PassW0rd – 14th March 2018

Speaker A: This program is brought to you by Resonance 104.4 FM. If you like what you hear and want to support our work, please make a donation at fundraiser.resonance.fm. Hello and welcome to Password with me, Charlie O’Brien, Charlotte Roundtree, Blue Buffery, and Jane Wyatt. So the Mother’s Day flowers are starting to droop a bit and the chocolates have almost all been eaten. So it’s back to the normal routine for mums like me. In today’s Password show, I’m looking for technology, apps, and life hacks that could make life easier or better for parents and children, and put the fun back into being a mum. So, but let’s start right at the beginning—conception. Instead of leaving it to chance, women can now upload their menstrual cycles and find out their peak fertility moments by plotting them in an app. Now, there are several different versions. Our Password reporter Charlotte Roundtree’s been finding out about an app called Clue. It helps women to understand exactly what’s going on in their bodies. Charlotte and Password’s Jane Wyatt have been finding out just how well it works.

Speaker B: Well, very simply, most tracking apps, most fertility apps, are a mix between a calendar and a calculator. So they ask you to daily input symptoms such as headachy, moods, Several ask about sort of skin and when your period starts and stops, and from there it works quite easily where you should be in your cycle, when you’re most likely to be fertile. So some apps work very simply with a calculation to do this. So they’ll put, you know, your date of ovulation 14 days before the end of your cycle, which is the most habitual length. Some are a bit more specific, so they’ll use basal body temperature, thermometers, weight, and these will be a lot more specific. If we’re looking at one which is called Clue, we’ve actually had Clue on Password before. Clue uses very simply tags, so you can track a day when you’ve been feeling particularly, you know, moody or stressed or your skin has been particularly oily, how heavy your flow is, and then it will work out a prediction for you. For instance, when you might be likely to PMS, when you’re most likely to menstruate next, and when you’re likely fertile. But the ones that are a bit more in-depth do tend to have a thermometer with them. These are like Natural Cycles, which, which are a contraceptive app. They can work out when you are fertile, when you’re not, when it’s safe to have sex.

Speaker C: How foolproof are they though?

Speaker B: Well, Natural Cycles, which has been used by the Health Board, it’s as effective as taking the pill. Simply by knowing your cycle, being able to work these things out for you, and knowing when your body is fertile and when it isn’t. Obviously there will always be human error in something like this because it’s not chemical the way the pill is. It’s literally just telling you when you do need to use protection and when you don’t. Obviously not everyone will listen to this 100% of the time, which is where some of these problems do come in.

Speaker C: And of course you could always forget to take the pill as well. So what do you think are the advantages of knowing this sort of information?

Speaker B: If we look at it from both sides really, so the advantages of having this amount of data that’s very in-depth, that is very personal, it’s fantastic for the companies that are collecting it because they can use it to extrapolate interesting trends and things like Clue have used it to develop a lot of articles to help people understand and learn more about their health. You know, they’ve written about the impact of eating disorders on menstruation and ovulation, common skin and mood changes that do happen every month that maybe you weren’t likely to notice if you were just tracking it by yourself. They’ve even looked into articles about how veganism and vegetarianism affect the cycle.

Speaker C: Now this is very personal, intimate data which people are probably not really used to sharing except with their best female friend or their sister or something. How do you think the apps will actually play out in practice? Are they just a gimmick or are they going to become a more generally accepted part of being a woman?

Speaker B: I think in all honesty they are already becoming more and more accepted. I think This kind of tracking has been around for a very long time because at certain points in history, it was the only way people could avoid pregnancy or could try a lot harder to become pregnant. Sharing that information is very common. On most apps, you will have the opportunity to connect with your friends so that you can both see where you are in your cycle. And that kind of information, while it is very personal, obviously, it’s also quite a sign of almost a very modern sort of trust between friends, between partners.

Speaker C: As well as with your friends and obviously informing yourself, you’re also, I suppose, sharing this intimate data data with the companies who run the apps.

Speaker B: We’re used to things being advertised to us because of the data collected, and you can definitely see how that data could be used to advertise to the women using it. For instance, at a certain point in your cycle, it could start offering you chocolate. It’s a case of people having to be very wary of what their companies are doing with the data collected.

Speaker C: You’ve tested it out, you’ve checked out some of the alternatives. What do you think?

Speaker B: I think they’re a fantastic idea. It’s actually very strange, particularly the way that we talk about this kind of stuff now. For instance, when I was in high school, it just— what we I just didn’t speak about it. I think we were all a bit uncomfortable, we were young, kind of spoke in whispers about it. But then as I got older, I made friends that were using apps like this. They were using, you know, Period Tracker, they were using Clue, they were using all different ones. But it became something to sort of joke about, something that we could talk very openly about. And I think that kind of socialising aspect of it, it takes away a lot of the fear underneath it if you understand how other people are working with their own, how other people are feeling. Being able to see someone else’s cycle, it makes yours feel a lot more normal and a lot less scary.

Speaker A: So when baby does come along as planned, he or she will make a noise like this from time to time. And also like this. But what does it mean? How can you know exactly what the baby wants? Mother’s instincts, well, I think they’re right a lot, but they’re not always right. And then dads, grandmas, and babysitters also need to know what is wrong. So this baby app translator has been developed and tested in Taiwan, and the inventor claims a 90% accuracy rate. Cry Translator app tells parents or carers what the baby is trying to say. I’m hungry, I’m tired, I’m thirsty, I’ve got a wet nappy, so on and so forth. So when it comes to feeding those hungry babies, most healthcare professionals agree that breast is best. But it’s often easier said than done, especially if mum wants to return to work before the little one is fully weaned. Technologists might have the answer though. According to experts at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, the elite tech university in the United States, MIT Media Lab hosts an annual hackathon focusing on this very problem. It’s called Making Breast Pump Not Suck. So being able to pump breast milk during the working day and store it for your baby to drink later is a very important factor in getting new moms back into the workplace. And in the technology industry, where everything changes very rapidly, a short period of maternity leave and a supportive re-entry could help women to keep up with their career paths. I had this problem myself when I had my first baby. I was working on a self-employed basis and there wasn’t the option of me taking any maternity leave. I would have had to have gone back to my job when the baby was about 4 weeks old. Jane has been talking to Katherine D’Ignazio and Becky Michelson at MIT and Binta Beard, who is helping to bring the Breast Pump Hackathon’s new idea into public policy. And Katherine explained why she started the first hackathon in a state of indignation.

Speaker D: This project Actually started in a bathroom. So I was on the floor of the bathroom at the MIT Media Lab, and I was a graduate student there, and I had just had my third child. And so it’s like I’d done it before, doing the whole thing of breastfeeding. In contrast to you lovely folks in the UK, you might know that we have no paid maternity leave here in the US. So we all end up, all of us who work outside the home, end up returning really, really soon after giving birth. And that’s sort of the state I was in. I was like 2 and a half months postpartum. So I found myself on the bathroom floor, and then I was like, because there’s nowhere to pump in the MIT Media Lab, it’s a building made of glass, very transparent, no good private spaces. And I remember thinking to myself, what the hell? You know, like, why am I the most elite engineering institution in the world, and yet I’m sitting on the bathroom floor pumping breast milk for my baby. And so that was like the seed that— and so it did, it was a seed that it started with technology because it started with this thing of like, well, like, why does the breast pump still— why does it suck so badly? You know? And then I came out of the bathroom and I talked to my fellow student colleague, Alexis Hope. And she had had some experience with designing devices for mothers and babies in the past. And she had this very sort of like engineering and design spirit and said, well, hey, like we’re in a position to make it better. Let’s just do something about this. And so that’s really how it started. And so we actually had the first Make the Breast Pump Not Suck hackathon was in 2014. And it was very technology focused. We learned just a whole a whole great deal about how really this is not only a problem of technology. We want to involve technology and products and we want to have better pumps, quieter pumps, and so on. But even if you gave every mother in America the best, most wonderful, comfortable breast pump, you wouldn’t actually be solving everybody’s problems when it comes to being able to breastfeed and work and provide both money and breast milk for their families. And so that’s sort of where Binta comes in, because this time around we are not only running the Make the Breast Pump Not Suck hackathon, but we’re also running a policy summit to address some of the more structural barriers that women in the US face as they try to have a breastfeeding relationship with their babies.

Speaker E: But what about the hackers?

Speaker C: Who, who’s doing the hacking? What kind of people are they?

Speaker D: This time around too, that’s the part that’s going to shift a little bit. We’re still looking for lots of engineers and designers. That’s who came to the first event. So, you know, the event is at the MIT Media Lab. We don’t really have a problem attracting engineers being at MIT. There’s mechanical engineers and there’s hardware designers, there’s industrial designers. But this time around, we’re also looking for a good number of artists. As well, like artists and media makers, because again, we see the goal of this event is not just to design new and better pumps, but we also want to think about, well, like, what are technologies or programs or services that could actually work to shift some of these cultural norms? So like, how do we think about campaigns that reduce stigma around breastfeeding or technologies like in telehealth. So there’s been some interesting developments in telehealth recently where breastfeeding moms and parents can get just-in-time lactation support over their mobile phone. So there’s a service, for example, called Pacify where you can just get the breastfeeding advice like right when you need it. And there’s lots of opportunities as well. Like so many women, what we’ve been finding with interviews is so many women get their information online and on Facebook. So there’s real opportunities for technology development in online communities. So like, how do we better support online and peer-to-peer support, but in a way that’s giving good sort of evidence-based information about breastfeeding? And so we’re trying to encourage a kind of broad definition of technology and innovation in the hackathon. So we will have the like high-tech folks, we have folks who are working on Alexa or Siri, you know, giving you breastfeeding advice, for example. But then we also have folks who are working on local or community-based innovations. So for example, we have one team who’s coming in from the Native American, two Native American tribes out in the Southwest. And what they’re working on is redesigning their traditional ceremonial clothing to be more nursing friendly because it’s very sort of restrictive. For participating in these ceremonies. And so that’s a kind of a more design and, like, fashion-based innovation. So it doesn’t all have to be high-tech, and some of it can be more about creating that supportive and enabling environment where we really value and celebrate breastfeeding. That’s the other thing that’s sort of different from the first time around is the first time around in 2014, we had lots of pumps. They were really great. Smart pumps, comfortable pumps. But a lot of the things that came out sort of made assumptions about, you know, who the people were, like who are the workers that are going to be using these pumps. And they all kind of made the assumption that these are knowledge workers, they have offices that they can close the door, that are private, they can, you know, disrobe and use their breast pump. And so this time around we’re kind of, we are trying to challenge ourselves and challenge the larger sort of breastfeeding advocacy community and the product community to say, well, like, who are we innovating for? Because a lot of the stuff that’s come to market since 2014, there are smart pumps, there are increasingly more comfortable pumps, there are quieter pumps, but, you know, they’re coming in at a price point of like $500 to $1,000 and they’re not covered by our insurance programs here in the US. This makes it so that women at the sort of top 1% can have access to these things. But, you know, if we want to do like real innovation, it can’t just be for the 1%. It has to be for everybody. So this time around, we’re really centering equity. And we’re also trying to curate very specifically, like, who shows up and who is an innovator. And like Binta said, with the policy summit, you know, we’re trying to center the most marginalized voices in this space, which have traditionally been the low-wage workers, the LGBTQ parents, as well as women of color who often get overlooked in these conversations about sort of innovation and fancy products and things like that.

Speaker C: When you say smart pumps, what can they do? What makes them smart? Sure.

Speaker D: I mean, I would actually say that the smart pumps that are out there are not actually that smart. So I think one of the big innovations that a lot of the companies have now gone for in the past 4 years has been that they’ve integrated a kind of app and tracking system into their pump. So it doesn’t automatically detect how much breast milk that you have, but there’s an app that accompanies some of these like smarter pumps where then you can like log how much milk that you’ve produced and track its dates and stuff like that. So there’s these kind of tracking apps. There are some of the companies’ apps that also have kind of a built-in online support community as part of it as well. And for some of the pumps, the pump is actually able to communicate over Bluetooth to the phone to say like, oh, this, you know, took like, it’s sort of like the self-tracking, like Quantified Self, like, oh, these days I pumped for this long. And then maybe you can manually enter like how much milk you pumped and stuff like that. So that’s, those are one of the smart things. I think the other thing that we’re seeing in terms of the smart, in quotes, sort of systems is better technologies for the milk extraction. So if you look at Naya Health, that’s one of the very fanciest pumps. It costs like $1,000, but the technology is reportedly very good. It’s sort of a water-based system instead of a vacuum-based system, which ends up doing some compression on the breast as well as suction. A lot of the current designs or the default designs basically just do suction. But from what we know around lactation research, the way that a baby sucks, it’s not just about sucking, it’s also about compression. And of course, when you have the baby there, it’s a lot of other things like love, which you don’t feel for your pump. But those are some of the other innovations in the space. And then actually some of the other cool things that have come to market recently too are around discretion. So there’s a couple new pumps out where you can actually pump in your, like you can have your clothes on and the pump is on your breasts, but it’s more discreet. And it’s actually collecting the milk in like bags in your clothing. So again, these all have their downsides as well, but those are some of the developments that are happening in the space.

Speaker C: They might be able to give you advice in the middle of the night when the baby won’t latch on or something else is going wrong, or in the middle of the day when you just can’t get the pump to work. How would they— where does that advice come from?

Speaker D: Becky, do you want to speak to that? That’s one of these companies that Becky’s been talking with. One of the companies, Breastfeeding at Home, that we’ve been in conversation with, they’re looking at how to help troubleshoot an experience of trying to breast pump or feed and then serve as a referral service to local lactation consultants in the area so that it could be a way of, like, triaging or gathering useful data about what conditions, how the experience of pumping or feeding is going, and then be able to refer to an appropriate specialist nearby.

Speaker A: Another futuristic option championed by philosopher Alexandra Montgomery Whittington is that mothers shouldn’t have to take full responsibility for producing and delivering breast milk. Science could calculate the exact combination of protein, fat, and vitamins, and anybody—dad, gran, childminder, or day nursery staff—could make up the baby’s feed using a 3D printer, knowing that the bottle is filled with nutritionally correct milk for that individual baby.

Speaker F: I mean, so I offered a couple of different possible futures, and so there were two main variables. I was looking at what’s called the mommy wars in the United States. Have you ever heard that term? It’s a pop culture terminology, but that is how we sort of encapsulate this idea that mothers can be pitted against each other in terms of like breastfeeding or bottle feeding, stay-at-home mom versus working mom. Ooh, the mommy wars, you know, bottle versus breast, work versus home, married versus single, you know, whatever the It’s a version of the culture wars, right? Conservative versus more modern values, let’s say. So I looked at that as one variable. And then the other variable was the role of the household in producing or consuming. Because when I looked around at the literature about families, it’s primarily about how much money families spend, you know, how they function as a consuming aspect of society, how much families earn and how much families spend and what they buy and how Having a family is really just a series of buying things, at least in America. We don’t have a very good social safety net for families. So everything is on our own dime. You know, we buy all of the necessities for our family. So what I was looking at is a continuum where on one end the household consumes and on the other end the household produces. You know, a long time ago households used to make everything they needed. They didn’t buy things such as formula, for example. So when I So when I put those variables together, I just sort of thought about what are the different futures when you crisscross these impacts? And I came up with a few, like breastfeeding is sort of a status symbol. Breastfeeding becomes like a status symbol where only wealthy parents breastfeed and the masses are sort of left to whatever quality formula might be available. Another one was, I called it lactose intolerant, a scenario where breastfeeding is uncommon and consumerism is completely rejected. And in this one, some of those modern technologies that we futurists like to talk about, such as, say, 3D printing. What if people could 3D print their foods, including their baby milk or whatever infants would need to eat, in their own home? So you’re sort of going back to the household produces model, but it’s modernized by a formula feeding norm, which— in which case men could actually be involved in making the milk, let’s say, that would feed their child. It could be something very personalized. It could have some qualities that cater exactly to the health or the biological makeup of that child. So this is just sort of how futurists think. We come up with parameters and we try to come up with what futures result from the cross-impacts of those different variables and those different conditions.

Speaker A: That was Alexandra Montgomery Whittington of the University of Houston, Texas. Of course, in the UK, things are different. Paid maternity leave is more widely available, and there’s a national charity called the NCT, or the National Childbirth Trust, that specialises in helping nursing mothers. Yet still there are battles for breastfeeding to be accepted in places like restaurants, and whether mums choose to breast or bottle feed, mums are likely to feel under breashe at some time. The NCT’s latest survey published on Mother’s Day shows that half of all mothers do suffer some kind of mental health problem during baby’s first year. So any little thing that makes life easier must be welcome. On the NCT website there are apps and a chatbot so you can join in an online community of mums, breastfeeding buddies and expert counsellors. We also do have chat and support forums over at channelmum.com. Mothers’ mental health problems are often overlooked because of the belief that women are naturally perfectly well-equipped for rearing children. But that belief is a myth. Professor Gina Rippon, a neuroscientist at Aston University in Birmingham, is keen to explode the myth. She spent Mother’s Day denouncing what she calls the neurotrash, or scientific fake news, at the Women of the World Festival in London’s South Bank Centre.

Speaker G: So the idea of a male and a female brain is that there are biological differences, obviously, between men and women, and the chain of argument was that the biological differences, you know, the genetic differences which determined your genitals and your gonads, also determined your brain. And therefore men and women must have different brains, and this is why they had different abilities. And what’s the truth of that?

Speaker C: What do you find when you’re studying brains?

Speaker G: Well, certainly even with the more sophisticated brain imaging techniques we have at the moment, there is very little evidence that certainly structurally there are any differences between the brains from men and the brains from women. If there are differences, they are tiny. What What people very often don’t realise is that the term different means different things in science and in popular use of the term.

Speaker C: And what does that mean then in terms of women’s abilities, of women’s aptitudes, their special skills as mothers and helpers and so on? Does that mean it’s all complete nonsense, that it’s not shown in their brains? Yeah, nonsense is a tricky term.

Speaker G: I mean, there is neuro-nonsense, which is a whole different issue. Well, the argument has always been that men and women have different skills. And so, if you like, it’s a kind of reverse engineering, or working backwards and saying, “Oh, it must be something to do with their brain. Let’s have a look at their brain and let’s see what differences we can find there.” I mean, in the 21st century, people are starting to challenge all of the basic assumptions in those arguments. Let’s actually have, you know, a proper look at the evidence that men and women have different skills that are in some way fixed. You know, women are supposedly much more verbally fluent than men, and men are much better at spatial skills like map reading, etc., etc. But if you look at the data properly, there is no good evidence that, oh, you know, all men are better than all women at map reading or verbal tasks, etc. So that’s something you have to look at. You then work backwards and say, well, let’s have a look at brains. What kind of evidence do we have that men’s brains are different from women’s brains? And again, the evidence is that women’s brains are much more similar to men’s brains. You know, the differences between them are tiny, and so knowing whether, you know, the owner of the brain is a man or the owner of a brain is a woman is not terribly informative.

Speaker C: What about size and weight of the brain, though? I mean, most women are smaller in height than most men, and lighter too. Does that make a difference to the power or the nature of the brain? Yeah, very, very good point.

Speaker G: And in fact, all the early work, I mean, way back in the times when I was talking about trying to work out why women were inferior to men, lots of eager Scientists were looking for reasons for these differences, and they noticed that on average female brains were 5 ounces lighter than male brains. And so hurrah, you know, they found the explanation, and that missing 5 ounces clearly contained all of the skills that were necessary to make you powerful and Admiral of the Fleet or whatever. But then somebody pointed out that actually women are smaller than men, and maybe their brains are smaller because they’re smaller. And of course that immediately emerged as the truth. And there is still ongoing debates today about how you correct for the fact that the brains you’re looking at are of different sizes. And people have noticed that if you don’t just compare male and female brains, but if you actually match brains in terms of their size, then bigger brains have differences from smaller brains which have nothing to do with whether they’re the brains from men or the brains from women. So the size issue is, is very important. And if you correct for those kind of differences, then the very small differences that you have found almost all disappear. So the kind of basis of the argument that there are differences between men’s brains and women’s brains disappears.

Speaker C: How about the way that the different parts of the brain are arranged and that the different proportions? We hear about left brain and right brain. Some scientists, or some commentators at least, seem to associate masculine and feminine attributes to the relatively different proportions and sizes of these different parts of the brain. What about the truth in that, or is that nonsense too?

Speaker G: The left brain, right brain is in a way almost in the same forum genre as male and female brains. It was an interesting metaphor early on to try and, you know, when people were starting to try and get a handle on how different parts of the brain might support different functions, different skills, and it looked as though there were nice clear-cut differences between the left brain and the right brain. So all of a sudden there was a metaphor that we have this kind of logical scientific left brain and emotional, verbal, very good at interpreting facial expressions, etc., right brain, which matched neatly onto the male-female dichotomy that was already around. So those kind of ideas, actually, in scientific terms we have moved on quite a lot from them, but they’ve really got themselves well entrenched in the sort of public understanding of how the brain works. And there’s quite a lot of commercial organisations out there who still trade on that particular metaphor, particularly supporters of single-sex schools, etc., who explain that boys and girls learn differently and neuroscientists have in inverted commas, proved this, and therefore we need to organise our educational establishments accordingly.

Speaker C: So if I, as a mum, were wondering whether or not to send my children to single-sex schools, what would I have to go on now? You said the science has moved on.

Speaker G: Certainly in scientific circles, those kind of myths have been debunked, but one of the problems that we have is that they stick around, that you can’t get rid of them, and somebody comes up up, you know, with them in a different guise, 5 or 6 years more down the line, and off we go again saying, actually, that isn’t how the brain works. But that’s not the message that gets conveyed. All of these reports are on average groups, so that you take 2 groups of boys, 2 groups of girls, you give them a task, or you measure their brain activity, or both, and you might find some average differences, but it’s very likely they’ll be very small. But that tells you nothing about individual differences, which of course, as a mother, that’s what you want to know. You want to know, does my lovely little chap that I want to send to school, or my darling little daughter that I want to send to school, you know, what will be the best thing for them? And the key issue is understanding the way they learn best, you know, the particular instructional style or whatever they respond to best, which lumping people into males ‘females’ just doesn’t give you the right answer.

Speaker C: So a lot of different factors to bear in mind there. And then suppose I’ve made some good decisions about my children’s education, they’ve gone back to school, and I’m feeling like going back to work in one of the very well-paid lucrative jobs that exist now in science and technology. How would I go about it? What would your advice be?

Speaker G: Well, I think the key thing to be aware of is that science and technology still has a long way to go in acknowledging the role of women in science and technology. So that a lot of scientific careers, those in charge are mainly male. A lot of people have an image of a scientist as a male. So it’s an additional barrier, you know, if you’re a returner, an older female returning to the workplace environment, that in itself has certain amounts of barriers, particularly with respect to your own self-confidence, which is a key thing because self-esteem has major effects on how your brain works. But then to be aware of the difficulties that going into a science or technology environment can involve. But sometimes that’s all you need, just being aware that, you know, that there is that problem. And people are working very hard. I mean, there are some very good initiatives to make science more welcoming to females. And, you know, they are working very hard, so the need for women to re-enter science careers is— or to enter science careers in the first place, you know, there’s a big positive push in that direction, which is helpful. But sometimes day-to-day, it’s quite difficult to realise that.

Speaker A: And she is by no means the only top scientist to believe that more women, especially mums returning to the workplace, are needed in technology-based jobs. Dr. Sue Black, OBE, a professor of computer science, learned the hard way about what Professor Rippon calls the chilly climate for mothers in science careers. At 23, Sue Black was in a women’s refuge fleeing from her violent partner with 3 young children, yet she still became a top computer scientist and educationalist, and now as Dr. Sue is pioneering back-to-work classes for mothers. The course is called TechMums, and Passwords Blue Buffery has been checking it out.

Speaker E: I think it’s been going for several years now, and it seemed to have been mostly London-based, and now they’ve extended it into Facebook TV. So you’ve got a live streamed TV programme over 4 weeks in the format of a daytime TV programme, it seems. So it’s incredibly accessible. And useful little snippets of information in a very positive format. So you don’t— you think you’re going into a classroom environment, which is a little bit daunting, but you actually end up watching something that could replace a daytime television programme without you really noticing you’re learning.

Speaker C: Well, it sounds like fun, but what did you learn, if anything?

Speaker E: Actually, I found that it was accessible. Because it was paced nicely. So you, you had a piece about LinkedIn and how you can use that technology to up your chances of getting jobs, and it’s a nice little video that showed you how to do it, you know, how to actually put your stuff up there, what you’re putting up there, and how it built your contacts from there. And then chat amongst the women who were there explaining how they used it and tips that they’d found as well. So it was like having a coffee morning with your girlfriends, and that was useful. Then there was something about staying positive, so it’s very motivational. So tips on staying positive while you’re looking for work, bits from online entrepreneurs who have used the technology that they have to make their products available to people and have made money through. The LinkedIn thing probably was the biggest thing for today for me, just because it was something that— I have got the LinkedIn account, I’ve never done anything with it because I’ve never really known what to do with it. So like I said, it’s little techie bits that are done in a way that is non-threatening and you don’t feel stupid if you haven’t done it. There was an online app that was discussed that will show you where local part-time or flexible work was available.

Speaker C: Well, it’s obviously very useful to mums who’ve got to fit any bits of work they do around the children coming home from school and so on. Yeah. Doesn’t sound very technical though.

Speaker E: No, I was surprised at how untechnical it was, but like I said, because you have the interview parts and the videos where you’ve got the more technical stuff being explained, sort of idiot guide if you like. You didn’t really view it as technical, it was very, this is how you do it.

Speaker C: And it’s on Facebook, so could you join in, could you put comments in or like things?

Speaker E: Yes, what they have is you sign yourself up to the Facebook group and once you’re in that, you are within the group, you can then access the video stream itself the TV stream. There are bits that are there that you can just, you know, do a 4-minute best bits of. There’s loads of bits that you can comment on. There’s loads of interactivity on the site. The comments actually from other people are more interesting to a certain degree. At the moment, it is aimed at young women. I think obviously Sue Black being a young mum and having to fight that adversity herself, I think that’s where she’s focusing is getting those people who have had their children very young back into a position where they can support their families. This does seem to be her role, I suppose, as the uber mother. It was, like I said, it was very simplistic, but I think sometimes with learning, that is the way you do it. You don’t realize you’re learning because you’re watching something that you could replace your data time TV viewing with and not really know that you are taking in that information. I now, you know, I’m sitting here thinking I really must go and do my LinkedIn thing.

Speaker C: So it’s inspired you to actually do what they were doing in the show?

Speaker E: Yeah, because it was, like I said, I have my LinkedIn account, I’ve never done anything with it because I’ve really, one, I’ve never wanted really to put that time in because I don’t know what I’m doing with of it. I know it’s a con— and it was one of the things they came up with, it was always seen as a very business-associated thing, and now obviously it’s used by everyone for everything. Sometimes with these things, until someone shows you how to do it, you are a little daunted by it, and I didn’t want to sit there with my computer or my phone playing around for an hour or so thinking, I can’t get anywhere, I don’t know what I’m in a 5-minute clip that was totally accessible and not patronising. I now go, “Oh, okay, now I can understand how I need to do it and why I should do it.” And that was the bit that I came away with, was that there was a reason for doing it. It wasn’t just, “Oh, I should do this because, you know, I should do it.” It’s actually now I make ‘Okay, it makes sense. I should do this because it’s actually worth it.’ So if it inspired me, I mean, other comments on the Facebook page, they were mostly actually from older women as well, and a lot of them were very highly educated women, people doing PhDs, people who’ve taken time out to have children, who’ve had high-flying careers. There was very little actually coming from young mums, and they were saying, ‘Yeah, actually, do you know what? I want to go off and sort out my LinkedIn.’ I want to go and check out this other website. So it obviously has connected, and like I said, I think it is that thing where you’re not being threatened into something, you’re having it pointed out to you in a very polite way, in a very nice way, in a very friendly, all girls together way. And yeah, I do think I should go and sort out my LinkedIn account now. Well, maybe not right now.

Speaker C: The training course is called TechMums, so was there any evidence of children, or was this a kind of child-free zone own, a place where women could be grown-ups and talk about things they might do, businesses they might start, jobs they might get, and so on.

Speaker E: There were no children within the program itself, bar one little girl saying who her female hero was on a, on like a video montage thing that they did for Women’s Day. But they had women who had come in as guests who were young mums who had used the tech mums thing to improve their skills, but it wasn’t a case of children were excluded. It was a case of actually celebration of mothers all the way through, but no children running around, which was quite, quite nice. But like I said, it really was like watching a daytime television program. It was very, very, very easily absorbed, although after the first half an hour of me being very grown up and sensible and watching it I did find myself thinking, I could do the dusting while I’m here. Well, that’s even better, multitasking. Well, the standard mum thing, isn’t it? But that’s like I say, that’s what it came across as. It was like having the telly on and just it being part of a daily thing that people do.

Speaker A: Blue’s other problem, of course, before she can even think of a part-time or full-time career in technology, is childcare. So the flexible, trustworthy babysitting services offered by Bubble Sound like a great idea. Bubble is a sort of Uber for childcare. It’s been in the news recently quite a lot, but the important difference is that Bubble babysitter isn’t just a random driver. It’s someone who has already proved that they are reliable and trustworthy and has been rated by your own friends and family. Charlotte’s been talking to Bubble’s co-founder, Ari Last.

Speaker H: Bubble is on-demand app that is helping parents find trusted childcare even at a moment’s notice. Driven, I guess, by selfish reasons. It was after I had my first kid and realized that myself, my wife, every parent I seemed to come across had a massive problem finding reliable, trusted babysitters, and it was just hugely underserved by technology. But what makes Bubble different is we show parents the babysitters that they know via mutual friends and contacts, that the babysitters recommended and loved by their own community. So who is using Bubble?

Speaker B: What do the demographics look like for sitters and for parents?

Speaker H: So on the babysitter side, it’s really varied. It’s a marketplace, so you’ve got everyone from your 17-year-old sixth form student who kind of lives down the street, lots of university students, you know, lots of nursing and medical students, and then you have lots of professional childcarers, lots of teachers and nurses. So it’s really varied on the babysitter side. They all set their own rates, they all have different experience levels and skill sets, and parents get to pick the ones that they want for their kids. On the parent side, right now, I’d say the demographic is largely used by mums, although one of the nice phenomenons about our app is all of a sudden dads, rightly or wrongly, but dads are getting involved in booking the babysitters.

Speaker B: So why do you think it is so important that sitting becomes so much easier for parents? What do you think parents are really getting out of things like this?

Speaker H: We thought this was about, you know, getting our social lives back, and it’s going to be about parents using it on the weekend and in the evenings, and it largely is, and it’s super, super important and valuable for parents to, you know, have a social life again. But actually what’s caught us pleasantly by surprise is just how many bookings are daytime bookings by parents, mums, who are using the app for all kinds of things. You know, actually a lot of the time it’s the boring mundane things that we as parents give up on and took for granted before our kids came along. So parents are now tapping into the app to get in an extra pair of hands for a couple of hours to help, I don’t know, go to the house, house viewings, PTA meetings, haircuts, going to the gym. If they’ve had a particularly hard day, they’re getting someone in on Bubble just to come round at bath time and dinner time to help them for a couple of hours. And that’s a completely new tool in all of our pockets and at all of our fingertips as parents. So, you know, we had a mum the other day book a babysitter to come with her to the office to help her negotiate her maternity pay. And the other big The other big factor we’re seeing in terms of why mums are taking up the app is to help them juggle work. So lots and lots of mums, either they are working from offices or they’re actually working from home, and we see lots of bookings in the app where they’re bringing someone in so that they can have peace and quiet to do a conference call in the other room while a babysitter looks after their kid at home. So it’s really playing a big factor in helping working mums juggle work life and family life a bit better.

Speaker B: So what does the best profile look like for a sitter? You know, what are parents really looking for in the people that they trust with their children?

Speaker H: So that’s a really interesting question because our position is there’s a fairly broad spectrum of where parents sit in terms of what we each need from our sitter. And fundamentally, as parents, we believe no one is better than ourselves to judge what we need. And we see on the app, you know, how lots of parents use it in completely different ways. Our mission is to give parents the information and the choice, and they are always in control and they choose who they want. So sometimes you get a parent, they will only use someone who has a certain number of reviews, who has first aid training and a DBS check. Sometimes parents book a sitter, but they’ll only use them if they can have a pre-meeting with a babysitter, or if the babysitter can come to the sit an hour early, and the app makes it very easy to facilitate this. Parents book sitters based off of reviews and social recommendation. Our challenge is to show parents, give them rich, smart, transparent information at their fingertips, and they always decide who is right for them. And we’re all using slightly different things to get comfortable. Sometimes the word app, I think, can scare people. You know, people think of an app for babysitting, they immediately think like, like the Ubers or the Deliveroos of this world. We’ve been compared to them all, where you tap a button and someone shows up at your door. You know, with Bubble, it’s completely different. Parents totally control and always choose who they want.

Speaker B: So it is almost like the traditional way of babysitting, just in a new service?

Speaker H: Yeah, I’m really glad you said that because, you know, that’s, that’s the point we need to constantly reinforce. You know, for all of our clever technology, and some of it is clever, ultimately the idea is very simple. All we did as founders really is we looked at how parents are booking babysitters every day offline in the real world. Is we send a WhatsApp out or we go on a Facebook our Facebook group to our limited group, or we ask at the school gates or at work, who do our friends know? And when our friends recommend us someone, we book them. All Bubble is doing is taking the dynamic and how parents are already doing it offline, and we’re making it easier, smarter, and I think safer and more transparent via an app.

Speaker B: So naturally, with something like this, safety always will be a concern. How is Bubble overcoming the fears and the worries and making sure that the people using it are safe?

Speaker H: Safety is obviously is absolutely key to what we do. Not just that, but being transparent about what Bubble is and what Bubble is not is hugely important to us. Bubble isn’t a nanny agency. We are a marketplace. You know, we never claimed to be. We’re not vetting all babysitters in a traditional sense. What we’re about is showing parents who are around them, giving them various bits of information and tools to make decisions that are right for them. We’re not a completely open marketplace though, so every babysitter on the platform has to pass an online identity check and an online background check before their profile goes live. There is a baseline level of security checks, and again, so there’s a baseline check that every sitter goes through before their profile goes live. Layered on top of that for parents is they can read reviews from other parents and chat to other parents in the app. They can see mutual friends in common. They can filter by things like, does this babysitter have a DBS check or first aid training? What earns our trust is social recommendation. So we’re giving them the ability to tap into that via their phones.

Speaker A: Bubbles Ari last there. Now, apps like this collect a lot of data, an enormous amount in fact, and what they do with that data is not always transparent or desirable. The data that schools collect on children from ages 2 to 19 has now actually become a bit of a battleground. There is in fact a court case coming up demanding judicial review of the law that allows state school children’s personal individual data to be given away to the media or market research companies. Data scientist Jen Pearson at Defend Digital Me explains to Jane why she started the campaign.

Speaker I: I’m Jen, I am a mum of 3 children, and about 4 years ago I started to understand a little bit better how the government was planning to use our medical records and were going to give all of our GP records to a central database from where they were going to be given away to commercial companies, think tanks, charities, and all sorts of other researchers. And I thought, hang on a minute, that doesn’t sound right. We have a right to confidentiality. And I started to look more into it and discovered how that was being used, and that all, in fact, our hospital records were already being used in this way. So I followed that campaign quite closely and then from there understood better that in fact our children’s personal data collected in schools and across the education sector were being used a very similar way, and that I, despite being a mum myself, hadn’t been informed how children’s data collected in schools were being used and thought I should know more about it. So I started to do some work, started to ask some questions using freedom of information requests from government, and I set up a campaign, and we chose the name Defend Digital Me together with another mum and teacher. So we’re nonpartisan, we’re apolitical, and we would campaign for policy improvements regardless of which party they come from. We campaign for safe, fair, and transparent use of children’s personal confidential data across the education sector in England. And we were really fortunate this year, 2017-2018, to be funded through a single annual grant from the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, which we’ll be soon looking to renew. But we’ve been working very hard this year to try and get better improvements in how data are handled and to help people understand how children’s data are used. And how are they being used?

Speaker C: This must be something that’s really quite scary. For you to go to all that trouble of launching a national campaign and getting it funded and so on?

Speaker I: I was shocked when I found out that my children’s records were being given over, lock, stock and barrel, with their full name, their date of birth, their gender, their home address, everything about their attainment, reasons for absence, or even should they be excluded, reasons for exclusion, which are quite sensitive things like violence, theft, alcohol, sexual misconduct, and full children’s records were being given to a national database 3 times a year. I’d thought the government would need to understand things to plan children’s education well and to plan policy, of course, and I’d support that, but I thought it would be statistics, anonymous data, collections of aggregated data. I had no idea it would be sent on a national basis, on a named basis. And that these data are collected, stored in a database, and then linked with all sorts of other data that collected— get collected about them from age 2 through to age 19. And then from there, once it becomes the National Pupil Database, they were being given away to third parties, and that’s the bit I was really surprised by.

Speaker C: What kind of third parties would get access to this data?

Speaker I: In 2013, the government brought in a new law, which was fairly quiet, clearly, because I had 3 children in school at the time and completely missed it. And they allowed individual pupil-level data about individual children to be given away to a whole range of third parties for research purposes. But the research purposes included providing information, so they’re very, very broad, and that therefore meant companies, data analytics companies, charities, think tanks, and even journalists had access to this data. Now, I don’t have anything against journalists as individuals, but I was absolutely horrified to find that a journalist from The Telegraph or The Times or even BBC Newsnight could be getting more access to my child’s individual record than I was allowed, because I asked the department would you give me a copy of what you hold on my own children? I made what’s called a subject access request and said I’d like to know what data you hold about them and also who you’ve given it to. And they refused. It’s crazy. How are they allowed to do that? This piece of law, this statutory instrument they brought in, said they had permission to give individual pupil-level data out to these third parties. Now, the government says we do this on a regulated, licensed basis and that the users of the data have to sign an agreement. Which means that it’s safe. But it’s not safe when you send out this information to their own computers. Before Christmas, we saw that finally the government had admitted that they’d given these data away over 1,000 times, and that’s personal, confidential, sensitive data, and they’d given it out over 1,000 times since 2012. And it means that it’s not safe and secure in the government’s own settings, or a safe setting, but actually sitting on the desktops or servers of all these third parties. So we were concerned because we said, well, once they’re out there, how do we know that they’re not misusing it, or they’ve sold it, or lost it, or had it hacked, or given it to somebody else, or used it for something completely different? And of course you’d think the government would, would be looking after it, but in fact they don’t even have a regular audit process. So the data’s being sent out into the wild and then not even— hadn’t been properly followed up. So when we asked, you know, what did The Telegraph do with it, presumably they had a license agreement for 3 years, the government had to come back and say, well, we’ve asked and actually they hadn’t deleted it by the time they said they would, and we’ve chased up now and they will. So since we’ve done some work, they’ve started to tighten up the processes, but it still means that children’s data are being sent out to all these companies and sitting out without anybody’s oversight and outside our control.

Speaker C: So what can mothers, what can parents do about it?

Speaker I: The thing that we would say is start asking questions. To write to their MP, send them a quick email. You can use a website called writetothem.com. We also have information on our website defenddigitalme.com. You can send your MP a question and say, why are these data going to places without my consent? And demand that the data get made safe. But unfortunately, there’s not an awful lot we can do otherwise because the law was passed to allow them to do so. The other thing that we can say is the Information Commissioner’s Office takes inquiries and complaints from the public. You can also email or telephone the Information Commissioner, or ICO in England, and they look after, if you like, the data rights of the public, and you can complain to them if you think your data has been misused in ways that you didn’t find reasonable or hadn’t been told about. We just carried out a survey, actually an independent survey through the company Cervation. One of the questions that they asked of 1,000 parents in February was, have you been informed that your child’s data, if you’re in a state-educated school in England, have you been informed that those data can be given away by the Department for Education? And 69% came back and said no. We’ve not been informed that the Department for Education can give our children’s data away. We actually think it’s probably even higher than that, because there’s some bias in that number when people feel like, well, I probably should know, and I, or I maybe I’ve read something about it in the census. And especially when they started to collect country of birth and nationality last year, there was a little bit of information that went out to some people better around how nationality data were going to be used because people pricked up their ears after the EU referendum, were concerned about that. So there is a bit more information out in the public in the last year, but we still think clearly the vast majority of parents have no idea this information are going to third parties. So we’d say let your MP know, complain, write to them, and also the Information Commissioner. You can drop them a quick email or a phone call.

Speaker A: That’s Jen Pearson, founder of Defend Digital Me. The campaign’s group’s especially worried about the effect that wholesale data collection can have on schoolchildren whose parents are not in the UK.

Speaker H: From our handheld devices, we can access the internet, fake news or facts. All the information we want is there. Comment, share, bully or taunt. We’re greater than data, zeros and ones. Our lives become numbers, quantified, coded, managed, sanitised, traded, friended, filtered out, de-identified. It’s our internet search, our private thinking. Terms and conditions declare our passive agreement so they can say we don’t mind being exploited, discriminated, or a service denied. Every form online or off is giving our stats, our lives in boxes defined by our tick which answer applies to you, circle 1 to 5, rate A to E, because you know, who really reads the small print? Who uses our data?

Speaker A: As technology moves into education, secure data storage and access to information will become increasingly important. American futurist Alberta Rosolli has made a podcast for the Future of Business series predicting that bots will soon replace classroom assistants and teachers won’t teach knowledge but instead act as motivators. But surely having all these bots and apps is just going to be a massive distraction? Families already have to cope with so many gadgets, consoles, devices, and smartphones, and children and technology don’t always get along. Accidents do happen, as Ellie Martin from Protect Your Gadget has been telling Charlotte.

Speaker B: You’ve done a lot of research into the subject. Can you tell me what do the numbers look like? So who is the most prone to breaking their gadgets?

Speaker J: What we did was we sent out a survey to 1,000 people, completely random. The most that came back was sort of women in regards to sort of liquid damage. Basically, we gave a little comment section where people could write sort of the specific reasons as to how they’ve damaged their phones. Quite a lot of women, they came back, we had one that said boob sweat, I’m not joking. Another one that said I’ve had it in my bra at a gig and it was damaged by the sweat. And then it was sort of followed closely behind by the men, but that was mainly due to sort of like influence of alcohol. Mainly the women that were doing it, and that was sort of a mixture between sort of their children breaking them. Is that less common for men?

Speaker B: Did you find that a lot of the stats, men weren’t having their gadgets as damaged by children?

Speaker J: Feedback that came back, there wasn’t very many sort of children-related or grandchildren sort of related comments that came back from the men. It was mainly from the women.

Speaker B: So how can we safeguard against that kind of thing? There’s obviously a lot of people that are doing this with their phones. Do you know how we could stop that from happening or maybe protect phones against it?

Speaker J: That’s why we developed Protect Your Gadget, which is the— we are a comparison service against insurance for phones, we have different ranges of levels, we cover everything from phones to, to your tablets as well, and you can get these all on the same sort of policy. With this then, obviously water damage is quite a common theme that we see when people do quote, but there are some specific little bits within the policy. So we did see that 7 out of the 162 policies that we do offer on the website, they do not cover if you accidentally were to put your phone in the washing machine. So there are policies out there that will cover you for specific issues. You know, if you do stick your phone in the washing machine by accident, not something you’re aware of, you know, that’s the sort of way to go. But it is, you know, insurance is highly important, especially, you know, with these people walking around with brand new phones that are about £1,000.

Speaker B: So on these kind of policies, do you think there is sort of a definite split between not covering the things that affect more women, so having it broken by a child or having it broken by sweat in that way?

Speaker J: We’ve done quite a lot of research into looking into the the in-depths of the policy, and we did find that some of them, they don’t cover if sort of like an immediate family under the age of 18 are using the phone, and most of them, they actually do. So it’s quite important, you know, which is why we’ve highlighted it on our website, that people can see whether it’s covered for instant cover for their younger family. So it’s mainly aged toward people that do have families and younger children. You know, I see my friends that have got kids and my younger siblings, my mum and dad, they’ll chuck a phone at them to keep them quiet and they don’t think about it, do you, at the time if you’re out having a meal, you just give them something to watch, you don’t even think that they might lob it across and it might, you know, smash the screen or they might spill their drink on it. You don’t think of that, so having a policy that kind of explains that to you, that you can get that cover, I think is really, really important for families, especially people that have younger children under the age of 18 as well.

Speaker A: So that is all from Password this time around. It’s a Future Intelligence production for Resonance FM, and you can find out more about technology in society at the Future Intelligence website. TechMums is on Facebook Live, the Breast Pump Marathon at MIT is on the 29th of April, and you’ll find Bubble, Neurotrash, and the National Childbirth Trust, and Defend Digital Me all online. And there is loads more friendly and informative stuff for mothers like me over at channelmum.com as well. Password will be back on Resonance FM on Wednesday the 12th of April. Thank you so much for listening and goodbye. This program has been brought to you by Resonance 104.4 FM. If you liked what you heard and want to support our work, please make a donation at fundraiser.resonance.fm.