 Hi everyone, my name is Malika. I am the editor of the SOAS Spirit, which is SOAS, the student led newspaper. And today I'm going to be interviewing three nominations, three nominees who have been caught up by the, supported by the SOAS community as inspirational women for International Women's Day. So today I'm joined by Sarah, who is the mature students officer. Would you like to introduce yourself and tell me a bit more about your role at SOAS? Sure. So as Malia said, I am the mature students officer, which means that I am a part-time volunteer student representative on the Executive Committee. And my course is I'm studying a full-time MA in social anthropology. As you can probably guess, as a mature student, I did have a kind of life before SOAS. And most recently, before I was a student, I've just been teaching English and culture studies for a few years in China, both at a K-12 level. And then I was working in the university before I came back to the UK. Great. So Sarah, what do you think is the biggest struggle that women are facing today? Maybe you could draw on your experience as a mature student at university, but what, yeah, what do you think is the biggest struggle that women are facing? So of course it really varies from community to community and woman to woman. But to me, especially, I've been aware in the last year that it's the persistent disparity in the way the workload of domestic and childcare duties are split. So even though contrary to some misguided and old-fashioned stereotypes, women in many communities all around the world are more and more having fewer children than they did before. They still perform a really disproportionate share of the care of those children, which really impacts on everything else. Because even if equitable access to education and professional opportunities are achieved and reproductive rights are safeguarded, if women are doing more than their fair share of childcare, then that's kind of to me the final stumbling block that can hold everything else back. As most people probably know, in a household where a man and a woman both earn roughly the same salary and work roughly the same hours, statistically, she's still doing many more hours a week of these tasks. And I really feel like in the last year during the pandemic, both in the UK and elsewhere, the situation has really been exacerbated. So here it's so as we both staff and students, not always, but often women have been doing disproportionately more of the lockdown homeschooling that needs to happen and things like that. Women have started to drop out of workplaces and drop out of classrooms here in the UK and abroad. And we really need to do something about this before everything we've achieved starts to go backwards, I feel. Absolutely. I think it's difficult because the modern woman is told, you can be independent, you can do everything, but that also means that you have to do everything. You know, it's always, there's a huge disparity between the roles that men value and the roles that women often do. I think that's such a good point. So obviously for International Women's Day, it's about celebrating other women and lifting other women up. So can you tell me about a time that you've worked together with other women? So I feel really lucky to say that I feel like I'm always working with other women in the best possible way. So right now a lot of the women I'm working with, of course, are other student officers, the fantastic student reps that don't always get a big enough shout out. And of course, so our staff, both academic and non-academic. Right now at the Student Union, we're celebrating all of March as Women's History Month. And we've got so many different events happening and they're all being coordinated by different groups of women within the community. So we've got had social events, but there's going to be networking events. And also welfare related events, I think you just really need to check out the program. So that's that's been happening. And I also, what we're talking about inspirational women kind of relates to what I just said actually before. I really want to do another shout out for the student parents in particular. Because I think sometimes people may not even know, especially while we're doing remote learning that someone in your class is a parent as well as a student. And the fact that we have people here in the community that are managing to to play both those roles during the current situation is incredible to me. Also in my previous, previous job before I came to SOAS, I was teaching in a university place in a foreign studies college and the foreign foreign studies, particularly language studies, is disproportionately once again, a field that has more women in it. And I found it really inspirational every day to see both kind of women professors doing fantastic things. But also in particular seeing young women undergrads who had often come from all kinds of different intersecting challenges, really grasping opportunities through education and seeing language, you know, in foreign language as a way to learn more about the world and engage more with the outside world and other communities, which I think is quite a SOAS thing as well. So I really like that. And it's really admirable that you use this platform to highlight other women is absolutely what we're trying to get at here with this project. So I guess the final question is, what is your best advice for women coming to university, particularly for maybe mature students, given that that's your area of expertise here. Yeah, so I think that for me it's kind of two things really and both of them are about not being afraid of something and the first one is don't be afraid to take up space. I think often as women we are can be socialized from a very early age to put other people's first to be to be kind to be maybe a bit more reserved to be as well to please other people basically. And if someone is, and this may be worse. In fact, I guess someone is a mature student and when they've been outside education, they've been in situations where they have been, you know, supporting colleagues, supporting teammates, supporting family, and to get the most out of higher education. I think you need to, as I say, be not afraid to take up space. You know, say what you need to say, like people often there's like some research that suggests that people consistently overestimate the amount of time that a woman has been spoken and underestimate the amount of time a man's been speaking so don't do that to yourself if you've got something to say and you've got something to contribute to this discussion do so and probably mature students often have so much right from the outside experiences to bring to the classroom. So I'm related to something you shouldn't be afraid to do and I think this one is challenging I struggle with it myself. But also, don't be afraid to say no practice, say and no to things when you're reaching capacity practice, knowing how to set boundaries to to protect yourself basically in your own well being because if you don't look after yourself then you know you can't contribute your best for other people so those two things take up space and but also be ready to say no and set boundaries. Absolutely, I think that's great advice. Thank you so much for speaking with me today. It's been a pleasure and I can quickly see why you've been nominated. I think that's great advice that you've given to everyone. So, yeah, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you very much my pleasure.