Personal Everest

I am what you call a "mood reader."  In other words, I typically will read books and articles from a similar genre or topic for a while before switching to something else.  For a while, I was reading anything and everything on the American Civil War (I still have a few books left to read, so I will likely switch back at some point).  Before that, I was engrossed in books on the British Navy in the Age of Sail (the Aubrey/Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian, the Horatio Hornblower series by C.S. Forester, and the Richard Bolitho series by Alexander Kent).  Currently, the topic of interest seems to be disasters and high adventure.  I just finished the book, Alive, which tells about the story of the sixteen survivors of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, which crashed in the Andes Mountains in 1974 (the book was made into a 1993 movie starring Ethan Hawke).  I have also been reading a lot of books about Ernest Shackleton and his 1914-1917 expedition to Antarctica.  Finally, I seem to be reading a lot about Mt. Everest (the book, Into Thin Air is just one example).  I have found that this whole genre of stories is a really good place to learn about leadership.  And, climbing Mt. Everest in particular has become a common metaphor for tackling significant challenges and attaining hard to reach, so-called "stretch goals" in your personal and professional life (there are, in fact, a number of articles, blog posts, and self-help books that utilize this particular theme - see just one example here).

So, it was really coincidental that I came across two very interesting articles this weekend.  There was a short article in the Cincinnati Business Courier about a local entrepreneur who was getting ready for an attempt on Mt. Everest.  More interesting was an article that appeared in the New York Times about the mountaineer, Alison Hargreaves.  The New York Times is apparently running a brand new feature called "Overlooked" which tells stories of some very remarkable women.  The articles appear in the Obituaries section of the newspaper, and each one starts with the following opening line:

Since 1851, obituaries in the New York Times have been dominated by white men.  With Overlooked, we're adding the stories of remarkable women.

I encourage you to take a look (here is the link), as there are some really interesting stories about some remarkable women throughout history, including Henrietta Lacks, Emily Warren Roebling, and Ada Lovelace, to name just a few).  The most recent story, as I said earlier, is about the mountaineer Alison Hargreaves, who was the first woman in history to climb Mt. Everest alone (no one was helping her set up fixed ropes or scouting the trail) and without the use of bottled oxygen.  She accomplished this feat on May 13, 1995 and sent the following radio message to her son and daughter, "To Tom an Katie, my dear children, I am on the highest point of the world, and I love you dearly."  In fact, she was only the second person ever to accomplish this feat, the first being an Italian mountaineer named Reinhold Messner in 1980. 

When asked if a female climber needed to be tougher than a man, Hargreaves answered very poignantly, "I think that women in general have to work harder in a man's world to achieve recognition."  In fact, after Hargreaves and her colleagues died trying to climb K2 (the second highest mountain in the world) on August 13, 1995, there was a notable backlash and media frenzy in which she was called selfish for choosing to leave her poor children behind to try to climb a mountain.  Please note that no one - absolutely no one - publicly or privately questioned all of the fathers who died with her.

As I sit here and think, I can only wonder about how many other women have found themselves in a similar situation - even if it wasn't necessarily a life-or-death situation like climbing Mt. Everest or K2.  Do women really need to do even more than men to gain the same level (actually, it's never really the same level, is it?) of recognition and accolades?  Unfortunately, I think so.  Hopefully this is starting to change.

We all have our personal Mt. Everest's.  I think what is most important, however, is that we don't force women to climb Mt. Everest in order to gain the same level of recognition that a man who climbs Mt. Kilamanjaro or Denali receives.