 Felly, ddod oeddwn ni'n gweithio i Professor Ann Oakley, yng Nghymru yn ei wneud yn ymddi'r gweithio. A'r fath o'r cyfnod o'r fath o'r cyfnod o'r gweithio, yn ymddangos i'r fath o'r gweithio, yn ymddangos i'r gweithio i'r gweithio i'r gweithio i'r gweithio, ac oedd y gweithio i'r gweithio i'r gweithio i'r gweithio i'r gweithio. Felly y bydd ar y fath o'r gweithio i'r gweithio mi srae. Mae gydag ei thysgliad yr egocirio eich trwy peth yn yma yn ei fath o'r cyfnod o'r gweithio i'r gweithio? Nid efallai sy'n golygu i'r gennw gweld, hwnna'n meddwl gweld i gydag gennw gweld, mae hynny'n gweithio'r welwydd, ac hiwn i'n gweld i'r gweithio i leisio diwethaf. Rydyn ni wedi gwelwch yn adnod llwyllus y bydd y mynd i'r ddweud o'r cyfnod o'r sex yma, sydd wedi bod yn llwyddol yn gyfnod, rydyn ni'n golygu ond o'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod a'r seithio'n mynd o'r cyfnod a'r seithio'n mynd i'n gweithio ar uwch yn 1972. Yna, rydyn ni wedi gweld i'n gweld i'n gweld o'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod. I was actually doing a study of housework and I was genuinely puzzled as to why it was women worldwide who did the housework. So that sent me to the anthropological and medical and psychological literature to look for the answer to this question and what I discovered with this whole complex system of gender differentiation in which for the most part women are treated unfairly but not always and that's what I found. So that's why I wrote that book and that I know that book has saved in print and it is used by A level students. I get maybe one email a week from a student saying could you just explain to me this and often they want me to do the work for them and I tell them to go and read the book and that doesn't go down very well. So it's the gender system and then obviously my work on housework I think has helped to elevate the status of housework both as an academic subject and as an area of labour and that is, I know that is also quoted quite a lot and some of that work has been read by quite wide areas of the public. It hasn't actually been just sort of academic theory and then the third area is methodology. So I think the way in which my work has used different approaches and has been at times quite controversial for doing that. I would like to think that I have made some contribution to the evolution of social science methodology. Most recently, well I say most recently but actually since the mid 1990s, setting up a resource for doing systematic reviews of social research and that continues today and I'm very proud of my role in helping that off the ground. I'm just going to follow up a little bit. Why do you think it was so controversial that you were using systematic reviews for social research? What do you think was controversial in that for people? I didn't think it was controversial but parts of the academic community didn't respond particularly well. Particularly I have to say in education, there were professors of education who got quite cross. This work I didn't do on my own, this was very much a team effort but when we came along and said about an area of education research we read these studies, we can't tell who you interviewed, who they were, when you did it, what questions you asked them. It was more a question of taking them to task for not reporting their research in such a way that you could work out whether or not it answered the question that you were trying to answer. We were, I think, regarded as being unnecessarily panickety about that but it isn't a question of unnecessary panickety, whatever the word it is. It's a really important criterion about the doing and reporting and disseminating of research results. I was surprised, I was surprised not so much by the controversial aspect but by the hostility, hostility. I remember going to conferences and presenting these results and just being shouted down. It didn't happen, of course, well not of course, but it didn't happen when we were talking to healthcare audiences because the notion that you need to look at an area of research properly and you need to be sure that you have evaluated something in such a way that you can be confident that you're saying this works or this doesn't work. That is much more accepted in healthcare settings. It is not, was not and still is not accepted in the same way in settings outside that. Do you think that those responses are reflective of the discipline at the time, the people who are publishing in those areas and developing methods in those areas? I don't know because some of that response continues today. I know, I am not in that world in the same way that I was but I know from talking to colleagues as it does. You know, you don't have very much control over how people read your work and people read other people's work in such a way that makes sense to them at the time. I do it. We all do it. So I can see that some of what I was saying about methodology didn't fit with what people wanted to hear. And they didn't actually take the trouble to understand it. The degree of misunderstanding will come on to this later but some of my applications particularly to what was then the Social Science Research Council, the peer reviewers comments about methodology reveals a pooling level of ignorance about these different methods. I really was a pool to other people who were part of that effort to get that work funded. That's really helpful. Thank you. We'll come on to that question I think straight away which is what parts or what funding applications were unsuccessful. Were those applications where you got such ignorant feedback and comments or such lack of understanding of what it was that you were doing? Yes. Well every social researcher has a whole finding cabinet full of unfunded research. When I look back at having many years I was doing this, I am amazed by the amount of time, the amount of labour that goes into this. It is a very inefficient way of conducting a research enterprise nationally I think and it also speaks to something which has seemed throughout my career which is the lack of a proper career structure for research. Social research is still the pool and we are not even called academics. There are academics and then others and researchers are others. You can get a permanent contract to be a member of the teaching staff but not to be a member of the research staff and that means that researchers are constantly chasing the next contract. That has all sorts of implications for the way in which research is done. One of the implications which again we may come on to later is that the attention to research materials when a project is over, there is no attention. Stuff gets shoved in a cupboard and it never gets sorted, it never gets looked after. So the public money that goes into research is not reflected at the end of the day in the public resource that other researchers can access. So unfunded, I think in the end I tried to think of a project that I couldn't get funded and I actually wasn't able to think of anything that I didn't eventually manage to get funded. But that might mean several or eight different applications and I used to reckon that one application, even if it was quite a small amount of money, would take you a month. So that is a lot of time spent trying to chase funds for something. I think I would have liked to have done more comparative research looking at other countries, looking at the international context and some of the issues that I've looked at. I would have wanted to do that. What do you think that would have added to your research? Well, it would have been fascinating to have, for example, done the housework study in early 1970s in other countries. Some of the work later on, looking at, I mean we did a project on evaluating the value of childcare, formal childcare, and of course Scandinavian countries have a wealth of experience of that. So to have done the same study, this is, I hesitate to say this, but this is in the sense the medical model is when you're trying out an intervention, you look at it in lots of different places. And I think social science really hasn't got its head around that. And that would have been in terms of producing a social science which is relevant to social policy. And that's what you need to do. And you need to be an international context. That's really helpful. And just finally coming on, so at the beginning of the first question was looking at the themes that have been taken forward and have been really impactful. Are there any themes in your work that have not been taken forward that perhaps have surprised you that they've not been taken up? Well, I think some of the work has been taken up in some circles and not in others. The books I wrote about the history of methodology, experiments and knowing, I know is very widely used by healthcare researchers. I was like it to be used by people who are learning how to do sociology more than it is. And then I think there is a piece of work that I did in relation to the study of women having their first babies. I published two books about that. One was called Coming a Mother and it was re-printed under the title From Here to Maternity and reviewed by some people twice. They thought it was a different book which shows you how well they read it in the first day. But the second book was called Women Confined Towards the Sociology of Childbirth and what it put forward was a theoretical model for explaining post-natal depression. And what I argued on the basis of these interviews which I had conducted with women doing their pregnancies and afterwards, what I argued was that you didn't need to have any kind of theory about women's psychology to understand that some women having a first baby got quite miserable afterwards. They had gone through a series of traumatic human life events, occupational change, complete change in bodily shape and bodily identity. Taking on a new job with no training at all and surgery often as well, institutionalisation in hospitals. All of this was sufficient to explain why you weren't necessarily overcome by the joys of mothers. That has not been taken up and I don't know why. I think it's a loss because I continue to think that that is a valid, I think it's a useful way of looking at it. I think it would be more helpful in some cases for some of the women who still have this kind of difficulty. It links back, I think, what's really interesting about that is what's seen as controversial. I do wonder if topics like that, which are part of the lived experience of at least 50% of the population, have actually not been taken seriously by broader disciplines, by funders, by those who fund social research. That's a theme that goes all the way along. I should have mentioned earlier in relation to the first question that I think the motherhood work, the early work, drew attention to the impact of medicalisation, which is what it was then called. What that was part of was a move mostly outside academia, but some within, and there were other sociologists who, around that same time, were particularly in America, Barbara Capsarossa and Nancy Stollersaw, people like that, who were saying the same thing. These helped to change maternity care policy, not just here but everywhere. It helped to alert people to the fact that quite a lot of what was done to women who were having babies was not based on good evidence and was actually harmful. I think it empowered, it's not the word I like very much, but you sometimes need to use it, it empowered the user organisations to bring about change. I think that's really interesting in the context of research that I'm currently doing around young fatherhood. We're working with professionals and practitioners and we're talking about the benefits of father inclusive practice, not just for men but for women and for children as well. I just wondered if you could reflect a little bit about why might we need to ask questions about men and their welfare and do you think that contributes to that broader conversation and discussion around challenges that women experience as well and questions of women's welfare? Well, gender is not just about women, although it is mostly women who go on about it, if I think it's a problem. So gender is about men and if one is looking at the impact of cultures of gender, ideology and practices on human beings, you have to look at the impact on men. Fatherhood is a good example, it's an area where I think men suffer from being excluded to some degree from experiences of love and care, which are deeply meaningful human experiences, so which women get probably rather too much of. But that is an area where men would definitely benefit. But this whole thing about gender being about women is such a problem. So if you look at social policy issues today, one of the biggest problems is the culture of masculinity. I've done some work on this with a colleague called Cynthia Coban, we wrote some piece in the Guardian and in various other places, looking at the culture of masculinity and masculinity as why masculinity is not a social policy issue. So you look at crime, over 90% of violent crime is committed by men. One of my social science heroes, heroines, is a woman called Barbara Wharton, who did a lot of work on the treatment of crime, finology, criminal justice. She made this remark along the lines of, if men behave like women, the courts would be idle and the prisons empty. That remains true. So if you want to save, I think Cynthia and I did a calculation that if men, this was about 10 years ago, if men behave like women in terms of crime, 42 billion pounds a year would be saved. Right, you could spend that usefully. So why do people, this is not about, I mean our piece in the Guardian got a lot of responses along the lines of men hating, men dating and all that. It's always women who are the problem. So the Ministry of Justice publishes an annual report on women and the criminal justice system, which is to fulfil the requirements of some equality act. Don't do a report on men and the criminal justice system, because if they did it would be policy dynamite, because what you might show is, it was like I said, that a major area of social policy that needs attention is the antisocial effect of a culture of masculinity and its impact not just financial, but obviously psychological and social. I don't think that was the answer you were expecting. Well no, it raises some questions for me I think, which is great. For me I suppose I'm trying to look at fatherhood and people's everyday lives. I guess my question then is what's our role as sociologists in developing those explanations and what can we do I think to contribute to those broader discussions in a way that benefits men as well as women I think in society. I don't think I can answer that. I think that's for you, younger generation. I pass that one back to you. It's difficult, it is difficult, it's difficult to change. Same thing with me, we managed to get an interview with John Snow. He was very nice, we met for coffees on where near ITN, and he was very engaged with the whole topic, but he said probably it's not newsworthy. It's not newsworthy. 42 billion isn't newsworthy. Yeah, it's not newsworthy. Interesting. But then that comes back to why certain themes of your work have endured and others may not have around not only in terms of who's interests they may serve, which touches on your question that you know who's writing at what time and from what set sorts of purposes and for whom, but also then what is seen as provocative and why is motherhead, why is this example of women saying actually it wasn't good for me in hospital when I was having children and I was being infantilised in particular ways, which wasn't great. Why that push back against an orthodoxy, like a medical orthodoxy becomes very provocative in those sorts of situations? Well, the answer, one answer to that is obviously if you start saying that motherhood isn't necessarily a matter of joy and roses and all of that, you are criticising, you are taking apart a really important cultural ideology that keeps the whole kind of gender family system in place. So you're corroding that and that is threatening to the establishment. And in terms of medicine, in the 70s, I hesitated to compare that with the situation today, but doctors were very patronising. They really did. It wasn't just women that treated in this infantilised way. Patience didn't have rights, patients didn't have experiences that you needed to listen to and that has changed, but it was in the process of transition. One thing I'm interested in is the extent to which we individualise families still. That lets the state off the hook in lots of ways, providing access to resource and welfare. I think we expect families to carry a huge part of the load of the whole range of social problems and that gets talked about at discourse level as well I think. I certainly see my role in trying to develop those explanations really around. That's problematic. And within families it's still women who carry the main burden of sorting all of this out, not exclusively, but still a lot. We've mentioned which were the most impactful at the time. Why do you think that your work continues to have such significant impact? Because it does. It continues to have importance and resonance for sociologists, social scientists more generally. Clearly young people as well as you were saying. Students, they're coming back to you, they're engaging and there's still so much meat for them to engage in and resonance with their own lives. And yet we're talking, for me, I think there's a couple of things here which is around this idea, or well 1975, this is the students that are writing to you. That's very much in the childhoods of their own parents, probably, likely. So for me that raises questions around enduring social trends, enduring social processes. And that also then connects to why some of your work does continue to have, and which ones do you feel are the most important, that continue to have resonance for people? I think the question about impact is better answered by other people, but I will give you two answers. One of them is that I think a great deal of my work has been about everyday life. And that is something that people find it relatively easy to identify with. And in relation to that, my orientation, I hate to say this, but I don't actually hate to say it, it's the truth, has not been predominantly towards the academic world. I have not been trying to become a sociological theorist and I wasn't trying to become a professor at an early age. Those were not my ambitions. And therefore I think that I probably have a reputation as quite a practical kind of sociologist, somebody who doesn't write in a theoretical, jargony kind of way. It's accessible and I've always tried to write. That is racist, a fact that I never wanted to be a sociologist and firstly I wanted to be a writer. So writing and the translation of research into some kind of text that makes sense to people outside that world has always been very important. But also those themes in your as well. So whilst we've seen tremendous social change since 1975, those themes still endure, they're absolutely at the heart, as you say, of human experience. Motherhood or parenthood or housework, home, family, the most profound of human connections really. And mostly immediate everyday lives, they're fundamental to what we do. The becoming a mother project was, we did do very much help, led by other people in this unit. A follow-up study contacting some of the women who were originally interviewing them. And then we did, we repeated the methodology with another sample and now there are a couple of a team of researchers who are going to try and get money, probably spending months and months writing on funded research to get money to do another such study. So that tells you that those themes and that kind of approach, it still has resonance today. So when you were talking about gender earlier and you were talking about men, you touched slightly on masculinity and I wondered if you wanted to say a little bit more about that. Yes, what I want to say about that is that the, as I said before, the gender system is about men and women and really the current culture of masculinity is, I think, very difficult for men. I think it's health damaging. It helps to explain one of the enduring mysteries in all of this, which is why on the whole men have higher mortality and more literacy than women. That may very well be something to do with the expectations of male behaviour and emotional life or rather the lack of it and all that kind of, all those related areas. So if you're looking at inequalities in health there has been so much more work done on structures, class structures, on gender and inequalities in health and like that. I've done some work with a public health expert called Alex Scott Samuel about the fact that patriarchy is damaging to men's health. This is a really important point. If one is looking as a social scientist at this whole picture, this is part of the picture. We aren't just talking about poor women and the oppression of women. We are talking about the oppression of human beings by a divisive and unhelpful way of thinking about human life. So your work has had a huge amount of social and intellectual impacts. What does an emancipatory sociology look like in your view? You have to start by looking at what sociology is at the moment. I don't only think there is good evidence that it remains a discipline which looks at the world from the position of dominant social groups. Not just men but white people and other dominant minorities. So in order for sociology to perform an emancipatory function, emancipatory is leading people out of slavery. It has to reimagine itself. It has to reimagine its aims and its methods and it has to recover its history. So a lot of the work that I've done in the last ten years I've been looking at the history of social science and I have discovered that most of what we're talking about now has been talked about before. Not just in the 70s but in the 1880s, in the 1890s and the 18th century. We've been there before but sociology has a very kind of amnesia about its own past. That is such a shame because it's a bit like unfunded research all that they have gone to waste. All these people have done all this work before. For example, if you look at the evolution of sociological research methods we shouted a lot in the 70s and 80s about the discovery of qualitative interviewing. But they were doing it. They were doing it in the 1890s and the early 1900s. There were many social researchers, mainly women but not exclusively. They were doing covert ethnography, qualitative interviewing, diaries, formal surveys, the whole lot. They didn't necessarily, they didn't call it that but that's what they were doing. They said we had the data from here and the data from here and we looked all together. So why do we constantly need to reinvent the past? That's not that's not emancipation for anyone. I think there's a lot of work still to be done and I think universities obviously got a lot to answer for. When I started out in all of this something like 80% of academic staff were men that's not the case now but do we actually have a culture which doesn't reflect dominant views about not just about masculinity but dominant views about important social issues. Housework is not an important social issue. The way men behave is not an important social issue. How babies are brought up is not an important social issue. So why not? I mean it has to I was when I was awake in the middle of the night as one is as you get older. I'm thinking what we really need is we need a degree course which actually takes all these texts from the past. So it teaches, it doesn't teach you know vapour, dirt time whatever. We look at not Max Vaber but Marianne Vaber who was a very important sociologist in her own right. We look at what she did. We look at the methods texts from the point of view of people like Margaret Harkness who was a cousin of Beatrice Webb who did this amazing work studying Sweaty Vaber and also wrote novels. This is another thing. It's one of the things that I have done that women social researchers and male researchers in the past did a lot. It wasn't because it was extraordinary to write the themes that you were interested in in fiction as well as in factual forward. And now that's not regarded as a sensible thing to do. But why not? If you want to encourage debate if you want to encourage people to think about something and to do something about it then why not? And that leads us to our final question which is one of the themes of this interview or this conversation has been legacy what do you feel how do you feel that people may take your work forward that sort of legacy into the future of the work that you've done? Absolutely no. I hope that the emphasis on the kind of sociology that I've done which is attention to the living of everyday lives and people's experiences on the one hand and as I said before the notion of social science as social science that those two things are the things that get remembered and taken forward but I would really like to know what happens and it's really frustrating because I won't know. Thank you very much indeed thank you for your generosity in your time it's been a real learning experience and for me too it's made me think about the past thank you.