You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

The Juan Polar Sun was falling on October 8th halfway through a six-week voyage across

the Central Arctic Ocean. Four women listened in quiet disbelief to the rules of a new dress

code. No leggings, no crop tops, no hot pants, nothing too tight or too revealing. It was for

their own safety they were told. Most of the crew on board the ship were men.

Chelsea Harvey, a reporter for E&E News, was part of a group of journalists aboard the Russian

research vessel Academic Fedorov. They were there to report on the Mosaic Expedition.

A research mission that set off late last year to study how climate change is impacting

the Arctic. With hundreds of scientists from 20 countries, the German-led Polar Expedition

is the largest in history for Chelsea. Just the opportunity to get up into the Central

Arctic is so rare and a once in a lifetime opportunity. I really had this feeling as I was

going that this is an environment that is rapidly changing due to climate change. If I had

the opportunity to come back in 30 or 50 years, that it might not look the same at all. That

was something that was really special. But Chelsea says that excitement shifted following

several incidences of gender discrimination. Discrimination that's symptomatic of a larger

history. Polar research has kind of perpetuated this archetype of the white male explorer and

that really has come at the exclusion of women until very recently. When I think that

this episode on this particular ship kind of illustrated a lot of the types of events

that still today are common on Polar Research Expeditions. For instance, Chelsea points

to that meeting around the dress code. I think for me and for a lot of other people, it sparked

a lot of resentment, first of all, because a lot of people had this impression that women

were being asked to change the way that they looked in order to manage the behavior of men

...