Robyn Williams: We begin with the journal Nature and the letter from Professor Jan Strugnell, published on Thursday, calling for women to be recognised as researchers in Antarctica. I was astounded to read that women were forbidden to be there until quite recently.

Is it true that women were not allowed, indeed banned from being in Antarctica up to 1956?

Jan Strugnell: That's correct. Women were prevented from working in Antarctica prior to that. So Marie Stopes applied, she was a palaeontologist, an internationally renowned palaeontologist, to attend on Scott's Terra Nova expedition, and she was hoping to collect fossil leaves that would help her prove her theory that Antarctica was part of Gondwanaland. And she applied with all her credentials, and she was prevented from going on his expedition.

Robyn Williams: Now, Marie Stopes, some people will recognise the name, more associated with a book called Married Love. She was the sex expert, she moved from palaeobotany to friendly relationships of human beings. But she indeed made Scott of the Antarctic, Captain Scott, promise to bring the fossils back, and he carried them all the way and they proved, as you said, to be quite invaluable.

Jan Strugnell: Clearly he was impressed enough with her to carry the fossils back but not so impressed to let her go. And just after that actually in 1937, over 1,000, in fact 1,300 women applied to go on a British Antarctic expedition and they were all rejected. So for a long time women weren't allowed to work in Antarctica. And the first woman was a Soviet woman, Maria Klenova, and she was a marine geologist, and she was the first woman to work in Antarctica in 1956. It's really recent times.

Robyn Williams: Well, it's changed now, all these years later, 70 years later. So why are you drawing attention to it when things surely have changed?

Jan Strugnell: For a few reasons I guess. Firstly, things haven't changed enough. Even though women were prevented from going to Antarctica in many countries until the 1970s, what we've really seeing is a really rapid rise in the great science and the leadership positions that women have in Antarctic research. For example, both of the largest polar research institutes, the British Antarctic Survey and the Alfred Wagner Institute, are both led by women.

In Australia we have a chief scientist, Gwen Fenton, she is the chief scientist of the Australian Antarctic Division. Women are being the lead author and contributing a lot to great Antarctic science that is published in Nature and Science, and lots of high impact science across a range of disciplines.

However, if we look at Antarctic medallists, such as medallists from the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, only 11% of medallists are women. And we are really passionate about changing this because in early-career researchers…so the Association of Polar Early Career Researchers is made up of 60% women. So we have a really large proportion of young polar scientists who are really passionate about their science. And what our initiative, our Antarctic women Wikibomb is about, is trying to really raise the profile of these women so we have visible female role models for these early career researchers.

Robyn Williams: And that's why you wrote to the journal Nature, published this week.

Jan Strugnell: That's right, to try and highlight our initiative and to draw attention to what we are trying to do and the women that we are profiling.

Robyn Williams: I remember Dr Louise Crossley, who was the deputy director of the Powerhouse Museum and a Cambridge graduate, went via Tasmania down to head one of the teams a long, long time ago. I think she was the first or the second from Australia to do such a job.

Jan Strugnell: Yes, but I think one earlier than her would be Patricia Selkirk who was a botanist who was one of the first Australian women to do research in Antarctica, a lot of research on Macquarie Island, a sub-Antarctic island. She was a little bit earlier than her, but Australian women didn't really go to Antarctica in any numbers until the 1980s, so that's really quite recent given the great research that has been done by Australian women in Antarctica today.

Robyn Williams: Well, of course you've been and you've looked at the records. Does the relationship work in such a far distant place, you know, living so tightly together with all those blokes?

Jan Strugnell: Do women do okay in Antarctica?

Robyn Williams: Yes, do they get along fine?

Jan Strugnell: They thrive, they're doing great research. And if you have a look at our Wikibomb you can read about nearly 100 women that we've profiled so far from across 30 countries who have made their careers in Antarctica. And in many of these cases these are the first women from their country to do research there. One of these would be In-Young Ahn, so she is the first Korean woman to go to Antarctica and now she is actually the first Asian woman to lead a base in Antarctica. So she runs the South Korean base.

Lois Jones is a woman that we've profiled, she led the first all-women team to Antarctica. So she applied to go and was rejected by the US Navy, they didn't want to take any women. And she persisted with her application, and in the 1969 to 1970 field season, finally, with support of Colin Bull and some others, they championed her cause and said, well, there's no reason why we can't take women to Antarctica, everyone looks the same in a parka. And they said we'll take you if you have an all-female team. And so she took six women to Antarctica and they were the first women to go to the South Pole and they all stepped off the plane together, so they were the first women to go to the South Pole and to have a deep field expedition.

Robyn Williams: And the sky didn't collapse.

Jan Strugnell: It did not.

Robyn Williams: Amazing. Now, you go there all the time, and I've talked to you about some of your octopus studies. I still find it very difficult to think of those fairly delicate, soft, fleshy creatures in that freezing water. How do they get on?

Jan Strugnell: They do fabulously, and in fact some of the research that I've done has shown that many deep sea octopus actually have their evolutionary origins in Antarctica. When we think about Antarctica we often think that perhaps there's not much that lives there, and that conditions are very harsh. But in actual fact beneath the sea there is a really rich and thriving diversity of marine life, and those animals are perfectly adapted to live there. So there are many, many species of octopus that weigh nearly as much as I do. We have sea spiders about the size of your head that are doing fabulously well, lots of starfish, huge sponges that are big enough for you to get inside…

Robyn Williams: Do you mean big enough for me to climb inside?

Jan Strugnell: Correct. Fish with antifreeze proteins in their blood, and they are all doing fabulously well.

Robyn Williams: When are you going next?

Jan Strugnell: I don't know. Well, actually I'm going on a sub-Antarctic cruise, an ACE expedition, which is going all the way around Antarctica in February. It's not going to the continent proper but it's visiting all of the sub-Antarctic islands. I think that heads out in December, and I'll be on a leg of that from Australia to South America from about February.

Robyn Williams: Good luck.

Jan Strugnell: Thank you very much.

Robyn Williams: Jan Strugnell is an associate professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne, and her letter is in the journal Nature this week.