The Hidden World of Women

It’s International Women’s Day today! This years theme is ‘Invest in Women: Accelerate Progress’ (find out more here https://www.un.org/en/observances/womens-day) As we’re a women’s organisation and gender based service we had to take the time to focus on acknowledging the 8th March. This year we struggled to come up with a topic for conversation particularly relating to accelerating progress until a post acknowledged Iris Apfel ...

In this weeks episode of the Hidden World of Women, Emma is joined by Serena. Serena is one unit away from completing her masters in counselling and was diagnosed with ADHD when she was 54. While this episode was going to focus on studying and careers with ADHD, in true ADHD fashion we went everywhere! This episode talks about Serena’s path to diagnosis, her experiences as a child of a mother with ADHD and what it’s like starting a...

In this week’s episode of the hidden world of Women we are joined by Ginger. Ginger has been in the adult industry for the last nine years and shared her experiences as a stripper and skimpy worker. She started stripping after returning from the UK and needing a job and source of income fast. The social expectation of a stripper is that they’re people who have “gone off the rails.” (A real thing people have said to Ginger!) in Gin...

In this weeks episode of the hidden world of women we continue the “Working Women” series. We’re joined by Kiah, a professional declutterer and organiser.

Kiah started her business in 2019 after her husband suggested that she use her skill set and passions and start Declutter with Kiah. With the support of her friends and family she started helping people make their spaces enjoyable to live in.

In this episode Emma and Kiah talk ab...

October sees the celebration of Frocktober for ovarian cancer awareness. As we’re a women's health organisation we had to do an episode talking about it.

In this episode of The Hidden World of Women, Emma is joined by former host: Melanie Brown!

Melanie shares her story losing a friend to ovarian cancer and caring for someone who was dying. This experience prompted her to start participating in Frocktober, a month long event of wea...

September is the month with the highest rate of births in Australia! In episode of Hidden World of Women we’re asking the question “what is a doula?” Emma sat down with Michelle to find out.

Michelle talked about how she felt like she’d been an unofficial doula for the last 20 years after helping advocate for her friends and family within the hospital system. She became a doula officially after she realised how difficult the medica...

It’s women’s health week! Given this podcast is brought to you by Women’s Health and Wellbeing Services (https://whws.org.au ) we couldn’t let it pass without a podcast episode related. This year’s theme is Grow Your Knowledge. As always there is a different prompt for each day and Monday is Check Me Out – women’s health checks including cervical screening self-collection, heart health and vulval self-checks. As we are still trying...

In this week’s episode of Working Women, Emma spoke with Kitty Woodhouse, The Maiden of Metal. Kitty shared her experience as a professional metal artist.

Emma asked about what drew Kitty to metal art (a broken gate that will one day be fixed….maybe) her experiences learning the craft (spite is apparently a good motivator) and the impact it has on Kitty’s mental health.

In te episode Kitty spoke about having PTSD (post traumatic st...

In this second episode of the ‘Working Women’ series Emma spoke to Linda Gerwar. Linda is a truck driver on the mines in Western Australia. Mining is something people talk about a lot but you don’t necessarily hear about the specific jobs on site. In this episode they talked about Linda’s career change later in life and the motivations for it, what drew her to the mining industry in particular and the parts of fly in fly out (FIFO...

Welcome back people! After a hiatus we return with a new series “Working Women.” This series was created after numerous conversations with women saying they don’t know what they want to be when they grow up (some of these women were in their 40s, 50s and 60s and some were in their teens and 20s) and one of the reasons; they just don’t know what’s out there. To try and shed some light on different employment options, this series wil...

November is PRIDE month in Australia. Pride month provides an opportunity to celebrate the impact that LGBTQIA+ community has had on the world. For many in the Pride community it is a chance to celebrate how far we have come as a society (while still recognising that we have a long way to go!)

In this episode I spoke with Emma Atkinson about her experience living in a heterosexual marriage with two children and then, after divorce,...

Every year, twice a year in fact, we put out a service evaluation asking people what they would like to see us cover. Every time people say ‘menopause’ but when we offer information sessions people just don’t come. Whether that is because of the stigma that still surrounds talking about menopause or it is because women in perimenopause years are ‘busy’, maybe they are stressed or maybe they just forget (turns out they are both symp...

October is Breast Cancer Awareness month. In this episode I spoke with Richelle, an absolutely glorious woman who is a devoted mother, loving wife and dedicated tribal belly dancer and tribal dance teacher, she also happens to be a breast cancer survivor.

In the episode Richelle speaks about her experience with diagnosis, the importance of early detection (the power is in your hands), how other people’s reactions impacted her, what...

This is our 50th episode (and between the last episode and this we celebrated our second birthday!).

50 episodes seems like a milestone so I posted on socials to ask listeners what we should do to celebrate and it was suggested we talk to someone about turning 50. In the episode I spoke with Pip Brennan, author, independent lived experience advocate, and passionate women's health advocate about her experiences of turning 50. We t...

It’s Women’s Health Week! A few months ago I was approached by Megan from Centre for Women’s Safety and Wellbeing about co-hosting a podcast for Women’s Health Week focusing on women in sport. The idea being that we would shift away from some of the more standard topics that are covered for Women’s Health Week. We had a couple of chats about it. We hoped to talk about the benefits of sport, physical, emotional, mental, look at how ...

Speaking with many women, it seems that incontinence, light bladder leakage etc is something that they feel like they need to just live with after having a baby or as they age. So many times I have heard ‘I can’t jump on a trampoline’ ‘don’t make me laugh, tears of laughter will run down my legs’.

Whether it is the advertising for incontinence pads in the mother to be or new mother bags or the television advertising for incontinenc...

When we are planning to start a family we get a picture in our head around what it’s going to look like. It very rarely looks like the romanticised picture we create. Sometimes, the reality is as vastly different to that picture.

In this episode Bri shares how her family doesn’t look how she anticipated. Bri and her husband have two children. When they took him to the hospital with wheezing from a virus their suspicions were confir...

While some parts of the world celebrate Pride month in June, here in Australia we celebrate Pride in November but Pride is for more than just one month a year. The more we can learn about people’s experiences the more empathy and understanding we can show.

The 2016 Census counted 1,260 sex and/or gender diverse people in Australia, 26% of those identified as transgender. This count is not considered to be an accurate count, due t...

Why are we hearing about more women being diagnosed with ADHD as adults? Why were they not picked up and diagnosed in childhood? What does ADHD look like in women?

ADHD looks very different in girls and women to the stereotype of the naughty boys who are disruptive and destructive, always in trouble and doing the wrong thing. It can look like fidgeting, hyper focus, or an inability to concentrate, overachieving or zoning out. It ca...