At a Think South reading the other day, someone from the audience asked me whether being a woman influenced my experience managing the Trans-Antarctica Expedition, or made the job more difficult. My immediate reaction was a simple 'no', but the answer, in fact, is more nuanced. As I write in the book's introduction, my whole point is that by accepting our differences - both cultural and personal - all and any of us can work together to accomplish big things. I probably should have added the word 'gender.'
There were a few obvious times in this project (and my overall career) when my gender influenced the path to success or my experience of it. On the negative side, there were important foreign partners who had to be convinced that I was a leader and negotiator to be taken seriously, not a girlfriend to someone on the team; I cried small tears when I got tired and overwhelmed; there were the occasional, small sexual advances from various players along the way, only a few of which were creepy and inappropriate (I am not naive enough to think that I did not, at least in some measure, encourage one or two).
On the positive side, my enormous desire to please and my ability to multitask made me work twice as hard as I would have had I not cared so much or paid so close attention. Mundane attention to detail - like my mother packing a simple weekend camping trip for a husband and five small children, multiplied exponentially - was key to us putting thousands of important pieces into place. Are these qualities inherently female? I simply do not know beyond my own experience.
Perhaps my own innate lack of interest in the physical feat of crossing the continent of Antarctica and proving my worth in doing so, made me less of a competitive threat to a band of men wholly focused on the deed. "If you had been a man," Will Steger said to me, "I'd probably never let you do so much; our egos would get in the way."
As much as this was a project all about physical super strength and endurance, human relationships, in the end, would make or break the effort. I read people well and took upon myself the important task of making sure various factions felt good about the decisions we made and the roles they played. I had a lifetime of experience and many role models that taught me how to be the nearly invisible glue in complex and emotionally charged relationships, how to subsume myself for the good of the whole and listen. But there is a price for those of us who do it well. Polar explorer Ann Bancroft once told me that she would never again participate in a mixed gender expedition in which she was the only female. Her experience as a member of Will Steger's North to the Pole expedition in 1987 taught her that the innate burden of being the one all the other (male) team members sought out to confess their fears and frustrations was a much heavier burden than the ice accumulating in her sodden sleeping bag. Jacqui Banaszynski, the Pioneer Press reporter that flew in three times to visit the Trans-Antarctica team had to straddle the demands of being both an objective observer and scribe and a "safe" friend to men who obviously and ardently needed to talk.
The bottom line, however, is this: my gender was, I believe, a footnote to this wild tale. if I didn't acknowledge it as a factor, I found that others stopped questioning it, too. In the expedition's aftermath, as we toured the world, our Chinese team member told the mayor of Beijing that I was the "big boss." "When she speaks," he explained, "everybody listens!" I would like to think it's true. I believe I was respected for the work I did - the heart, the spirit and volume - my reward, the success we achieved together.
When the team came home from the expedition twenty-five years ago, I slipped into the shadows again, and left them to the limelight and the cameras. My job was done. Now, twenty-five years later, those same men flew into town from various corners of the world to celebrate MY book and to thank me for getting them across Antarctica. They knew. Their presence was a testament to their understanding of my role. Nowhere in our conversation did my being female have a place.
Photo: Cathy de Moll, Will Steger and Jean-Louis Etienne, the three partners in the 1990 International Trans-Antarctica Expedition say goodbye as the men leave for Antarctica. Cathy stayed behind to manage the logistics. July 1989. Photo: Jack Dougherty