Hello and welcome to Business Daily on the BBC World Service. I'm Dougal Shaw.

On a recent episode, I looked at co-working spaces and the idea of working near home, rather than commuting to city centres.

For this episode, we're going to take a look at a different aspect of co-working spaces, which to remind you, our big open-plan

offices with hot desks and nice amenities where people like freelancers can come and work on a membership

basis. Today, we're going to look at the idea of women-only co-working spaces. I think I naturally

gravitate towards female spaces. When you're operating in a world where you have a lot of headwinds

and a lot of challenges to overcome, being in an all-female space is incredibly refreshing. There's a lot of camaraderie. There's a lot of

community. How can we help women within our spaces, get to the resources they need, get the

mentorship they need, be in a space that feels inspired, be in a space where they feel their

lived experiences acknowledged and celebrated and honored.

The idea of women-only co-working spaces really took off in America during the height of the Me Too movement.

In recent years, the idea has suffered setbacks, with several high-profile women-only co-working space is closing,

but a global network of them still remains. The piece like you did about working near home,

this isn't even a trend for us. When we launched before COVID, we were always going to be working

near home, because that's where women, in certain periods in life, that's where they're

really focusing their energies on. As a business, what we're really providing is this calm space

for women to focus on themselves and physical space becomes mental, emotional, spiritual space.

That's Oi Leng Lui, an entrepreneur originally from Singapore who used to work in the film industry,

who now runs a women-only co-working space in North London called The Harth.

I went to visit her to find out what her space is like, who goes there and why.

O'Lean, nice to meet you. Hi, Dougal. Welcome to the hearth.

So we're going to go around just to check, am I going to get a few quizzical looks as a man coming in here?

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