[A 2022 report described harassment as a “fact of life” on the
continent. Young researchers are particularly alarmed. ]
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AS ANTARCTIC FIELDWORK ENDS, A SEXUAL HARASSMENT RECKONING LOOMS  
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Christian Elliott
February 6, 2023
Undark
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_ A 2022 report described harassment as a “fact of life” on the
continent. Young researchers are particularly alarmed. _

The fieldwork camp at Allan Hills, Antarctica, where researchers
drill ice cores, in December 2022., Peter Neff/COLDEX

 

As Antarctic Fieldwork Ends, a Sexual Harassment Reckoning Looms
February 6, 2023 by Christian Elliott
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In September 2022, two months before Ph.D. student Megan Kerr was
scheduled to board a military plane bound for the Antarctic ice sheet,
she found herself in a conference room on Oregon State University’s
campus, waiting to ask a question that had been nagging her for weeks.
She sat intently through a presentation from the National Science
Foundation Office of Polar Programs. Then, she raised her hand. The
room full of graduate students turned in their chairs.

“This NSF report about all the sexual harassment that’s going on
in the field,” she said. “What is the NSF going to be doing in the
short term, also long term, about that?” Because “a lot of us are
going into the field in like, two months.”

 
These students and about a hundred other researchers from roughly a
dozen institutions had gathered at Oregon State University to kick off
COLDEX [[link removed]], a 5-year, $25-million-dollar
paleoclimatology project
[[link removed]]
tasked by the NSF, the federal science agency, to find and drill a
core of Earth’s oldest ice in Antarctica.

The report Kerr mentioned was the 273-page elephant in the room — a
document
[[link removed]] the
NSF released in late August detailing a decades-long history of
pervasive sexual harassment and assault at Antarctic research
stations. Almost three-quarters of women surveyed agreed that
harassment was a problem, describing it as a “fact of life” on the
continent. And 95 percent of women interviewed in focus groups knew
someone who had experienced assault or harassment within the Antarctic
program. To outsiders, the graphic detail and matter-of-fact
descriptions were shocking
[[link removed]]. But in the
polar science community, the reaction was different
[[link removed]].

When the report came out, “No one was surprised, other than the grad
students.” Kerr said. She spoke with her principal investigators and
supervisors, “and they were like, ‘Yeah, it’s been an issue for
a long time.’ Okay, why is this the first time I’m hearing about
it?”

Since middle school, Kerr wanted to go to Antarctica. This most recent
field season, which typically takes place over the Austral summer,
from mid-October to mid-February, she had finally been chosen as part
of an eight-person COLDEX team to survey the ice sheet at
Antarctica’s remote South Pole. She was one of two graduate
students, and the only woman, on her team.

“It sucked because I was so excited for it, you know?” Kerr said.
“This is a thing I wanted for years and years. And finally I got to
do it, I’m getting to do it, and then I hear that oh, actually,
it’s a terrible place to work if you’re a woman.”

COLDEX leadership think their initiative, with its unprecedented
funding, unusually long timescale, and built-in commitment
[[link removed]] to
diversify the polar sciences, could bring some change. But Kerr and
her fellow graduate students worry the NSF response to a systemic,
deeply entrenched culture problem has been surface level
[[link removed]]. They are also
left wondering what the field’s path forward looks like.

Erin Pettit is an experienced polar researcher and COLDEX’s director
of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Originally, her role was to guide
the center in its mandate to recruit a more diverse team of
researchers. But now, she’s also responsible for COLDEX’s response
[[link removed]] to the bombshell NSF report.
To her, those goals are closely linked.

“Our biggest challenge actually stems from the fact that polar
science started from White, male, Northern European explorations,”
said Pettit. “And it is still very White and mostly male.”

This history is part of Antarctica’s hero factor
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according to sociologist Meredith Nash, who studies gender in polar
science at the Australian National University — a pervasive image of
a polar scientist as a bearded, White, male, able-bodied hero
“battling against the blizzard” and penetrating the final icy
terra incognita. Polar science started with the risky adventures of
men like Robert Falcon Scott
[[link removed]] and Ernest
Shackleton
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those stories have enduring power: Polar scientists joke their field
remains “pale and male.”

 
“That narrative of the hero, climber, science hero, whatever you
want to call it, that attitude comes along often with this attitude
that they are in a powerful position and can take advantage of that
power,” said Pettit. “Often people will use that sense of power to
hurt people who are in vulnerable positions.”

In 1957, after the United States established its first permanent bases
on the continent, the then-program supervisor joked
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“women will not be allowed in the Antarctic until we can provide one
woman for every man,” according to a history of the base. It
wasn’t until 1969 that the first all-women scientific team deployed
to Antarctica. At the time, a New York Times
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reporter called it “an incursion” into the “largest male
sanctuary remaining on this planet.” Women were excluded as not
physically able to work in the extreme environment and as distractions
for men. National Antarctic programs in the U.S., United Kingdom, and
Australia
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only allowed women to conduct fieldwork sporadically prior to the
1980s. These women entered a world built for men — one lacking
gender-specific facilities or gear in the right sizes. At
Australia’s polar station, a collage of nearly a hundred
pornographic pinups
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covered the ceiling.

“All of this energy on stations has been to tell women directly
they’re not wanted here,” said Nash. “The bullying, the
harassment, the male joking culture — it’s a very clear message
that women shouldn’t be there.”

Pettit has been to Antarctica for 21 expeditions, starting in the late
‘90s as a graduate student. “I’ve definitely been that one woman
on a field team who ended up cooking every single night,” she said.
It wasn’t every time, because she largely had good team leaders, but
“that was definitely my role for no other reason than that I
happened to be a woman.”

McMurdo Station is the closest thing to a town on the continent — a
village of a less than a hundred dormitories, offices, warehouses, and
a handful of bars. Yet, it has no cell network. Researchers rely on
landlines to contact one another, including in dorm rooms, which makes
communication difficult in dangerous situations.

“If you're stuck in an uncomfortable position because somebody has
convinced you to go into their dorm room and you're realizing this was
not a good decision, it's like, ‘Oh, excuse me, can I use your phone
to call because I'm feeling a little bit uncomfortable right now,”
Pettit said.

The station culture itself is complex and opaque, she said — certain
dorms and lounges have reputations, and for a newcomer, it’s hard to
know which you want to be in and which you want to stay away from. In
the NSF report, one interviewee said she’d been told on her first
day at McMurdo to stay clear of a certain building unless she
“wanted to be raped.” Another woman said she felt like she was
seen as “prey” no matter where she was physically on the base.

It’s not always clear who bears responsibility for overseeing
reports of misconduct, since Antarctic research stations include
researchers from dozens of different universities, contract support
staff from as many companies, and the U.S. military. What happens
after someone submits a report — to their direct employer or through
the NSF — can feel nebulous.

Remote fieldwork camps are even more dangerous, because scientists
work together on small teams hundreds of miles away from McMurdo for
weeks at a time. If something happens, the survivor has nowhere to
escape to — they’re trapped out on the ice with their abuser.

All this has been true since women first arrived on the continent.

Polar science had its #MeToo moment in 2017, just weeks after the
Harvey Weinstein scandal broke, when Boston University suspended
prominent Antarctic geologist
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David Marchant with pay. Multiple women had come forward with
allegations of sexual harassment against him, including claims that
Marchant had pelted female graduate students with rocks while they
urinated, taunted them
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and threatened their careers. His ousting had far-reaching effects
beyond the women he directly harassed.

Oregon State University polar science Ph.D. student Olivia Williams
was an undergraduate student in Marchant’s Arctic Lab at BU when the
story broke in Science
[[link removed]].
She’d planned her undergraduate research path within around the lab.
Then the lab evaporated overnight.

“It was sort of a wakeup call for what my experience as a woman in
science could be, and for the risks associated with fieldwork,”
Williams said. "To know that someone you could trust to be responsible
for keeping you safe could do harm to you while you’re in a very
isolated environment." Williams was one of a few students working
directly with Marchant’s lab who struggled to pivot and find similar
research programs to work with. She still pursued a Ph.D. in polar
science despite this experience; now she’s working in the lab that
leads the COLDEX project.

 
Women often don’t report the abuse they face in Antarctica because
they fear they’ll be sent home, which can end careers in a
scientific field highly dependent on data collection over repeated
fieldwork seasons.

“The onus is on the victim, the survivor, to say something, and then
when they do say something, they’re punished,” Nash said.
“There’s a backlash — women have their rooms destroyed on
station, or they get tormented for the entire season until they get so
distressed that they’re the ones that have to leave. The stakes are
really high for women who speak up.” Marchant’s accusers had
waited decades to come forward, until they were sure he couldn’t
retaliate. Women fear being “sent off the ice.” In the NSF report,
contractors described their employers choosing not to renew their
contracts or blacklisting them after they reported harassment. In some
cases, their abusers were promoted. The report concluded: “Female
workers are viewed as dispensable.”

The recent NSF report represented the first time the agency has
officially acknowledged the scope of the U.S. Antarctic Program’s
sexual harassment problem, beyond firing individual bad actors
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But people who have experienced harassment had been sounding the alarm
for years. An academic study
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Nash conducted back in 2018 found nearly two-thirds of women in the
Australian Antarctica program had faced sexual harassment
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Antarctic

In response to Kerr’s question at the COLDEX meeting in September,
NSF Office of Polar Programs ice core science program director Paul
Cutler admitted the NSF’s handling of the field’s sexual
harassment problem had been “ad hoc” before the report came out.
“Now, our leadership is really getting to grips with how to do this
properly,” he said.

Cutler told the audience that for the 2022-2023 field season — which
just wrapped up — the NSF was ensuring field teams had access to
more than one satellite phone. Bystander training
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would also now be required, and an independent consultant would be
stationed at McMurdo for contractors to speak with about issues. The
agency also sent senior leadership down south to signify the polar
program is “getting everyone on the same page as we move into a new
chapter,” Cutler said. The NSF released a document
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listing all the changes, including that dorm room doors at McMurdo
Station will all have peepholes added so that people can see who is at
their door before opening it. It also established a new task force
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within the U.S. Antarctic Program.

COLDEX has made changes in addition to the NSF’s. Peter Neff,
COLDEX’s director for field research and data, was stationed at
McMurdo this season and volunteered to be a direct reporter for any
harassment encountered by their 21 team members. He also distributed a
list of COLDEX staff back in the U.S. to whom reports could be made.
The COLDEX DEI committee, of which Neff is a member, added extra
bystander intervention training for their researchers prior to this
field season, in addition to the NSF’s requirement. The workshops
instruct researchers on how to disrupt situations where harassment
could occur before it happens. The COLDEX DEI committee is also
crowdsourcing a McMurdo culture primer document for new researchers.

But Nash and Pettit think what’s clearly a systemic culture problem
requires a more systemic response — and more of a focus on
prevention, which the NSF report called “nearly absent.” The NSF
response is far from the drastic intervention some researchers have
called [[link removed]] for.

One problem, they agree, is that researchers fail to think of
Antarctica, and especially remote field camps, as workplaces like any
other. “It’s stunning, because if some of the stuff happened in
any other workplace that was not in Antarctica, it would never be
allowed,” Nash said. “People still don’t see Antarctica as a
workplace with workplace norms, and that the rules of Australia or the
U.S. actually apply when you’re out there.”

Ice core teams often consist of researchers and drilling staff from
multiple institutions that just turn up on the ice and work and live
together in camps 24/7. The teams have guidelines for field safety,
but may not have codes of conduct. In a 2021 study Nash conducted
[[link removed]],
only three of 36 National Antarctic Programs’ expeditioner handbooks
or field manuals mentioned sexual harassment.

“Programs should be seeing sexual harassment as a catastrophic risk
to the organization,” Nash said, “treating it just like they would
with any other legitimate safety issue that they cater for to manage
risk around — like falling in a crevasse. Like all the things people
get trained to survive in an extreme environment. Sexual harassment
should be at the top of the list too, and it’s just not.”

 
She’s not confident the national polar program leadership will do
much to help. In the NSF report, while almost 90 percent of senior
leadership agreed that sexual harassment and assault are important to
address, less than a quarter of them agreed that sexual assault was a
problem in Antarctica.

Now that the Antarctic research season has finished, and Pettit is
back home, she said she still sees room for improvement. Although the
NSF provided bystander training and had a confidential advocate on
station for people to talk to — support that Pettit said “is great
in the moment or after the traumatic interaction” — she stressed
that the real need is a change “from leadership at all levels.”

Pettit and other field team leaders, she added, “have limited impact
if the rest of the leadership structure isn't also acting to change
the culture.”

_Christian Elliott is a science and environmental journalist based in
Illinois. He has a master's degree in science journalism from
Northwestern University's Medill School in Chicago. This story was
supported in part by a grant from the Pulitzer Center._

This article was originally published on Undark [[link removed]].
Read the original article
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* Science
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* NSF
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* Antarctic
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* Sexual Harassment
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