or Iraq, where children are being married off at eight or nine, you know, they really don't have any advocacy at all.

15:57Why are you kind of redundant here? So what would be your answer to that? I mean, I think on a few things. I mean, firstly, on kind of women's health outcomes, which are much worse than men's health outcomes. and there's kind of lots of evidence around medical misogyny being a cause a cool drive especially amongst um women of color yes absolutely um and that kind of intersection between different identities and as you say women of color their health outcomes particularly maternity services are shocking um but also broader than that kind of much uh delayed diagnosis time for example their pain being dismissed quite regularly so there's a whole kind of area around women's health but also if you listen to teenage girls and their experiences now in the uk the level of kind of abuse and um uh yeah things like um violent pornography and that kind of thing that they are being exposed to from a very young age as i say it feels like in a lot of ways it's going in the wrong direction when you hear stories from younger women particularly about the expectations on what they look like in terms of their expectations about where they get their sense of value and their sense of worth.

17:05When I think about me being a teenager and reading the Germaine Greer books and all the rest of it, it feels unfortunately like we might be going in the wrong direction in terms of some of those very restrictive gendered ideas of what a girl or a woman is. Or what a girl and a woman wants from sex. I mean, you said violent pornography. I mean, I've been reading research which, you know, sets out in shocking detail the fact that choking, spitting, all these kind of anal sex are, girls think they have to do it because they've seen it in porn. Is this an area that the forces society could actually do something about?

17:45Yes, absolutely. So we are looking at that, particularly in terms of, as you say, kind of violent pornography. And there is effort in government to bring in some safeguards and some legislation to tackle some of those things. Also, we do a lot of work on looking at the relationship of AI and gender as well. because AI is also a huge kind of area of harm for women and girls in things like pornography. It's kind of AI, deepfake pornography, where even where women haven't consented, if you have a photograph, then you can use it to do whatever you want with it. And again, the legislation just isn't catching up to that.

18:19And to publish it. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. So there's a lot of kind of areas of AI in particular that we're really concerned about. And again, going back to kind of women's health, actually, seeing women and girls using ai chatbots like chat gbt and places like that to get health advice when actually we know that the data sets that those bots are based on has already got a bias embedded within it so because medical research is so skewed to men so for example with a heart attack uh you often will think that a symptom of that would be say a sharp pain and all the rest of it but actually the most common symptom for women is nausea before they have a heart attack yeah and it's just completely kind of so when you the god i didn't know that thank you that is such a public service announcement penny so when you look at these kind of ai generated uh the ai platforms they're just basing their advice on where they can find the most information so if they can find they're only as good as the information that's feeding them right and then they become the bias gets embedded within it so things like nausea being a symptom of heart attack and women but gets kind of lost in the data.

19:26Your latest focus is on medical misogyny and you've done this study on the gender pain gap. Can you just tell us a bit more about that, Penny? So the gender pain gap is essentially a kind of analysis of the fact that women's pain, often in health settings, is dismissed. There's new research actually that's come out from Neurofen that says one in two women find that their pain is dismissed by either a health practitioner or an employer and that they don't get the response that they want. And then that pushes women to going to things like AI in order to get the support they need because they can't get the information from health practitioners.

20:02And actually, when you look at young women, it's more like three quarters of young women have reported that they don't get their pain. They don't get the response they want, that kind of empathetic, compassionate response that gives them the time to talk about their experiences, to talk about the pain that they're experiencing. So we're really looking at that kind of medical misogyny and how the impact on women's health outcomes, but also their confidence in the health system to keep going back there is one of our key priorities at Fawcett. We've talked a bit about the gender pain gap. I don't think, I mean, we know the gender pay gap still exists.

20:37I mean, you've come in, you've been doing this job for a year. You wrote an interesting blog, which I think started the last few weeks have been exhausting. That's an opening line that we could use almost any time, any week. What are your most urgent priorities as Chief Executive of Fawcett Society? Well, certainly as I speak, AI is an absolutely huge one. I think one of the other ones is around political representation. So obviously in the last general election, we saw the most female MPs that we've seen ever. We have real concerns, again, that that's going backwards in the local elections we've just been, the fewer women candidates standing than in previous local elections.

21:25And that feeds into kind of things like abuse online and women being discouraged from speaking out in the way that possibly they had done. And so that kind of affect the fewer women taking office, whether it's in local government as councillors or whether it's as MPs, then you just don't get that perspective when it comes to policymaking and not having women in the room is a huge problem. So that's another priority. and then as you say women's health absolutely is up there that there's the women's health strategy that just got refreshed refreshed redone whatever they want to call it um and that was published a few weeks ago and that we were really pleased to see an explicit focus on medical misogyny in there but obviously with all government strategies it sounds good but will it be implemented well Jess Phillips just resigned from government she was minister for health guarding safeguarding and And for women, I think violence against women and girls with a stinging rebuke to Keir Starmer's effectiveness in this area.

22:24What was your reaction to Jess Phillips resignation and her accusations? Well, I certainly think that Jess Phillips is a loss. I do think that she lost her government and lost her kind of policymaking around violence against women and girls. She understands this stuff in her soul. I really do think that. but in terms of my reflections on that letter it's deeply concerning I mean the government's level of ambition around violence against women and girls was great I mean halving violence against women and girls what a great objective I think what we worried about in the sector was what baseline are you starting from that from how do you define it how are you measuring it and all of that stuff feels really unclear so again it's one of those things that sounds good on paper it's very nebulous isn't it yeah yeah Yeah.

23:10And then the violence against women and girls strategy, obviously, there was a delay on that. You know, we were waiting for many months for that. Yeah. And she said that Keir had prevaricated and prevaricated over kind of green lighting a very simple change that would protect women from, I think, online, the publication of images or something like that. Yeah. What was it? Yeah. So it was around the technology that she was saying that there could be technology on phones to stop children in particular. sharing inappropriate images of themselves so there's I think with all of this stuff particularly around online safety there are very loud voices around freedom of speech and around kind of personal freedoms and personal liberties but particularly around children and young people I find it very difficult to have any much sympathy with that I mean we have been living with age restrictions I mean you can you know that we've been living with things like films You can't go and see a film.

24:07You can't go and see The Exorcist when you're 11. Like we have decided as a society that we have a duty of care to protect children from seeing things that they shouldn't be seeing. And yet sometimes when you talk about safety online, everyone says, oh, individual liberty. You just think the adult side, there's a discussion to be had. But when it comes to protecting children from seeing or doing things at a very young age, I find the kind of personal liberty argument quite hard to. Do you think that's why she resigned? Because there were measures that could be taken quite easily to protect children, women and girls that the government was not taking?

24:41Or do you think it was more of, I mean, you may, you don't have to answer this. Or do you think it was more of a political statement? I mean possibly a bit of both I mean the thing is with political resignations is you obviously you can resign quietly can't you because you want to move away and because the music means that you want to resign or you can make a statement in your letter and say something slightly more exposing but I don't think you can resign without saying why yeah you can resign but you can keep it brief so I have lost faith in the Prime Minister or whatever it might be but by using a tangible example like that she was kind of feeding more information to the media than she possibly had.

25:16So there must have been a purpose to that.

25:24The other thing that you've been asked about recently is whether there should be a minister for boys and women. I mean, Jess Phillips has now resigned as safeguarding minister. Why shouldn't there be a minister for boys and men? I mean, not boys and women. That would be interesting.

25:42I mean I'm actually we are completely supportive of the idea of a minister for boys I mean we are a women and girls charity and we get a lot of people saying why don't you care about this and what about all that stuff and you just think you don't go to the RSPCA and say why don't you care about this we are allowed to care about women and girls so in terms of there being a minister for men and boys supportive of the idea because to be quite frank a lot of the problems that women and girls are facing is because of men and boys. I mean if not all of them. If not all of them. So yeah certainly a minister looking at things like male mental health, male loneliness, toxic masculinity, lack of positive male role models, all of that stuff is all jolly good stuff that will ultimately make the lives of women and girls better.

26:30Yeah and also get them early, you know the lack of father figures, the lack of male role models all of that you know we get the young generation teach them yep start so early I mean I have two boys at home who are seven and five and my seven-year-old is already talking about whether he's looks strong enough oh come on and I don't even know where that's coming from because he's definitely not watching videos about that but even things like video games or anything like it's my lord he's talking about muscles and he's talking about you know I've heard about do you know something I've lit so what you mentioned it I've just heard of something called bigorexia have you heard of bigger x here it's about men who are addicted to you know okay yeah to getting shredded and and pumping pumped and and building up muscle yeah you've huel and oh right you know that's yeah it's like weird it's so men do have their shit as well yeah they do they really do unfortunately some men choose to then take that out on the women in their lives and again it doesn't feel like it's going in the right direction around like so it feels like a bit of a pendulum doesn't it that there's a kind of push back against as you say dei or however you want to say this kind of and and then it suddenly pushes all the way that i would say that for younger people what they're being fed feels like gendered ideals on steroids quite like yeah like kind of trad wife the trad wife stuff or women being very very overtly sexualized or lying and as you say men having this idea which is obviously all the kind of manosphere stuff about being a strong and a tough and a provider it all just feels it's interesting that a night generalizations are invidious but it seems to me that gender equality is not regarded by a lot of the male sex as a zero as a as a positive yeah it's a kind of zero-sum game if women win they lose and actually helen lewis has done an interesting cover story in um the atlantic i think it is about the masculinization of politics from sort of Andrew Tate to MAGA, which is essentially telling men and boys that they've got to be, that the world has moved too much towards the feminine sphere with DEI or, you know, women on boards or women in leadership roles.

28:48And they have, you know, the way, they have to counter it. And that's why Andrew Tate has become very popular. That's why, you know, you'll see Elon Musk wanting to repopulate the world with his siege. You know, it's a kind of reaction. to the fact that women have kind of got somewhere. They've still got a long way to go. Yeah, completely. I mean, one of the other things we're pushing for at Fawcett is the government released a consultation last year on parental leave and reforming the parental leave system. And one of those suggestions was extending paternity leave from two weeks as a kind of statutory minimum to six weeks so that fathers can be involved in their baby's life a lot more I mean obviously two weeks I mean I was still in hospital after two weeks so it's kind of six weeks as a bare minimum for men anyway so we've been pushing this pushing pushing this there's lots of campaigners on this and there was actually quite a lot of coverage about it last weekend because there was a kind of I wouldn't say protest a rally at parliament square about it but to your point about kind of this pushback for men there's such a positive reaction on things like instagram and then I went on twitter or x or whatever it's called nowadays and there were all these men saying what kind of man wants more than two weeks with his baby uh proper men need to get back into the office and start providing again yeah and again that feels like such a kind of gentle non-controversial thing it's not saying oh all of a sudden dad's kind of every dad needs to wander around with those uh straps on them and pretending to breastfeed and all these it's just literally saying six weeks at home with a new baby to me it feels really uncontroversial but there are men out there who see it as a kind of threat or an insult to their masculinity to want that to want to that six weeks well i mean the truth is is that the uptake of paternity leave even if it's statutory is still pitifully low because i think men feel it's not masculine to take paternity leave yeah we've got to the point in the podcast where you tell everyone when when have you had to be most difficult or when when has been your most difficult time um i offer a choice because so many women sat where you're sitting and say you know it was when their mother was dying and they were you know trying to work and bring up children yeah which is such a common theme yeah um but it's it can be something completely different you know because we have all very very varied and eventful lives so yeah what was what would you like to share I think in terms of difficulty I would say you know probably one of the most difficult times of my life was definitely my second pregnancy I was pregnant with twins and very sadly lost one of those twins very late in pregnancy and that was an incredibly difficult time because obviously it's an incredibly difficult thing to lose a baby very late in pregnancy but also it was during covid that first year of covid within the nhs so not only have you got kind of poor maternity services anyway they don't have the resources they need plus covid plus losing a baby plus the other twin survived and here's my son which is wonderful but there was so many bits of that i remember when i found out a very late scan that the one of the boys one of the boy twins wasn't you know his heart wasn't beating anymore and they took me out and they put me in this kind of strange part of the waiting room where all the other women were waiting to get their baby scans and I was bawling my eyes out in shock completely by myself because my husband wasn't allowed with me because it was covid and I just now I reflect obviously I wasn't thinking of this at the time I was just distraught but now I reflect I think about there's so many things in in the health service that they could do better in terms of women's health because they put me back in the waiting room with all these women that were waiting to go to a scan poor women listening to me bawling my eyes out it's like going to an operation and you see someone with her foot chopped off or something outside you know it's absolutely like it's just that kind of humane inhumane response sometimes to very very difficult horrific things that happen for women and their health whether it's with maternity or other other bits of their health needs where you just think if things could be just done a little bit differently it doesn't necessarily need millions and millions of pounds it just needs someone to think what does this feel like as a woman and is there something that we can do that's a little bit more empathetic and supportive so yeah I would say that that is one of the most difficult periods of my life not not only as I say in terms of the health service, but also just experiencing the loss of a baby very late during COVID and that isolation, no friends and family, not able to see anybody, just dealing with it very much by myself.

33:37And so, yeah, I think that's probably one of the most difficult periods. Yeah, well, you have my sympathies. That sounds really harrowing. Yeah. And a time you've had to be difficult because I like to leave this on a kind of, you know, badass note. i would say every year that passes i get more difficult good i would say it's interesting when we're talking right at the beginning about growing up on germaine greer i could say that when i was in my early 20s although i knew about women's rights in theory if i'm being honest with myself i don't know if i was living it i think i was still a bit of a people pleaser a bit of a kind of you know what my boyfriend wanted you know keep the boyfriend unhappy and just not as much as that but just I wasn't myself as much as I could be and every year that passes as I come and go and you know get more into my 40s I just don't give a shit anymore and I just feel more and more I would say whether it's you'd say it's difficult whether it's carefree I just feel it takes some time I think sometimes to really feel liberated from people's expectations and I think it's an age thing as well yeah I think I wasn't really I told my daughter this I wasn't really fully confident till I was about 45.

34:51You know, you pretend you're confident, you fake it till you make it and then you, you know, you carry on faking it and you have imposter syndrome. But then, honestly, I think when you hit 50, you have no fucks left to give. It was my best at case. So the best is yet to come. Great, good. Penny East, thank you very much for being this week's Difficult Woman. Thank you very much for having me. Thank you for listening to another episode of my Difficult Women podcast. just remember to subscribe and download wherever you get your podcasts so that the next episode's always ready to go every Friday afternoon.

35:25Bye!

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