A group of 76 women set sail this week from Argentina on the first ever all-female Antarctic expedition. The team will brave subzero temperatures on a 20-day boot camp aimed at building leadership skills and promoting women in science and exploration.
The expedition is the first of many more planned trips with the goal being to graduate more than 1,000 women over the next 10 years through the program known as Homeward Bound.
Begun by Fabian Dattner, an Australian entrepreneur and leadership coach, Homeward Bound aims to not only expose more women to the Antarctic research, but also to focus attention on climate change. Among the group of women on the inaugural voyage there are physicists, mathematicians, engineers, doctors, marine ecologists and astronomers.
“The message of Homeward Bound is to bring together this intelligent, capable group of women who are not seen, not recognized, and in large part somewhat sidelined,” Dattner told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
On the first blog entry from the trip by Dattner from their vessel at sea, she reports with extreme pride.
“They drink, they play, they are already collaborating on a multitude of ideas to bring us together, as women have done for aeons. It is an impossible privilege to watch this go live before my eyes,” she wrote.
Follow the Homeward Bound Project on Facebook here.
