The podcast Eib is now in its seventh season, fearlessly tackling subjects from Beirut’s drag queen scene to Jordanian widows’ rights

In a bid to increase the country's birth rate, Iran’s state hospitals and clinics are no longer performing vasectomies or giving out contraceptives in an attempt to revive flagging population growth, a senior health official has told state media.

Customers were initially sceptical about having their hair or moustaches trimmed by young women, while others “did not behave well towards us”, Jyoti told the Guardian. “So we decided to change our whole get-up so that none could identify us.”

“Male producers, directors and actors have the power to make and break these women’s careers, and so routinely and aggressively proposition them, or at the very least let it be known that a willingness to grant sexual favours would help a woman professionally.”

The city’s army of rickshaw and taxi drivers pose no particular threat to women. As in other cities, sexual violence in the capital is most frequently committed by men known to their victims. “If drivers were a problem, the Delhi transport system would have come to a stop,” says Rutika Sharma, a social worker who helps run the schemes, developed by the Delhi-based Manas Foundation, a mental health group. But as growing numbers of women venture out to work and simply live their lives, they are coming into more frequent contact with commercial drivers – some from backgrounds where the idea of an independent woman is still relatively new. “We are trying to explain things in 40 minutes or one hour, that they have been seeing for 40 years,” Sharma says.

Five years since a brutal gang-rape that galvanised a movement against sexual assault in India, women who report the crime are still routinely harassed by police or bullied into silence, according to research released in Delhi on Wednesday. 'Her pain should be our pain': the woman tackling Delhi's rape crisis Read more The Human Rights Watch report found that willingness to report rape and other sexual offences had significantly grown, but was often stymied by regressive community attitudes, particularly outside big cities.

“Women are speaking up, young girls are speaking up, they are protesting,” says Professor Reicha Tanwar, from the Women’s Studies Research Centre at Kurukshetra University. “They know that sexual violence is against the law – earlier they were not even aware.”