Weekend Woman’s Hour: Listener week - Elderly caring, women in boat building, dialects, functional skills in schools

Listener 'Sarah' tells us about the burden and resentment she feels at caring for a parent who is in her 90s, when she is a pensioner too. This is the time she thought she would have for herself. Clare Jefferies, who co-runs care companies and has written the book: I’m Your Daughter, Not Your Carer, and Caroline Abrahams, charity director of Age UK, discuss the problem with Kylie Pentelow.

Have you ever considered working in boat building? We were contacted by Women in Boat Building, a community of women working hands-on in the industry, who wanted to tell us about their experiences and raise the profile of a trade that's largely male-dominated. Abbey Molyneux, a traditional boat builder who runs her own boatyard in Norfolk and is a director of Women in Boat Building, and Vanessa Larmond, who's just starting out in the industry in Southwold, Suffolk, tell us what it is like.

Do you ever use dialect when you speak? Do you think of yourself as having an accent? How do you feel about the way you sound? A listener in Yorkshire, Christina Longden, has got in touch with a request to hear from women like herself who are actively keeping regional dialect alive, an endeavour which she says has traditionally been the preserve of men. Christina would also like to discuss accent and dialect bias and why, she says, men have always been more permitted to speak in dialect than women. To discuss why what you say and how you say it still matters and how it’s influenced by gender, presenter Chloe is joined from Yorkshire by Christina Longden, a council member of the Yorkshire Dialect Society; by Diana Rackham, chair of Friends of Norfolk Dialect; and by Rob Drummond, professor of sociolinguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University.

In two weeks’ time, thousands of young people will open their GCSE results - but what about those who don’t get the grade 4 they need in maths and English? 41% of pupils in maths and 29% in English won’t reach that benchmark, and 82% fail their resits, blocking their path to A levels, T Levels and BTECs. Listener Hannah Gee highlights a hidden alternative: Functional Skills, which have a 60–80% pass rate. Chloe Tilley talks to Hannah and her son Joe, and Claire Green from the Association of School and College leaders.

Do men make more noise than women? One of our listeners thinks so and wrote: ‘It seems like a bit of frivolity, maybe, but it is blooming annoying, and I started to wonder if there is something psychological behind it: the noise men make when there is no need to make a noise at all. The coughing, sniffing, ‘ahhing’ as they get up and down, the belching, farting etc. It seems to get worse as they get older; or is it that women become less tolerant? Women seem to be silent in a room, but their other half is constantly making some sort of noise.’ Janet Street-Porter and Tim Dowling discuss.

Presenter: Chloe Tilley
Producer: Annette Wells