Equal Opportunities on Ice: Examining gender and institutional change at the British Antarctic Survey, 1975-1996

• Main Author: Seag, Morgan
• Format: Master Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Scott Polar Research Institute 2015
• Subjects: Antarctic; Antarc*; Antarctica; British Antarctic Survey
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.8756; https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/263414

This dissertation examines the recent history of an institution with a rich and varied heritage and a proud culture. In recognition of the limitations of this project, due to both the inevitably subjective research process and the constraints of research at the master’s level, I would like to begin by establishing a few things that I consider this dissertation to be, and a few things that I consider it not to be. This dissertation explores the dismantling of a discriminatory policy at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), and the corresponding progress toward women’s equality in Antarctica. It ostensibly traces the evolution of BAS’s exclusionary policy toward women in Antarctica, beginning with the passage of the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act and concluding with the 1996 announcement that BAS had become a full equal opportunities employer. Along the way it traces a progression of policy amendments that gradually gave women greater access to Antarctic fieldwork. But this dissertation also is about how an institution understood its own gendered identity during a period of dramatic institutional change. It explores the beliefs, norms, and networks that intersected with an entrenched gender paradigm, in an attempt to explain how the assumption that BAS could operate as a modern scientific institution under a masculinist gender paradigm was destabilised in the late 1970s, contested from within and without during the 1980s, and displaced by a new set of gendered norms toward the end of that decade. In sum, I argue that women’s increasing access to Antarctic field opportunities with the British Antarctic Survey between 1975 and 1996 should be understood in terms of broader and more fundamental processes of institutional change at BAS. However, I acknowledge that the story that unfolds in this dissertation cannot be exhaustive. This dissertation offers one possible path through the BAS Archives, and future researchers may well find others that are equally or more illuminating. It is therefore worth briefly mentioning a few ...