The Conversation

Aowen Jin is from China but has lived and worked in the UK for 18 years. Originally trained as a lawyer, she swapped a life at the bar for a life at the easel and now her work is in the Queen's private collection. Before the civil war Sara Shamma was a star of the blossoming Syrian art scene. She carried on painting in Damascus for as long as she could - starting on a series called Diaspora. By the time she finished it, she was herself part of the Syrian diaspora, having fled to neighbouring Lebanon where she has made her home. Aowen and Sara joined Kim Chakanetsa in the studio to talk about leaving home, taking inspiration from conflict, family ties and how to spend a day off relaxing to music and eating cheese!(Photo: Sara Shamma and Aowen Jin outside the BBC offices in London. Credit: Tim Allen)

Salima Ikram was born in Pakistan and got hooked on ancient Egyptian artefacts through the pictures in a childhood book. Her fate as an Egyptologist was sealed when she came face-to-face, aged nine, with mesmerising statues in the Cairo museum; she decided then that finding out more about them would be her life's work. "Archaeologists are people who never grew up" she says. When not lecturing at the American University in Cairo, Salima will be somewhere dry, dusty, and dirty, recording ancient inscriptions or X-raying mummies - human and animal. Her role models in archaeology were women who had been working since the 1940s, but, she says sexism is still a problem and more so in the west than the east. The important thing, she says, "is to do what you want to do and do it very well." Justine Benanty is a qualified pilot but as a maritime archaeologist her time is spent underwater rather than in the sky. At her first dig in Israel she realised that she hated wheelbarrows and got sunburnt too easily to work in the desert, so investigating shipwrecks became her focus. Her project for the last five years has been to tell the stories of the slaves, who were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean, through archaeology. It is a science which needs an image overhaul because, she says "there's nothing cooler than finding [...] a shipwreck at the bottom of the sea that no-one has seen for hundreds of years". She is a co-founder of the ArchaeoVenturers project, a collection of videos and blogs about issues in history and science, which also celebrates women's work in these fields. (Photo: Salima Ikram and Justine Benanty. Credit: Salima Ikram - J. Rowland)

Annise Parker is the mayor of Houston, Texas, the oil and gas capital of America. She once worked in this industry, but says her day job was supporting her "volunteer habit" and eventually gave it up to serve her community full-time. Annise climbed the rungs of local government to become the first openly gay mayor of a major US city in 2010. Her election caused an international media frenzy because of her sexuality. "The perception was Houston was a very conservative, sort of backwards place that wouldn't allow that to happen", but Annise says she used the coverage as an opportunity to talk about her city in a new way. Annise describes being a mayor as the best political job you can have, she was recently voted the seventh best in the world, but is sad about the lack of women wanting to take up this position. Chhavi Rajawat also gave up a high-flying corporate career in India to run for elected office. She has an MBA and worked in the telecoms industry, until she was asked by villagers from her ancestral home, Soda in Rajasthan, to run for the position of sarpanch, or local mayor. Chhavi has used her business savvy to attract funds from the private sector to help provide clean water, electricity and build toilets. She says, "if I were just to depend on government funding I don't think I'd be able to do what I've been able to do in these five years." She's been credited with changing the face of rural India because of her achievements. Chhavi says for her "every day is a Monday", people queue up at her front door early morning and late at night to discuss their issues. (Photo: Mayor Annise Parker and Sarpanch Chhavi Rajawat)

Naamah Kelman was the first woman to be ordained a rabbi in Israel in 1992. She belongs to the liberal Reform movement in Judaism and so her office isn't recognised by Orthodox Jews. She says, "women in our family were supposed to marry rabbis ... and give birth to rabbis" but her father gave her the support she needed to break the mould, study for years, and eventually become a leader. Naamah was influenced by the feminist movement to follow her religious calling despite the fears some in her own community had on her behalf about whether she was "up to it". She is now Dean of the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. Former Catholic nun, Christine Mayr-Lumetzberger describes herself as a bishop, but the ordination of women in the Catholic Church is considered a grave crime - the priesthood is a male preserve. Growing up in Austria she was drawn to Biblical stories and loved sharing and explaining them, comparing her feeling of having a religious calling to having a musical gift. She spent years in a convent in the hope that reforms would enable women to become deacons. The "scandal" of her actions and subsequent ex-communication by the Vatican have not deterred her from what she feels is her path in life. (Photo left: Naamah Kelman. Credit: Yitzhak Harari. Photo right: Christine Mayr-Lumetzberger. Credit: C M Lumetzberger)

MC Melodee is a rapper from Amsterdam who grew up listening to cassette tapes of De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest. From a young age Melodee says she loved playing with language and creating rhymes. Melodee says she went to university to please her parents, but when she graduated she chose a career in music, rather than a steady office job. That decision paid off and now MC Melodee has rocked venues around the world and set up her own female collective, Dam Dutchess, to coach, promote and encourage talented young women in the industry.DJ Naida is from Zimbabwe's capital Harare and has also worked in an all-female collective of rappers from different African nations. She describes herself as "a social commentator", with a personal style influenced by "old school" artists such as Lauryn Hill, Tupac and Coolio. When she was starting out in rap Naida was shaken by a music producer's warning that, "you really can't rap, anyway it's not for females, you really shouldn't be doing it - stick to the singing you'll probably make more money with it". She gave up, but eventually came back to it and proved that she could be a successful rapper -- and that same producer is now one of her biggest supporters.(Photo left: DJ Naida. Photo right: MC Melodee. Credit: Dear Productions)

At the age of 28 Ky Furneaux swapped her job as a guide in the Australian outback for stunt work in Hollywood. "I don't think I really realised it was gonna hurt," she says of this sometimes "brutal" industry. Now aged 41 Ky is a veteran of more than 60 films including Catwoman, X-Men: The Last Stand, and Thor. She has a reputation for taking "hard hits" but admits that the first time someone punched her in the face, she cried. She won a Taurus award which is the stunt industry's equivalent of an Oscar for her work in the blockbuster Thor and is trying to retire but the actresses she doubles for are reluctant to let her. Sanober Pardiwalla is one of the relatively few female stunt action performers in India's massive film industry. She says that being sporty and confident from an early age made her stand out among other Indian girls and propelled her to become a black belt in karate and learn to ride a motorbike. Now her skills are called upon by some of Bollywood's top action directors, but she would not recommend her profession to other Indian women. Sanober believes 'visualisation' plays a huge part in successful stunts and describes how she approached performing a fall down a 300-feet cliff face.(Photo left: Sanober Pardiwalla. Credit: Sanober Pardiwalla. Photo right: Ky Furneaux. Credit: Ky Furneaux)

Mexican conductor Alondra de la Parra has been described as a 'rock star' of the classical world. At a concert as a child her father asked her what a conductor does - "nothing" she replied. So he enlightened her and explained that the conductor does "everything". This ignited a curiosity, which soon led to an unstoppable passion and in her early 20s Alondra set up the Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas to showcase Latin music. She is now also a guest conductor with some of the greatest orchestras in the world.Simone Young is an award-winning conductor who is now the artistic director of the Hamburg State Opera and music director of the Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra. She does not come from a musical family, but says that growing up in Australia, where people who challenge the status quo are championed, helped to push her along her chosen career path. Simone is now based in Germany, which is steeped in classical music history, but has guest-conducted with some of the world's leading orchestras and is famous for conducting Wagner.(Photo: Conductors Alondra de la Parra (left) and Simone Young. Credits: Alondra de la Parra by Leonardo Manzo. Simone Young by Berthold Fabricius)

When Houriya Kazim became the United Arab Emirates' first ever woman surgeon in the late 1990s she chose to specialise in breast surgery. Accusations of immodesty and even pornography followed as Houriya's educational pamphlets fell foul of the authorities' restrictions on language and images of women's bodies. Despite making progress in encouraging women to check their breasts for signs of cancer she has seen tumours so advanced that they have burst out of the skin. She describes how when that happens, "they smell and it's right under your nose." Maria Siemionow has led the surgical teams on the only two face transplant operations to have been performed in the USA, in December 2008 and in September 2014. Born and raised in Poland, Maria says her parents - both economists - inspired her ambition to "be in charge" and a childhood doing handicrafts prepared her for the 'embroidery' of microsurgery (operating under a microscope). She is professor of orthopaedic surgery in the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine.(Photo: Surgeons Houriya Kazim (left) and Dr Maria Siemionow. Credit: Roberta Dupuis-Devlin/UIC Photo Services)

When celebrity chef Farah Quinn first appeared on screens in Indonesia, people were not quite sure what to make of her. Viewers were used to male chefs, so making her mark was not easy. Critics quibbled about her talents saying they lay in her looks rather than her culinary achievements, but Farah says this is unfair and she has worked hard to get to where she is, starting at the bottom and running her own restaurant.Russian chef Marianna Orlinkova can relate to working in a tough, male-dominated industry. She says there are not many female chefs in Moscow - the kitchen culture is too tough. Marianna is a 'brand chef' and creates menus for a restaurant in the city, as well as being an award-winning food writer and deputy editor of Russia's Gastronom magazine. (Photo: Farah Quinn (credit: Rio Photography) and Marianna Orlinkova)

Two women in the field of psychiatry discuss the demands and satisfaction that comes from working in Uganda and Pakistan, where there is still a stigma around mental health and mental health professionals.Dr Margaret Mungherera was the first African woman to be elected president of the World Medical Association, a role she held from 2013 until quite recently. Dr Mungherera was one of only six psychiatrists in Uganda when she started out at the country's largest mental health hospital where she says patients were often neglected by both the government and their own families. She helped to change the fortunes of this institution and attitudes towards mental health in Uganda.Dr Unaiza Niaz is also trying to change opinions and beliefs about her profession in Pakistan. "When I decided on psychiatry they thought I'd gone bonkers" she says of her friends and family. Dr Naiz is the former chair of the women's mental health section of the World Psychiatric Association and the founder and president of Pakistan's Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. Her work has focused on trauma in Pakistani society caused by terrorism, the effects of the conflict over the border in Afghanistan and of natural disasters such as floods and earthquakes.