No shops for women working in Antarctica

Until 20 years ago British research stations in the Antarctic were male-only bastions, frozen time-capsules of a more chauvinist age. It took a hard fight for women to bring change, but change they have eventually – and joyously – brought. As you fly into Rothera, the main British research station in Antarctica, you see the emptiness stretching in every direction. On a continent almost 60 times the size of Britain there's not a single permanent inhabitant – just thousands upon thousands of miles of snow and ice. Last November Rosey Grant made the journey perched in the cockpit of a small propeller plane. 'It was cloudy,' the 29-year-old meteorologist recalled when I spoke to her by phone in March, one of a series of interviews I conducted with women working at the base. 'But every now and then a glacier or an iceberg would appear in little patches of clear. Just getting pieces of the picture was tantalising. I remember thinking, "I'm glad it's like this or I'd be overwhelmed."' Grant had spent the months leading up to her departure writing a will, bulk-buying moisturiser, and packing it, along with a flute and ice axes, into a one-metre-cubed cardboard box. As her plane descended she was afforded her first glimpse of the place that would be her home for the next 15 months: a small cluster of green buildings dwarfed by the snow-covered landscape. Rothera is Britain's largest research station on the continent. It is run by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), which undertakes scientific research into everything from evolutionary biology to climate change. In the 1980s it was BAS that discovered the hole in the ozone layer.