Xinran & Catherine Coldstream with Suzanne Heywood (10:30 BST)

Three women discuss the impact of external forces on their lives at a time when equal power and equal rights for women remain elusive.

Xinran was born in Beijing in 1958 before moving to London in 1997. Her radio programme in China became famous for its unflinching portrayal of what it meant to be a woman in modern China and led to her much-acclaimed book The Good Women of China. Her charity, The Mother’s Bridge of Love, reaches out to Chinese children in all corners of the world.

Suzanne Heywood, author of Wavewalker, is now Chief Operating Officer of a large company. Enduring a nomadic childhood, she had to fight every inch of the way to reach university and career success, harnessing her hardships as sources of resilience to give her an understanding of the experience facing many women.

By contrast, Catherine Coldstream, author of Cloistered, chose to hide herself in an all-women enclosed Carmelite monastery only to run away 12 years later. She speaks about the challenges in re-entering a society very different from the one she had left behind.

In conversation with Sheena McDonald

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