For this episode I spoke to Professor Fiona Woollard.

Professor Woollard is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton. She has research interests in normative ethics, applied ethics, epistemically transformative experiences and the philosophy of sex and pregnancy. She has published on topics including the distinction between doing and allowing harm, climate change and the non-identity problem, the moral significance of numbers, pornography and the norm of monogamy.

Her recent research has led her to ask a question which turns out to be surprisingly difficult to answer: what is a mother? Not necessarily, in her view, a woman with a child. In this interview she explains why she doesn't think this is the right way of defining a mother, and what she thinks is a better way. To get there, we tried to get to grips with some vexed questions about gender.

Professor Woollard's page at Southampton is here.

Here's the advert we refer to at the start of the interview.

Some of the books and papers Professor Woollard talks about in the interview:

Ashley, Florence. (forthcoming) ”What Is It like to Have a Gender Identity? Gender Subjectivity and the Phenomenological Constitution of Gender Identity” Mind.
Bettcher, Talia Mae. (2009) “Trans Identities and First-Person Authority” In Laurie Shrage (ed.), You've Changed: Sex Reassignment and Personal Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hays, Sharon. (1998) The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. London: Yale University Press.
Jenkins, Katharine. (forthcoming) Ontology and Oppression: Race, Gender and Social Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kukla, Quill and Lance, Mark. (forthcoming) “Telling Gender: The Pragmatics and Ethics of Gender Ascriptions” in ERGO.
Ruddick, S. (1980). "Maternal Thinking". Feminist Studies, 6(2), 342–367.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Bloomberg Surveillance TV: December 8th, 2025

Bloomberg Surveillance

2026 outlook and tech leadership

The AI-powered Podcast Player