Climbing Mount Everest: Women, career and family in outdoor education

For women outdoor educators, combining an outdoor career with family relationships appears contradictory. Long and/or irregular hours, residentials, and increasing work commitments are, for example, congruent with traditional notions of a career in the outdoors yet they clash with social constructions of women’s primary identities as partners, wives and/or mothers. In this paper, I explore how 21 women outdoor educators constructed connections and disconnections between career and family. In doing so, I uncover how they negotiated their career identities and show how contradictions between work and home were exacerbated due to the centrality of the body to their outdoor education careers.