Women in Polar Research: A Brief History

Planetary geologist Ursula Marvin in Antarctica, 1978-1979. Photo: Smithsonian Institution Archives

In recent years, women researchers, scientists, and local champions have elevated their visibility and empowered their voices across the world. The Arctic is no exception. With powerful organizations like 500 Women Scientists and local movements like Women in Polar Science and Plan A growing their reach and impact, women are sharing their personal narratives, highlighting their contributions, and supporting each other like never before. The Arctic Institute’s Breaking the Arctic’s Ice Ceiling is our team’s contribution to this movement. In a series of commentaries, articles, and multimedia posts, we are highlighting the work of women working and living in the Arctic.

The Arctic Institute Breaking the Arctic's Ice Ceiling Series 2019

• Looking Up: Women in Arctic Science
• The Gender Gap in Arctic Research Awards and Leadership – Infographic
• An Arctic Imposter’s Journey to Belong
• Women Are America’s Climate Change Champions
• Vegan at Sea-gan: The Arctic Ocean
• Golden Rule in Arctic Science and Community Partnerships
• Is the Future of the European Arctic Socially Sustainable?
• Geo-mapping in the Canadian Arctic
• Women in Polar Research: A Brief History
• It’s Our Table: Indigenous People Shaping Arctic Policy

The history of women in polar research is a story of movement from exclusion toward inclusion, led by inspiring women who broke one “ice ceiling” after another. This history gives us reason to celebrate how far female polar researchers have come in the last several decades, and it can inform our work to create more inclusive polar research communities, today, and in the future.

Early women in a man’s world

For centuries, polar research and exploration were assumed to be male endeavors in many cultures. The earliest Western expeditions were often undertaken in the tradition of naval exploration, in which male companionship was prized and women were perceived to bring dead weight at best, and disarray at worst. Publications by early explorers popularized these ideas among Western audiences, who devoured tales of monstrous, feminized polar landscapes waiting to be “penetrated” and “conquered” by heroic men.

However, the idea of polar research as an inherently masculine endeavor was never taken for granted by everyone. In the Antarctic, women demanded access to polar expeditions from the earliest days of the “Heroic Age of Polar Exploration.”¹⁾For more on the “Heroic Age of Polar Exploration,” see Solomon S (2013) To the Ends of the Earth: The Heroic Age of Polar Exploration. Scientific American January 17, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/to-the-ends-of-the-earth-polar-exploration/. Accessed on 27 February 2019 Marie Stopes, now famous as an early advocate for birth control, was also a highly accomplished paleobotanist in the early 20th century. As such, she requested to join Robert Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition (1910-1913) to conduct field research, but he refused.²⁾Morgan N (2008). Cold Comfort. Geoscientist 18(6). Ernest Shackleton left behind the record of “three sporty girls” who begged to be included in his Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1914-1917): they wrote, “We do not see why men should have all the glory, and women none, especially when there are women just as brave and capable as there are men.”³⁾Pegrine, P (1914). Scott Polar Research Institute, https://www.spri.cam.ac.uk/archives/shackleton/articles/1537,2,30,5-6.html, accessed 27 February 2019 Dozens of women requested to join expeditions by Australian explorer Douglas Mawson and American aviator Richard Byrd, and when a British Antarctic Expedition was proposed in 1937, a newspaper reported that 1,300 women applied to join. All were denied.⁴⁾Blackadder J (2015) Frozen voices: Women, silence and Antarctica. In Antarctica: Music, sounds and cultural connections (Hince et al, Eds). Canberra, Australia: ANU Press, The Australian National University.

In most countries, women also were formally excluded from Western Arctic research communities until the 20th century. Still, women contributed, and some had substantial influence in polar science as early as the mid-19th century.⁵⁾Herbert K (2012) Polar Wives. Vancouver: Greystone Books. Women like Jane Franklin were instrumental in supporting Arctic research behind the scenes: when an expedition led by her husband John Franklin went missing in the Canadian Arctic in the 1840s, Jane Franklin’s tireless advocacy led to several expeditions in search of him. The expeditions she sponsored added greatly to Western understandings of the Canadian Arctic.

Of course, Indigenous women had been involved in Arctic knowledge-making and travel long before the arrival of Western explorers like Franklin. From the 19th century, Indigenous women’s knowledge and skills were assets to some expeditions originating in Europe and North America. In the 1860s and 1870s, an Inuit translator and guide named Tookoolito participated in several Arctic expeditions.⁶⁾Ipirvik and Taqulittuq (Ebierbing et Tookoolito) National Historic Person. Parks Canada, https://www.pc.gc.ca/apps/dfhd/page_nhs_eng.aspx?id=1628. Accessed on 4 March 2019. Tookoolito became known among Western audiences, but not for her impressive skills or expeditionary contributions: instead, she was exploited and exhibited at sideshows and museums, along with her husband and child, by explorer Charles Hall.⁷⁾Robinson M (2006) The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Indigenous women also contributed to Robert Peary’s expeditions to the North Pole. While their husbands accompanied Peary in search of the Pole, the women were left behind with American expeditioners to sew survival gear for Peary’s men, while in some cases being subjected to sexual harassment.⁸⁾Lemoine GM & Darwent CM (2016) Living on the Edge: Inughuit Women and Geography of Contact. Arctic 69(5): 1-12. Despite recent efforts to recover these and other Indigenous women’s experiences on Western Arctic expeditions, their stories and contributions remain largely obscured in dominant Western narratives.

We know more about a number of Western women who managed to participate in polar research in the 19th century. Many of these women were independently wealthy and conducted research around the “Third Pole” (the Hindu Kush – Karakoram – Himalayan region, also sometimes including other parts of the cryosphere). Cryosphere research at this time was often undertaken by adventurers doubling as scientists, who recorded scientific observations during their expeditions and returned with specimens and reports for learned societies. Among their ranks were female mountaineers like American Fanny Bullock Workman.⁹⁾Middleton D (1965) Victorian Lady Travellers. New York: E.P. & Dutton Co., Inc. Workman reported her findings from the Himalaya and Karakoram to the Royal Geographical Society and the Geographical Society of America, though as a woman she could not become a formal member of either organization. Two decades later, Louise Arner Boyd sponsored her own scientific expeditions to Greenland, publishing well-received books and papers on her findings.¹⁰⁾Kafarowski J (2018) The Polar Adventures of a Rich American Dame: A Life of Louise Arner Boyd. Toronto: Dundurn. Despite being excluded from male-dominated professional networks and most routes to formal training, women were publishing glaciological research in scientific journals as early as 1902.¹¹⁾Hulbe C, Wang W & Ommanney S (2010) Women in glaciology, a historical perspective. Journal of Glaciology 56(200): 944-964.

Only in rare cases did women have direct access to formal Arctic research institutions. Russian women, for example, were encouraged to participate in the USSR’s State Oceanographic Institute as early as the 1920s. In 1933, renowned marine scientist Maria Klenova produced the first seabed map of the Barents Sea.¹²⁾Lewandowski K (2018) Taboos, stowaways and chief scientists: A brief history of women in oceanography. In Johnson B (Ed) Women and Geology: Who Are We, Where Have We Come From, and Where Are We Going? Boulder: The Geological Society of America. Nonetheless, women in most countries remained barred from participating in “official” polar expeditions until the mid-20th century: either directly through institutional policies, or indirectly through lack of access to prerequisite training and credentials.

A new era of polar research

Things began to change in the late 1950s, when the International Geophysical Year (IGY) was established in the midst of the Cold War. More than sixty countries participated in IGY projects, with many focused on the polar regions.¹³⁾National Research Council. 1965. Report on the U.S. Program for the International Geophysical Year: July 1, 1957 – December 31, 1958. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/26118/report-on-the-us-program-for-the-international-geophysical-year. Accessed on 28 February 2019. The IGY signaled the start of a new era of polar research, in which “big science” reigned supreme. Several countries participating in the IGY brought large, expensive research collaborations to the polar regions, creating a high demand for labor in polar research and support.

Female researchers appealed to these countries’ growing polar research institutions, and the years surrounding the IGY saw several “firsts” for women in relatively accessible parts of the polar regions.¹⁴⁾Chipman E (1986) Women on the Ice. Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press. In Russia, women were included in Antarctic marine expeditions from the first year of the IGY, when Maria Klenova became the first female scientist to work in the Antarctic. Other “firsts” followed in the late 1950s and early 1960s: Australia and France sent female scientists to the sub-Antarctic in 1959 and 1961, respectively; the US began permitting women to conduct research on Antarctic research vessels in 1962; and Chile permitted women to work on its Bernardo O’Higgins research station in 1963. In 1965, Rita Horner became the first Western female scientist to work in the North American Arctic.

Superficial excuses and underlying anxieties

However, most field opportunities in both the Antarctic and Arctic remained closed to women throughout the 1960s. In some cases, prohibitions persisted for several decades, with the official reason often given as a lack of facilities for women. One British woman was reportedly denied on the grounds that “there were no facilities for women in the Antarctic, ie, there was not a separate toilet, there were no shops, there were no hairdressers…”.¹⁵⁾Jones B (2012) “Women won’t like working in Antarctica as there are no shops and hairdressers”. The Telegraph, 20 May, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/9260864/Women-wont-like-working-in-Antarctica-as-there-are-no-shops-and-hairdressers.html. Accessed on 28 February 2019.

These superficial excuses were underpinned by deeper anxieties and ideological commitments. Although some men may have doubted women’s capabilities, institutional resistance to women’s participation often had less to do with women themselves, than with fears about “mixing of the sexes” in isolated environments. Institutional leaders believed that women would bring sex to field stations (homosexuality was still swept under the rug at the time), and it was feared that sex would cause jealousies among the men and destabilize fragile station communities. In the US, Admiral George Dufek claimed that “women will not be allowed in the Antarctic until we can provide one woman for every man.”¹⁶⁾Belanger D (2006) Deep Freeze: The United States, the International Geophysical Year, and the Origins of Antarctica’s Age of Science. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado. These were similar reasons to those that kept women barred from marine research vessels, astronomical observatories, astronautics, oil rigs, mines, and military outposts in many countries.¹⁷⁾Seag M (2017) Women need not apply: gendered institutional change in Antarctica and Outer Space. The Polar Journal 7(2): 319-335.

Some also feared that women’s presence would undermine what they believed to be core masculine values of polar research and exploration. As Dufek said of US Antarctic operations, women’s presence would “wreck the illusion of being frontiersmen going into a new land and the illusion of being a hero.”¹⁸⁾Seag M (2017) The trouble with heroism. Chemistry World, 3 September, https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/when-antarctica-stopped-being-only-for-men/3007778.article. Accessed on 28 February 2019.

Women in the lab and office

As such, female polar researchers generally remained confined to the lab through most of the 20th century. Some were forced to design and carry out experiments based on samples collected by their male colleagues. While getting her PhD at the Ohio State University, Lois Jones, who became the first woman to lead an all-female team in Antarctica, had to “beg and borrow samples” from male colleagues for several years before she was finally permitted to work in Antarctica in 1969.¹⁹⁾Hale Smith, C (1970) Her Antarctic Adventure. The Atlanta Constitution, 29 March.

Still, women made great contributions to polar research in the mid-20th century, with or without access to the field. Among the most influential polar researchers of the mid-20th century was Edna Plumstead, a South African paleobotanist whose laboratory analyses of Antarctic fossils provided crucial evidence in support of the theory of continental drift.²⁰⁾Frankel H (2012) The Continental Drift Controversy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Women also contributed to polar research behind the scenes. Some, like Vivian Bushnell, edited polar publications (Bushnell was Executive Editor of the American Geographical Society’s influential Antarctic Map Folio Series)²¹⁾Bushnell, Vivian C. WorldCat Identities, https://entities.oclc.org/worldcat/entity/E39PCjxCt9BxHwmy9jvDkvxGgX.html. Accessed 28 February 2019.; others, like British diplomat Margaret Anstee, worked in polar policymaking (Anstee began her career in the UK government’s polar office).²²⁾Dodds K (2009) “Settling and Unsettling Antarctica”. Signs. 34(3): 505–509.

Moving toward gender equality

The pace of change for women in polar research quickened in the 1970s, as more field sites were formally opened to women. Changes were often connected to social, cultural, and political developments in researchers’ home countries. Women’s movements, the passage of equal opportunities legislation, labor shortages, and rising numbers of women earning scientific degrees all raised the potential cost of excluding half the population from the workplace, and created incentives for polar institutions to open more doors to women.

Progress can also be attributed to advocacy and tireless persistence by women, as well as support from male allies. Men like Colin Bull lobbied the US Antarctic Research Program to change its no-women policy in the 1960s;²³⁾Bull C (2009) Behind The Scenes. The Antarctic Sun, 13 November, https://antarcticsun.usap.gov/features/1955/. Accessed on 1 March 2019. others, like an unnamed manager at the British Antarctic Survey, argued that by excluding women, polar organizations were “virtually condemning [themselves] to considering second-rate applicants.”²⁴⁾[Redacted] (1985) [Redacted] to C Swithinbank, 15 April. [Letter] Held at: British Antarctic Survey Archives Service. 19/47/444(1). Still others impelled cultural shifts, bringing new norms into polar workplaces and mentoring trainees to appreciate the value of gender equality to polar research.

Of course, progress for women in polar research varied by country, sometimes dramatically. It also varied by field location: Arctic sites were often more accessible to female researchers than Antarctic sites, and the most isolated locations – those in the interior of Antarctica, or submarines in the Arctic – were generally the last to be opened to women. Women were not permitted to work at the UK’s isolated Halley Station, Antarctica until 1994, and some opportunities for Arctic scientists aboard US Naval submarines remained closed to women into the 1990s.

For some early women in the polar field, being a pioneer came with challenges. Some were subjected to discrimination and harassment; several reported that they were held to a higher bar than male colleagues. During Antarctic fieldwork in 1970, engineer Irene Peden was warned, “If you fail to get your data, there won’t be another woman on this Continent for another 10 years or a generation.”²⁵⁾Peden I (2002) Interviewed by Brian Shoemaker for the Polar Oral History Project, 8 May, https://kb.osu.edu/handle/1811/6058. Accessed on 1 March 2019. Others had to make sacrifices that their male peers did not, from putting family planning on hold to relocating to countries where women were allowed to conduct their own polar fieldwork.

On the other hand, some early women found a welcoming environment in polar research, reporting that in the field, hard work mattered more than gender. For them, polar fieldwork provided an opportunity to prove themselves as “scientists,” allowing them to shed the qualifier that came with being a “female scientist” in the mid-20th century. Many women reported polar fieldwork as among the most rewarding experiences of their lives.

The number of women entering the field increased in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and women’s presence slowly became “normalized” in polar research communities. Many of today’s leading polar researchers began their careers in this period, and several report that they benefited from having female role models. This is the era in which German glaciologist Almut Iken fundamentally altered our understanding of the physical dynamics of Arctic glaciers; Sudipta Sengupta and Aditi Pant became the first Indian women to conduct research in Antarctica (1983); Monika Puskeppeleit led the world’s first all-female overwintering group in Antarctica (1990); and Susan Solomon led the National Ozone Expedition to McMurdo Sound (1986-7), twenty years before she was named one of Time magazine’s most influential people in the world.²⁶⁾Pachauri R (2008) Susan Solomon. Time, 12 May, https://content.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1733748_1733754_1735701,00.html. Accessed on 1 March 2019.

Women also became more visible in institutional leadership positions in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Women began taking the helm of Antarctic stations, including stations run by Australia, Spain, Germany, the USA, and South Korea. They also broke through to the top ranks of several polar organizations, including the NSF Office of Polar Programs (Carol Roberts became Deputy Director in 1988); the British Antarctic Survey (Liz Morris became head of the Ice and Climate Division in 1987); and the New Zealand Antarctic Program (Gillian Wratt became Director in 1992). In 1999, Jill Ferris led the establishment of Polar Field Services, which has provided logistical support to National Science Foundation researchers in the Arctic ever since.

Legacies of polar history

The legacies of this history are visible in the tremendous accomplishments of today’s women in polar research, as well as in lingering challenges. The polar research community is working to address gender disparities and inequities, including pressing issues like harassment and assault. These problems are not unique to polar research, but solutions will need to address historical legacies of relatively recent discrimination, as well as male-normative narratives that continue to shape perceptions about what polar research is, and who should be doing it. Initiatives like Women in Polar Science, Women of the Arctic, the IARPC Diversity & Inclusion Working Group, the Gender in the Arctic Research Network, and the IASSA Working Group on Gender in the Arctic are amplifying these conversations and encouraging critical engagement with gender in the polar regions, with particular attention to the inclusion of Indigenous women in the Arctic.

Women in polar research also have much to celebrate. In recent years, women have led several of the world’s leading polar research organizations: the International Arctic Science Committee (Susan Barr), the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (Jenny Baeseman and Chandrika Nath), the European Polar Board (Renuka Badhe), the US National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs (Kelly Falkner), the Korean Polar Research Institute (Hong Kum Lee), the British Antarctic Survey (Jane Francis), and the Alfred-Wegener-Institute’s Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (Karin Lochte and Antje Boetius), to name a few. Women from around the world lead stations, field teams, and major international collaborations.

Today, 55% of members of the international Association for Polar Early Careers Scientists are women, and 10 out of 12 of that organization’s presidents since 2007 have been women. There is no shortage of young women interested in polar research; the task is to retain diverse cohorts as they progress through their careers.

Together, women in polar research are reclaiming untold stories and creating a more inclusive vision of polar research. Let’s use our history to help guide our strategies to create more diverse, inclusive, and equitable polar research communities, in which people of all genders and backgrounds have equal opportunity to thrive.

Morgan Seag is a Gates Cambridge Scholar and PhD Candidate in Geography at the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge.