Parents are struggling to juggle their jobs and children because society has given up on the notion that “it takes a village to raise a child”, according to the new host of Woman’s Hour.
Nuala McGovern, who took over from Emma Barnett on the beloved BBC Radio 4 show this month, said many parents no longer have strong support networks, and worry they are imposing if they ask for help.
“That idea it takes a village, we have lost that, and it would make things easier,” she said. “A lot of people live away from family — it’s not like you can drop in to your mum and throw the baby in with her for a couple of hours — or maybe your mum is working. There isn’t the set-up that there was once upon a time.”
McGovern, 52, does not have children herself, so said she had “observer status, without a dog in the fight”, adding: “I haven’t been asked to babysit as many times as I’d have expected. People feel it’s a big imposition, instead of it being normalised. I don’t think people drop kids with friends as readily as they did in the previous generation.”
McGovern grew up in Dublin, the middle child of five. Just before she was born, her parents bought a pub, the Goblet, which remains in the family to this day and was a source of occasional childcare. “My parents wouldn’t take the youngest child on holiday because what’s the point? They’d just leave them with someone from the pub: not someone who worked there — someone who drank there,” she recalled. “There was a man they used to leave my younger sister with — he had 11 children, what was one more?”
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Childcare is an issue McGovern will keep in the spotlight on the programme, but she would also like to hear more from those who are voluntarily childless. Echoing the poet Robert Frost about her own decision, she said: “It is a path diverged, and I — not knowing which to choose — chose the one less travelled by,” adding: “There’s always an interest about who has children and who doesn’t, sometimes because you’re trying to understand how people have got to where they are, what are their other responsibilities? It’s very fertile ground for Woman’s Hour.”
McGovern, who covered Barnett’s maternity leave last year, cannot believe her luck in being back permanently (she hosts the show from Monday to Wednesday, with Anita Rani doing Thursday to Saturday).
“As a listener, you have a vision of what it’d be like to present Woman’s Hour — and it’s all that, and more,” she said. “It’s my radio spiritual home. They’ll have to pry me out with a crowbar, when the time comes.”
She didn’t grow up dreaming of working in the media but believes doing shifts in the pub from the age of 12 gave her relevant skills: “I maybe wasn’t as diligent a student as I could have been, but I loved chatting to people, I loved knowing their stories.”
She studied English and Italian at University College Dublin, then taught English and worked briefly for a newspaper in Venice, before moving to New York in 1996. She worked her way up from intern to executive producer on The Brian Lehrer Show on New York public radio. The station’s offices were close to the World Trade Center.
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“I was actually looking out of the window when the first plane exploded,” she said of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. “I thought it was a bomb. We continued broadcasting but after the second plane hit, we left the building, and went to our midtown studios. I remember that walk: it was chaotic and we saw people covered in ash and the shop windows with TVs were all showing the planes hitting. We continued broadcasting all day and all night. Those conversations were cathartic — and that’s my bedrock for what we’re doing with Woman’s Hour.”
Three years earlier, she met her husband-to-be, Tristan Agates, in the New York club CBGB. “It was late on a Friday night, I was about to leave and I remember thinking ‘handsome, way too quiet’. And then we met again a couple of months later, and I said, ‘hello Tristan’, and he said, ‘hello Nuala’ and that was it.”
Agates worked in risk analysis for American Express, but he retrained in the UK, working at Kew Gardens and now at the University of Greenwich, where he manages the roof gardens and teaches horticulture. She is the primary earner, and believes that most men don’t feel emasculated by their wives out-earning them. “That idea is outdated. My husband and I have switched those roles over the years,” she said. “It’s something that sits very easily with us. And not having childcare responsibilities maybe gives us flexibility in that particular sphere. He definitely takes more care of business within the home. I used to do a lot of nights for many years, and the first thing to go is anything to do with the house — you’re just knackered. He picked up the slack.”
The couple moved to London in 2009, and McGovern, then aged 37, felt she had to start afresh in her career as her US experience “did not immediately translate”. She began working as a freelance producer for the BBC, when a colleague suggested she try presenting. “I remember every bone in my body saying no — I was afraid to do it — but another part of me really wanted to do it,” she recalled. She would become one of the BBC World Service’s top presenters, and report from more than 30 countries, before finding her home at Woman’s Hour.
The programme has allowed previous hosts the freedom to delve into underexplored issues. For Jane Garvey, that was the “sandwich generation” of carers who look after both children and elderly parents, while Barnett, who suffers from endometriosis and adenomyosis, focused on reproductive health. McGovern wants to devote more airtime to what advances in digital technology will mean for equality and for women, inspired by interviews she has done with the actress Emily Atack, who made a documentary about online abuse, and with Georgia Harrison, a reality TV star who campaigns against so-called “revenge porn”.
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“Their bravery in speaking out allowed other women to speak out, and then you think about potential solutions,” she said. “There are a lot of positives about technology, but the drawbacks can predominantly affect women.”
The BBC has come under intense scrutiny in recent years about how the corporation treats female staff, with equal pay fights and allegations of age and sex discrimination. As the host of its flagship women’s programme, does she feel she should be a voice for female staff at the corporation?
“I hope I have always been a voice for women at the BBC,” she replied, adding that she sees mentoring junior staff as a part of her job. “So many women have come to me over the years, and I try to make that path easier for them. It’s only ever been women. A couple of men have come to me when they want a job I’ve done, but they’ve never gone to me for advice, whereas women have come in droves.”
