It was unusual enough to be a female climber in that era of yesteryear, let alone to make a stand in front of your friends that would possibly upset them.
Junko Tabei
Transcending these social norms had a personal impact. Tabei lamented that, although “I remained strong-willed about Everest, tears of doubt fell down my cheeks at night.”
Her honesty was criticized by some in the established mountaineering community in Japan, particularly in her published account, “Annapurna: Women’s Battle,” which expressed the raw emotions and feelings experienced on their 1970 expedition. Tabei shared “the feelings of the team members when things failed to go in the direction they had envisioned … We put our honest experiences on paper.”
Reflecting on how she had to overcome social norms to lead the expedition — “In my day, we were strictly advised that being different was abnormal” — Tabei concluded that: “A person must be able to voice her opinion without worrying about criticism.”
A problem of representation
Ever since the late 1850s, women have made a significant yet often-hidden contribution to mountaineering. It retains a powerful legacy of male-dominated clubs and governing institutions founded on masculine norms such as risk-taking. This has often cast mountaineering achievements in a way that privileges men.
Clubs established traditions based on the first ascents of mountains — very few of which were made by women. Their absence from leading mountaineering clubs and lack of representation in published club journals meant their achievements were often attributed to male companions.
In 1872, the American climber Meta Brevoort felt it best, due to social prejudice, to publish her extraordinary first ascents in the European Alps under the name of her nephew, William A.B. Coolidge. Mountaineer and author David Mazel notes that Brevoort’s account was “carefully written to conceal the author’s sex.”
Mountain exploration and climbing have traditionally been framed as heroic endeavors dominated by men. Figures such as Hillary, Mallory and Reinhold Messner are celebrated for their bravery, strength and leadership — traits associated with masculinity.
Early mountaineering narratives often emphasised physical endurance, dominance over nature, and the ability to withstand extreme conditions — reinforcing ideas of masculine heroism. Mountains as towering, imposing and seemingly unconquerable landscapes have been metaphorically linked to power and challenge.
Traditions that have been passed down through generations — from ascent styles to route names – have also been synonymous with masculinity. In the words of mountaineering historian Walt Unsworth, climbing Everest “is the story of Man’s attempts to climb a very special mountain.”
This has had real-world consequences for mountaineering. Today, only 6% of British mountain guides are women, while globally, less than 2% of those registered to the International Federation of Mountain Guide Association (IFMGA) are women. If you don’t see your face reflected, it becomes a daunting prospect to imagine yourself in mountaineering — whether as a mountain guide, or an amateur mountaineer like me.
By 2024, women represented 13% of all Everest summiteers since 1953, yet their stories are seldom told. White, male, able-bodied and middle-class voices dominate representations in published records and popular portrayals of adventure on the world’s highest mountain.
As anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner attests, this is not surprising given mountaineering’s history as a Western imperialist and colonizing project that aimed to conquer nations and nature, built upon all-male institutions. Yet men and women have the same statistical odds of making a successful summit or dying on Everest.
Julie Rak, in her book “False Summit,” shows how some accounts can treat women’s achievements with ambivalence, and at worst question their authenticity. It has even been suggested that Tabei was effectively dragged up the mountain by her friend, the male Sherpa Ang Tsering.
Having suffered significant trauma following the avalanche that nearly wiped out their 1975 expedition, Tabei showed enormous courage and resilience to summit Everest just a few days later. She describes the ascent as difficult — and yes, accepted help from Ang Tsering — but this was her achievement, not a “stunt” to be denied by those who were not even present.
Diversity on the mountain
Since Tabei’s Everest summit, mountaineering has undergone changes as a sport, shifting from an elite, exploratory pursuit to a commercialized industry where wealthy clients can hire companies to reach summits with professional support.
From the late 1980s, high-altitude mountaineering became a valuable tourism commodity. Seizing the opportunity to boost tourism, the Nepalese government began to issue more permits, fueling the growth of commercial companies offering clients the opportunity to be guided up 8,000-meter summits. In 2023, Nepal welcomed over 150,000 high-altitude trekking and mountaineering visitors, with 47 teams attempting to climb Everest.
Yet despite the popularity and commercialisation of the sport, mountaineering remains stubbornly resistant to diversity.
Scholar Jennifer Hargreaves argues that women have been excluded from being represented as the “sporting hero.” What constitutes our cultural identity, meaning and values almost exclusively solidifies heroic masculinity in most forms of sport, including mountaineering.
And much of this is due to the stories that are not told.
Delphine Moraldo’s research found that of the mountaineering autobiographies published in Britain and Europe from the late 1830s to 2013, only 6% were written by women.
Historically, literary representations of women mountaineers have often been met with ambivalence, their achievements portrayed as lesser. Women are stereotyped as weaker, bound to domesticity and lacking the hardiness required to be a “good mountaineer.”
These perceptions, coupled with a lack of representation, have reduced women’s opportunities to secure funding for expeditions, or to access female-specific clothing and equipment. Tabei and her team had to make their own expedition clothing because women’s sizes did not exist, a problem that remains today. When raising sponsorship for Everest, she was told: “Raise your children and keep your family tight, rather than do something like this.”
But while there is still a mountain to climb when it comes to attaining equality in adventure sports, there is a growing body of research and media celebrating women’s achievements – from campaigns such as Sport England’s This Girl Can to films charting the lives of some women mountaineers.
A hidden sisterhood
Junko Tabei and Pan Duo’s names may never be as well known as Edmund Hillary’s. But they are just two of many women whose achievements reach far beyond the peaks. I’ve written about many of them in my research.
Polish mountaineer Wanda Rutkiewicz was the third woman and first from Europe to summit Everest. When asked in 1979 by high-altitude record holder Maurice Herzog why she had climbed Everest, Rutkiewicz responded that she did it for “women’s liberation.” By the late 1980s, such activism was harnessed by large sponsors such as Tata Steel, who recruited Indian mountaineer Bachendri Pal, the fifth woman to summit Everest, to lead a women’s adventure program.
Corporate sponsorship has, however, eluded many leading women mountaineers. Despite all her outstanding achievements — including holding a world-record ten Everest summits by a woman — Lhakpa Sherpa struggled for years to achieve recognition and the status of her male contemporaries. In 2019, writer Megan Mayhew Bergman asked why she didn’t have sponsors.
More recently, however, Lhakpa Sherpa’s mountaineering career was documented in the 2023 Netflix documentary “Mountain Queen,” which raised her profile and has led to new sponsorship opportunities.
There is also work being done to change the exclusion of women from mountaineering. In Nepal and around the world, charitable organisations have been initiated by women mountaineers to help their fellow women climbers, including Empowering Women Nepal and 3Sisters Adventure Trekking.
My research has shown how women and mountaineers from other marginalized backgrounds can use their successes to become role models for and drivers of social change.
Tabei, for example, was appalled at the degradation mountaineering had caused to Mount Everest, and spoke out about the need for responsible mountaineering and conservation. She led cleanup expeditions and researched the environmental impact of tourism and climate change on both mountain ecosystems and local communities.
Tabei’s efforts helped bring global attention to the need for conservation in high-altitude environments, inspiring climbers to take a more responsible approach to their expeditions.
In research about Asian women’s contribution to climbing Everest, I examined how the struggle for women’s emancipation, empowerment and recognition is a phenomenon that is shared globally. A new generation of Asian women mountaineers such as Dawa Yangzum Sherpa, the first woman to achieve IFMGA status, and Shailee Basnet are defying gender norms and achieving status as internationally recognised mountaineers and mountaineering guides.
Basnet became one of ten women to scale Everest in 2008 as part of Sagarmatha Expedition, which was established to draw attention to climate change and gender equality, and to reclaim the Nepali name for the mountain: Sagarmatha. The expedition brought together ten women from six different religious, caste and ethnic backgrounds. All ten reached the summit, making it the most successful women’s expedition to date.
Following this, in 2014 Basnet led the formation of the first all-women Seven Summits project to climb the highest peak on every continent. Importantly, she harnessed the team’s newfound profile to undertake a large-scale social justice program, visiting hundreds of schools, leading hikes and giving talks across the Kathmandu Valley. Their mission was to improve educational awareness concerning opportunities for women and girls, and also to protect the environment.
‘A life we would never regret’
Since the mid-1950s, a hidden sisterhood has forged a route for women to access high-altitude mountaineering. Their impact has reached far beyond the expeditions they led.
Women have used their status as mountaineers to empower and support other women to achieve social, political and environmental justice, and raise awareness about poverty, sex trafficking, religious and ethnic marginalization, environmental degradation and the impact of mass tourism.
Junko Tabei was a pioneer whose tenacity helped a whole generation of women in mountaineering. By not recognising their achievements, we deny an important part of our cultural heritage — and miss the opportunity to learn and share the inspirational work that women continue to undertake.
Tabei’s memoir is not simply a remarkable mountaineering account, it is, in the words of Julie Rak, a feminist text that challenges what society has always thought it means to be heroic, brave and adventurous.
Tabei died in 2016 at the age of 77. On the 50th anniversary of one of her many achievements, it’s fitting to end with these words from her memoir, “My approach was one of not worrying about the loss of a job or missing out on a promotion. I felt it was important to live a life we would never regret.”
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