This podcast first came to my attention as one of the episodes featured the rather marvellous Simona de Silvestro - race car driver and generally all round good egg. Once I listened to that episode, I very quickly downloaded all the preceding shows and subscribed so I wouldn’t miss any future publications either.

In Her Court comes out of Australia and features sports journalist Sam Squiers interviewing a variety of sporting names regarding all things “women in sport”. Topics have included overcoming difficult events, changing sports mid-career, getting a leg up, fighting for equality with men, and sporting injuries. The focus of the most recent episode, which actually ended the first season of the show, was about whether women are more susceptible to injuries than their male counterparts, and delving deeper into that taboo topic of menstruation.

If you look at the research, much of it is very old, and some of it is quite amusing, clearly written by men. Wouldn’t be acceptable these days, let me put it that way.

I think clarification of all these things: whether exercise is of benefit to help mitigate pre-menstrual symptoms, and if that’s the case, what sort of exercise? How many girls are really significantly affected? I wondered whether in fact it’s sport and menstrual dysfunction self-selects, and girls who do get a lot of period pain, joint pain and aching and bad pre-menstrual symptoms end up not being able to reach that high level because they’re perhaps affected badly.

Dr Diana Robinson

As a Formula One fan, the topic of women making their way in sport is never far from my mind, so it was refreshing to get opinions from so many different sports people - some I had heard of and some I hadn’t, but all with interesting and insightful things to add to the conversation.

Like I mentioned above, the show has finished its first season while Ms Squiers goes on maternity leave, but it is set to return. In the meantime, you can catch up with all the episodes that have aired so far - these aren’t particularly timely conversations so you can listen at any time, but they are important discussions that can only serve to further the cause.