How has war changed the lives of Ukraine’s working women?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 13 November 2023
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 saw millions of Ukrainian women and children flee to safety; causing massive upheaval and hitting the economy hard.
For the women who have stayed, their lives have been transformed; many have taken on new roles, like Tetiana, who is now working underground in a coal mine, and Evgeniya, who is now a sniper on the frontline.
Others, like Alina Kacharovska, have managed to grow their businesses; in this case, shoes and accessories, or are stepping into leadership positions, like Yulia Burmistenko, in the crisis group at energy company D-Tek.
In this edition of Business Daily, we also hear from Iryna Drobovych from the Ukrainian Women’s Congress, and Yuliya Sporysh, founder & CEO of NGO Divchata, on how the war could change things for gender equality in Ukraine.
(Image: Tetyana Ustimenko, manager of underground installations at DTEK. Credit: DTEK)
Presented and produced by Clare Williamson
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Wait, so you said you genetically engineered yourself. |
| 0:02.8 | I put a foreign piece of DNA inside my cells. |
| 0:07.7 | Wow. |
| 0:08.5 | Crowd science is the podcast that takes your questions about life and the world around us and goes in search of the answers. |
| 0:14.6 | What happens to bugs during the winter? |
| 0:17.1 | Oh, there's a wasp in there. |
| 0:18.6 | Yeah. |
| 0:19.0 | Just search for crowd science wherever you found this podcast. |
| 0:24.5 | Today on Business Daily, we're heading to Ukraine, finding out how the lives of many working |
| 0:30.8 | women have been transformed by war. |
| 0:33.9 | We'll meet the women running and building businesses while their country is under attack. |
| 0:39.3 | We need to make the collection in time, so we will continue, and actually it was kind of a light in the end, you know, to move, not to like sit, cry, whatever. |
| 0:49.8 | This experience right now, I understand what it gave to me personally. |
| 0:57.0 | It gave so much strength. So like, I am not afraid of anything. |
| 1:00.0 | And we'll hear from the women taking on jobs traditionally done by men. |
| 1:05.0 | We're going down a coal mine to meet Tettiana, |
| 1:08.0 | helping to keep the power running despite Russian bombardment. |
| 1:14.3 | Women always used to work in the mines before it was banned. |
| 1:17.6 | Then, when the war started, we were asked if we wanted to work underground to support the |
| 1:22.7 | Energy Front while the men went into the army. |
| 1:25.5 | That's the new way of life for working women in Ukraine, with me Claire Williamson, |
| 1:30.6 | coming up in today's Business Daily. |
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