As you fly into Rothera, the main British research station in Antarctica, you
see the emptiness stretching in every direction. On a continent almost 60
times the size of Britain there's not a single permanent inhabitant – just
thousands upon thousands of miles of snow and ice.
Last November Rosey Grant made the journey perched in the cockpit of a small
propeller plane. 'It was cloudy,' the 29-year-old meteorologist recalled
when I spoke to her by phone in March, one of a series of interviews I
conducted with women working at the base.
'But every now and then a glacier or an iceberg would appear in little patches
of clear. Just getting pieces of the picture was tantalising. I remember
thinking, "I'm glad it's like this or I'd be overwhelmed."'
Grant had spent the months leading up to her departure writing a will,
bulk-buying moisturiser, and packing it, along with a flute and ice axes,
into a one-metre-cubed cardboard box. As her plane descended she was
afforded her first glimpse of the place that would be her home for the next
15 months: a small cluster of green buildings dwarfed by the snow-covered
landscape.
Rothera is Britain's largest research station on the continent. It is run by
the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), which undertakes scientific research
into everything from evolutionary biology to climate change. In the 1980s it
was BAS that discovered the hole in the ozone layer.
BAS operates four research stations year-round in the Antarctic (two on the
island of South Georgia and two in Antarctica itself), all in British
Antarctic Territory. Elsewhere countries such as America, Russia, Chile and
Argentina have bases of their own. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of
uninhabited miles separate each one.
Grant arrived at Rothera at the busiest time of the year, the height of the southern summer, which runs from October to March. But by the time this article is published the base will be in the depths of the Antarctic winter. The summer crew will have departed and a skeleton staff of 18 will be left over the long, dark months. Grant and her colleague, Mairi Fenton, a 22-year-old marine biologist, will be the only women among them.
When I visited Rothera in February 2011 to film a documentary, I found it hard to imagine that, until relatively recently, women weren't allowed to work at BAS's Antarctic bases at all.
Mike Pinnock, 58, who started at BAS in the 1970s as an engineer and now sits on its board, says the 'no women' rule can be traced back to the war when the British first established the stations: 'It was a military-naval operation, so we inherited a lot of Navy principles,' he tells me from his office in BAS's Cambridge HQ.
Janet Thomson, 69, worked as a scientist for BAS in Britain from the 1960s, and recalls how she and other female scientists were forbidden from joining male colleagues on trips to Antarctica. 'There was the most appalling letter sent back from personnel [to one female applicant] saying, "Women wouldn't like it in Antarctica as there are no shops and no hairdresser." It's just laughable now, but that's how they felt at the time,' she says.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Thomson was told, 'We don't have any facilities for women.' But it was about more than just bricks and mortar. The whole mindset, says Thomson, was 'men are men and they do these things and women stay at home'.
For 18 years Thomson argued her case 'round and round in a circle' until finally, in 1983, she was allowed on a research ship and became the first female BAS scientist to work inside the Antarctic Circle: 'I was very aware I was running a gauntlet and that if I did anything silly it would be, "Oh, well, that's what you expect of a woman,"' she says.
In 1986, at a small station called Signy, the first female scientists were allowed to work on British bases during the summer. In 1993 the first woman spent the winter there. In 1997 the first woman overwintered at Rothera.
Pinnock remembers being sent to another research station, expecting to have to 'crack the whip' and oversee the removal of pin-up photos from the walls in preparation. 'It would be foolish to deny that one or two people didn't feel, "This is the end of the world,"' he tells me. 'People were treading on eggshells a bit in the dining-room and bar. [But] it very quickly relaxed. And the women just became part of the team.'
Today, on average, a third of those who work at Rothera (100 or so during the summer months, about 20 in winter) will be women. This summer, not for the first time, a woman was commander in chief – Agnieszka Fryckowska, 41, originally the base meteorologist.
The fact that women today re now fully assimilated is, says Janet Thomson, exactly 'how it should be', but she's a little sad that people have forgotten what a struggle it was: 'I went to Rothera for a month in 1999 and we were in the queue for dinner and there was a young lass in front of me,' she remembers. 'I must have said something about how good it was that there were these opportunities for her now, and she just looked at me blankly and didn't understand.'
Rosey Grant agrees: 'I think our generation is not at all aware because it's not how it's been [for us]. I've never been aware of being a girl in a male-dominated environment.'
Grant's summer room-mate, Sharon Duggan, 35, who manages the marine laboratories down on the wharf from October to March, points out that the women who come to Antarctica aren't 'ultra-feminine girlie girls'. 'You are required to get your hands dirty, muck in and help out. I don't think a certain type of woman – or indeed man – would be interested in that.'
But, while climbing gear and ice axes tend to clutter the cupboards in some rooms, in others make-up and hair-straighteners line the shelves.
Every woman I spoke to had a different reason for coming south. For Grant it was a passion for snow and ice. For Alison Massey, the 32-year-old summer base assistant, it was a love of David Attenborough documentaries. For Mairi Fenton it was personal: her mother, a scientist, had wanted to work in Antarctica back in the 'no women' days, while her father, a botanist, did manage to get down in the 1970s and 'a lot of the stories my dad tells me are about how hard it was for him and how we've got it easy,' she said.
He might have a point. But, while there are plenty of modern comforts today – central heating, en suite showers, internet access (though too slow to Skype) – there's no escaping the fact that much of the work is still done outside in freezing conditions (it goes down to minus 40 degrees Celsius in winter, and when Fenton dives to collect marine samples she has to chainsaw through half a metre of ice).
Soon Fenton and Grant will have to cope with the added psychological pressures brought on by the fact that from May to July the sun won't appear above the horizon and the weather will have grounded all transport in and out.
In a medical emergency BAS would attempt evacuation, but such rescue missions aren't always possible. In 1999 an American doctor had to treat herself for breast cancer. In 1961 a Soviet doctor removed his own appendix. 'A lot of people tell you to expect a feeling of panic about the fact that you won't be able to get out,' Fenton told me. 'I haven't had that yet.'
She has, however, already experienced one of the unfortunate realities of life on the continent: relationships with those at home often crumble under the strain. Soon after her arrival she broke up with her boyfriend of three years: 'I went thinking it would last, but you feel yourself growing apart, as it's not like anywhere else on earth and you can't really describe it.'
Life at Rothera is not dissimilar to that at an expensive boarding-school. Five meals a day are served to ensure people have enough calories to work in the cold, and each Saturday there's a three-course dinner where people dress up, candles are lit and wine is served.
'It marks the end of the week,' Isabelle Gerrard, the chef, told me. 'Here, days just kind of meld into each other and so it's almost like a marking point.' And those at Rothera play as hard as they work.
One room is filled with musical instruments for the base band, another with fancy dress. Perhaps a lack of television drives you to create your own costume drama because it is, Alison Massey told me, 'one of the biggest things in people's luggage'. She brought a horse costume and her brother sent a fake beard so she could keep up with the men.
It was another pastime, however – and fear of how it might affect life on base – that made BAS initially so wary of sending women south. 'Let's be frank,' says Mike Pinnock. 'Living in Antarctica is not easy. There's the environment, the isolation. There are problems getting on in a small group. The moment you put women in, that adds another dynamic.'
He is, of course, right; many people do get together. Indeed, BAS turns out to be rather successful as a dating service. Of the eight people working at the small King Edward Point base in South Georgia in 2010, four returned as couples.
Such close-knit relations haven't upset the balance as some originally feared. Anyone who becomes pregnant must be sent home for safety reasons, but BAS says it's not yet happened. Any other problems arising from relationships, and break-ups, are just considered a messy fact of life.
Combining work here with motherhood is an altogether bigger challenge. Arriving at Christmas, Joanne Johnson, a 34-year-old geologist, spent six weeks working from a small tent out on the ice, desperately missing Phoebe, her three-year-old daughter, whom she had left at home with her husband.
'I was camping with one other person,' she tells me, now back in Cambridge. 'A man. Who doesn't have children. And who's single. So I don't think he had any idea [what I was going through]. I did feel quite alone in that, if I'm honest.'
Johnson needs to travel south every few years to collect rock samples, but if Phoebe hadn't coped with their time apart, she was contemplating a change of career. BAS says Johnson is one of just four female employees who have managed to combine their jobs with motherhood, whereas men with families are not uncommon.
When I asked other women if they'd combine children and Antarctic life the response was mixed. Sharon Duggan said she doesn't want 'marriage and family', so it 'isn't an issue' for her.
I emailed the base commander, Agnieszka Fryckowska. 'I guess I am one of those who won't jump into anything just because society tells me I should,' she wrote back. 'I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. As for women making this work [when they have] children to think about – I don't think it's fair to generalise. Is it really sensible for a mother with young children to come south for six to 18 months at a time?'
Janet Thomson never had children. 'The prospect of going to Antarctica materialised,' she says, 'and I didn't want to say goodbye to that, and then one gets too old.' Does she wish she could have had both? 'Yes,' she says quietly. 'It would have been the best of both worlds.'
Grant arrived at Rothera at the busiest time of the year, the height of the southern summer, which runs from October to March. But by the time this article is published the base will be in the depths of the Antarctic winter. The summer crew will have departed and a skeleton staff of 18 will be left over the long, dark months. Grant and her colleague, Mairi Fenton, a 22-year-old marine biologist, will be the only women among them.
When I visited Rothera in February 2011 to film a documentary, I found it hard to imagine that, until relatively recently, women weren't allowed to work at BAS's Antarctic bases at all.
Mike Pinnock, 58, who started at BAS in the 1970s as an engineer and now sits on its board, says the 'no women' rule can be traced back to the war when the British first established the stations: 'It was a military-naval operation, so we inherited a lot of Navy principles,' he tells me from his office in BAS's Cambridge HQ.
Janet Thomson, 69, worked as a scientist for BAS in Britain from the 1960s, and recalls how she and other female scientists were forbidden from joining male colleagues on trips to Antarctica. 'There was the most appalling letter sent back from personnel [to one female applicant] saying, "Women wouldn't like it in Antarctica as there are no shops and no hairdresser." It's just laughable now, but that's how they felt at the time,' she says.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Thomson was told, 'We don't have any facilities for women.' But it was about more than just bricks and mortar. The whole mindset, says Thomson, was 'men are men and they do these things and women stay at home'.
For 18 years Thomson argued her case 'round and round in a circle' until finally, in 1983, she was allowed on a research ship and became the first female BAS scientist to work inside the Antarctic Circle: 'I was very aware I was running a gauntlet and that if I did anything silly it would be, "Oh, well, that's what you expect of a woman,"' she says.
In 1986, at a small station called Signy, the first female scientists were allowed to work on British bases during the summer. In 1993 the first woman spent the winter there. In 1997 the first woman overwintered at Rothera.
Pinnock remembers being sent to another research station, expecting to have to 'crack the whip' and oversee the removal of pin-up photos from the walls in preparation. 'It would be foolish to deny that one or two people didn't feel, "This is the end of the world,"' he tells me. 'People were treading on eggshells a bit in the dining-room and bar. [But] it very quickly relaxed. And the women just became part of the team.'
Today, on average, a third of those who work at Rothera (100 or so during the summer months, about 20 in winter) will be women. This summer, not for the first time, a woman was commander in chief – Agnieszka Fryckowska, 41, originally the base meteorologist.
The fact that women today re now fully assimilated is, says Janet Thomson, exactly 'how it should be', but she's a little sad that people have forgotten what a struggle it was: 'I went to Rothera for a month in 1999 and we were in the queue for dinner and there was a young lass in front of me,' she remembers. 'I must have said something about how good it was that there were these opportunities for her now, and she just looked at me blankly and didn't understand.'
Rosey Grant agrees: 'I think our generation is not at all aware because it's not how it's been [for us]. I've never been aware of being a girl in a male-dominated environment.'
Grant's summer room-mate, Sharon Duggan, 35, who manages the marine laboratories down on the wharf from October to March, points out that the women who come to Antarctica aren't 'ultra-feminine girlie girls'. 'You are required to get your hands dirty, muck in and help out. I don't think a certain type of woman – or indeed man – would be interested in that.'
But, while climbing gear and ice axes tend to clutter the cupboards in some rooms, in others make-up and hair-straighteners line the shelves.
Every woman I spoke to had a different reason for coming south. For Grant it was a passion for snow and ice. For Alison Massey, the 32-year-old summer base assistant, it was a love of David Attenborough documentaries. For Mairi Fenton it was personal: her mother, a scientist, had wanted to work in Antarctica back in the 'no women' days, while her father, a botanist, did manage to get down in the 1970s and 'a lot of the stories my dad tells me are about how hard it was for him and how we've got it easy,' she said.
He might have a point. But, while there are plenty of modern comforts today – central heating, en suite showers, internet access (though too slow to Skype) – there's no escaping the fact that much of the work is still done outside in freezing conditions (it goes down to minus 40 degrees Celsius in winter, and when Fenton dives to collect marine samples she has to chainsaw through half a metre of ice).
Soon Fenton and Grant will have to cope with the added psychological pressures brought on by the fact that from May to July the sun won't appear above the horizon and the weather will have grounded all transport in and out.
In a medical emergency BAS would attempt evacuation, but such rescue missions aren't always possible. In 1999 an American doctor had to treat herself for breast cancer. In 1961 a Soviet doctor removed his own appendix. 'A lot of people tell you to expect a feeling of panic about the fact that you won't be able to get out,' Fenton told me. 'I haven't had that yet.'
She has, however, already experienced one of the unfortunate realities of life on the continent: relationships with those at home often crumble under the strain. Soon after her arrival she broke up with her boyfriend of three years: 'I went thinking it would last, but you feel yourself growing apart, as it's not like anywhere else on earth and you can't really describe it.'
Life at Rothera is not dissimilar to that at an expensive boarding-school. Five meals a day are served to ensure people have enough calories to work in the cold, and each Saturday there's a three-course dinner where people dress up, candles are lit and wine is served.
'It marks the end of the week,' Isabelle Gerrard, the chef, told me. 'Here, days just kind of meld into each other and so it's almost like a marking point.' And those at Rothera play as hard as they work.
One room is filled with musical instruments for the base band, another with fancy dress. Perhaps a lack of television drives you to create your own costume drama because it is, Alison Massey told me, 'one of the biggest things in people's luggage'. She brought a horse costume and her brother sent a fake beard so she could keep up with the men.
It was another pastime, however – and fear of how it might affect life on base – that made BAS initially so wary of sending women south. 'Let's be frank,' says Mike Pinnock. 'Living in Antarctica is not easy. There's the environment, the isolation. There are problems getting on in a small group. The moment you put women in, that adds another dynamic.'
He is, of course, right; many people do get together. Indeed, BAS turns out to be rather successful as a dating service. Of the eight people working at the small King Edward Point base in South Georgia in 2010, four returned as couples.
Such close-knit relations haven't upset the balance as some originally feared. Anyone who becomes pregnant must be sent home for safety reasons, but BAS says it's not yet happened. Any other problems arising from relationships, and break-ups, are just considered a messy fact of life.
Combining work here with motherhood is an altogether bigger challenge. Arriving at Christmas, Joanne Johnson, a 34-year-old geologist, spent six weeks working from a small tent out on the ice, desperately missing Phoebe, her three-year-old daughter, whom she had left at home with her husband.
'I was camping with one other person,' she tells me, now back in Cambridge. 'A man. Who doesn't have children. And who's single. So I don't think he had any idea [what I was going through]. I did feel quite alone in that, if I'm honest.'
Johnson needs to travel south every few years to collect rock samples, but if Phoebe hadn't coped with their time apart, she was contemplating a change of career. BAS says Johnson is one of just four female employees who have managed to combine their jobs with motherhood, whereas men with families are not uncommon.
When I asked other women if they'd combine children and Antarctic life the response was mixed. Sharon Duggan said she doesn't want 'marriage and family', so it 'isn't an issue' for her.
I emailed the base commander, Agnieszka Fryckowska. 'I guess I am one of those who won't jump into anything just because society tells me I should,' she wrote back. 'I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. As for women making this work [when they have] children to think about – I don't think it's fair to generalise. Is it really sensible for a mother with young children to come south for six to 18 months at a time?'
Janet Thomson never had children. 'The prospect of going to Antarctica materialised,' she says, 'and I didn't want to say goodbye to that, and then one gets too old.' Does she wish she could have had both? 'Yes,' she says quietly. 'It would have been the best of both worlds.'
