TasWeekend: Antarctic voyage to promote women in scientific and political spheres

AN all-female research voyage to Antarctica aims to promote women in Australia’s scientific and political spheres.

Nicole Hellessey, Amanda Sinclair, Molly Christensen and Meredith Nash will be voyaging to Antarctica on the all-women trip. Picture: SAM ROSEWARNE

IT’S an epic journey featuring more than 70 of the world’s brightest minds aiming to bring awareness to the low representation of women in leadership positions – and it has a decidedly Tasmanian flavour.

Homeward Bound is the brainchild of leadership expert and social entrepreneur Fabian Dattner and Tasmanian research scientist Jessica Melbourne-Thomas.

It will see 78 women from across the globe, mostly of a science, technology, engineering or mathematics background, head to Antarctica on a 20-day mission to improve their leadership skills and get exposure to cutting-edge science education.

The trip will include 16 landings, including four research base visits.

A documentary will also be filmed following their journey from start to finish.

The world’s largest all-female expedition to Antarctica is just the first phase of a 10-year plan to have 1000 women elevate their ability to take a position at the executive table and influence policy and decision-making.

Dattner says the rationale behind the trip started to form in her mind about six years ago after she repeatedly saw women being marginalised and excluded from leadership positions.

It’s almost to the point that the joke is you have to have a beard to be a leader in polar science.

It was an encounter more than two years ago at the Australian Antarctic Division headquarters at Kingston during one of her leadership programs with 24 women, mostly scientists, that the problem became abundantly clear to Dattner.

“Three-and-a half days into the seven-day program, six or seven of us were sitting under some stairs in AAD’s headquarters eating lunch together. I can’t say what twist it was in the conversation but it went from being joyous, curious and intellectually rich to angry, frustrated and heartbreaking,” she says.

“It went that way until a few of the women were in tears. They were expressing their grief not only for what is happening to our climate – and this is common among climate scientists particularly – but also at how clever women are constantly being left out of senior positions. It’s almost to the point that the joke is you have to have a beard to be a leader in polar science.”

Homeward Bound co-founder Jessica Melbourne-Thomas.

Dattner says she went home that night and dreamt up the vision for Homeward Bound.

“In the dream, I was on a ship, it was bound for Antarctica and I had 45 women on the ship, giving state-of-the-art transformational leadership skills and sciences informing the state of the planet,” she says.

“It was called Homeward Bound in the dream. I’ve never even been to Antarctica, but I saw the ship, I saw the journey and the women. In the back of the room was a film crew and I knew we were making a documentary about leadership in the world through the lens of this group of women.”

Initially the plan was to have the women leave from Hobart, but on December 2 the crew will be setting sail from Ushuaia in Argentina instead.

Melbourne-Thomas, research scientist for the Australian Antarctic Division and the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-operative Research Centre, says it is a pity not to be leaving from Hobart, but the change of departure opened up new opportunities such as the trip becoming fully self-funded and garnering the project worldwide attention (200 million people are estimated to have heard about it so far).

“We really had hopes initially to link Homeward Bound to Hobart as a gateway to the Antarctic and the AAD had been important in terms of supporting the ideas behind it right from the beginning, but it just wasn’t the right time in terms of trying to get money from the State Government – there just wasn’t any money to support it,” she says.

“It ended up being more affordable, there are bigger boats that leave from South America, which meant we could take more women.”

The women talked a lot about the general feeling of invisibility when you are the only woman in your department. You really lack a network or other women for role models and mentors.

Having passed a stringent selection process, Tasmanians Nicole Hellessey, Amanda Sinclair, Molly Christensen, Meredith Nash, Aimee Bliss and Britta Denise Hardesty have all be chosen from hundreds of applicants to take part in Homeward Bound.

All 78 women have been assigned projects to work on in the leadup and will leave the ship after 20 days with individual strategies to get their messages out into the world.

Sinclair, 29, of South Hobart, has been juggling finishing her master’s thesis in applied science at UTAS with preparing for the trip of a lifetime to the end of the earth.

“People talk about it as being a dream come true [travelling to Antarctica], but I can’t even call it that because I never even thought it would be a possibility – it’s beyond my wildest dreams,” she says.

“I hope what we see down there in terms of climate change will really help clarify in our own minds exactly what the outcomes of our current impact on the planet are and help us to articulate the importance and urgency of action on climate change. That’s not the whole focus of Homeward Bound but it’s certainly an important side message.”

MORE: WOMEN LEAD WAY TO ANTARCTICA

This won’t be the first trip to Antarctica for Hellessey, 27, of Kingston, who is studying her PhD on the effects of climate change on krill at the Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies.

She visited the icy continent in May with the CSIRO.

Hellessey says her role will be all about communication.

“I’d really love to develop my leadership skills so I can go out and make a positive difference on climate change policy in particular,” she says.

“I’d love to be able to talk to local government, state government, the krill fishery – pretty much anyone who has an impact on Antarctica and say this is what’s happening in that region and here’s what you can do to combat that.”

It isn’t only women in science who will be aboard the Ushuaia when it departs next month – there will also be leadership and strategy planning experts as well as social researchers such as Nash, 35, of North Hobart.

The women talked a lot about the general feeling of invisibility when you are the only woman in your department.

A senior lecturer in sociology at UTAS, Nash is conducting a research project evaluating Homeward Bound.

She has already interviewed 25 of the participants asking what sort of incidents in their careers have shaped how they think about leadership and whether they think being a woman has helped or hindered their career in science.

“The women talked a lot about the general feeling of invisibility when you are the only woman in your department. You really lack a network or other women for role models and mentors,” says Nash.

“The starkest examples were things you wouldn’t expect to be happening in universities today – sexual harassment, being shut out of meetings, the barriers involved in being literally the only woman working in your particular field.

“What we’ve learnt before the voyage has even happened is women are absolutely craving a network to meet other women in the same position. It’s really about knowing other women exist who are going through the same thing.”

Hatchery technician for the IMAS rock lobster aquaculture project, Christensen, 26, of Blackmans Bay, says there will be nothing to distract the intrepid group, aside from the scenery of one of the first places in the world likely to be affected by climate change.

“It will be three weeks of 78 undisturbed minds coming together, seeing the impact of climate change, all being together in the one spot and making decisions at the same time,’’ she says.

Next month’s journey is the culmination of two years’ planning and has given the women involved a chance to get to know one another before sharing the close quarters of the ship.

The six Tasmanian women have been catching up around Hobart.

“The whole vision for Homeward Bound was about this network of women supporting each other and so that communication element has been so important,” Melbourne-Thomas says.

“We were really struck by this demand for mechanisms to start working with each other in advance of the voyage.”

For Dattner, it’s already been a bonding experience.

“We’ve all come to love one another and we haven’t even all met,” she says.

● Follow the voyage at homewardboundprojects.com.au

For more great lifestyle reads, pick up a copy of TasWeekend magazine in your Saturday Mercury.