Women scientists face enough barriers to conducting polar research in Antartica, says professor Meredith Nash — the clothing is ill-fitting and managing menstruation discreetly is near impossible.



"It is a place set up for white men," Nash told BuzzFeed News.

But it is also a uniquely isolated and intimate workplace to navigate sexual harassment.

"There are a lot of really difficult power dynamics because if you're out in the field for say six weeks, you can't leave and it is really hard to report," she said. "You're supposed to report it to the station leader, but what if he's the one who harassed you?"



Nash co-authored a 2019 study that found 63% of women who travelled to Antarctica with the Australian national program said they had been sexually harassed during fieldwork, and that much of it had occurred when they were postgraduates or field assistants. Sexual harassment by supervisors was particularly difficult for PHD students to report, she said.

"It is a really small field, so that person is basically in charge of your professional life: they will write references, they will connect you to jobs, you will see them at conferences," she said. "This affects your ability to get funding and further field work, your access to mentoring, all the things you need as a junior researcher."

Of those that experienced harassment, 49.5% of survey respondents took no action.

"People who complain often become the location of the problem rather than a victim to be helped," Nash said. "At the moment, the response seems to be 'well if this happens women can't go down south anymore'."

Boston University last year fired geologist David Marchant 18 months after he was accused of harassing women at remote Antarctic field camps. But on Tuesday Nash presented a paper at the University of Melbourne arguing although Marchant's case has been cited as evidence #MeToo has already changed Antarctic science for the better, "it is problematic to focus on individual cases at the expense of the wider culture".

"All of the things that women and other marginalised groups contribute are lost as a result of the fact that we can't keep them safe," she said. "This happens in polar research, it happens in mining, it happens in archeology, it happens anytime women are put in remote, isolated settings."



Nash wants better pre-deployment expedition preparation (alongside the staples of first aid and wilderness survival), which encourages fieldworkers to "be self-reflexive" about how their race, gender, sexuality and class could contribute to "comfort and discomfort" in certain settings.

"For instance, the experience of living in close quarters where white heterosexual men predominate and without the possibility of exit is one that comes up regularly in the stories of fieldwork from women and other marginalised groups," the paper notes.

Nearly 60% of early career polar researchers are women. Women in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine (STEMM) are 3.5 times more likely than men to experience sexual harassment during fieldwork.