"Look around the world and look at what's missing," says Fabian Dattner.
Women. Women in leadership roles, specifically. Bearing in mind we speak before the US election, Dattner's words still hold confrontingly true.
![Fabian Dattner, founder of the Homeward Bound Project, which aims to fundamentally shift gender bias in leadership.](/web/20161128124851im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/x/n/8/o/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gsuq9l.png/1480048535109.jpg)
"Don't tell me we don't have a crisis in leadership, that's why Trump, that's why Brexit, that's why Marine le Pen, that's why Aleppo," the social entrepreneur says. "If women were sitting at the table in equal measure, there is a good chance this would not be happening."
Indeed, that is also why climate change, in part. "It is incomprehensible to me that at least 50 per cent of the people fighting and informing that policy aren't women."
![The Homeward Bound all-female scientists' expedition to Antarctica will set off from Argentina on December 2.](/web/20161128124851im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/x/n/8/7/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gsuq9l.png/1480048535109.jpg)
Dattner is leading a group of more than 80 women on an extraordinary journey to the Antarctic in an attempt to right that imbalance.
Speaking with Daily Life, she explains that it was a dinner with female scientists in Tasmania that galvanised the idea: tired of being ignored for senior positions, they concluded that to be a leader in polar science, it was necessary to have a beard. Frustrated and angry, Dattner quite literally dreamt up an intense learning expedition that would arm women with truly practical solutions towards shifting the power base. The Homeward Bound Project was born.
Leadership is Dattner's thing. And to foster leadership within science – a community that may sway the future of the world whether via climate change, tech innovation or health, say – Dattner has convened a group of 76 scientists and a faculty of eight women to sail to the Antarctic and intensely workshop ways in which they can return to their communities as leaders.
"Mother Nature needs her daughters" goes her mantra. Leadership needs women. Combine the two, add "intense strategy" and Homeward Bound emerges.
![The scientists will return buoyed with new leadership skills and the motivation to make real change.](/web/20161128124851im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/x/n/9/1/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gsuq9l.png/1480048535109.jpg)
"Equity is good and well, but values don't change the world, a vision will," says Dattner, who is deep in final preparations for the polar summer.
That vision saw a long application process for female scientists from around the world, who first made expressions of interest before being whittled from 180 to an initial 45 positions.
Departing Sydney next week, Dattner and her fully self-funded expedition – the Australian government would not back the venture – will set sail from Argentina on December 2, taking in 16 landings over 20 days. Over the course of the trip, the women will be tutored in leadership and strategy in 32 two-hour modules. Led by Everest pioneer Greg Mortimer, one of the ship's chief focuses will be upon climate change.
"Despite 30 years of mounting media, research, advocacy and effort, the shift is glacial – which is not a good metaphor any more because glaciers are melting quickly," says Dattner, dryly.
A documentary will be made of the project, with Screen Australia, Screen Queensland and Good Pitch coming on board with funding. The University of Tasmania is a major sponsor and Dattner Grant, Dattner's leadership consultancy, is a founding partner. One of the documentary's strategists is primatologist Dame Jane Goodall.
"I've come to realise something that has changed my life – and that is that great leadership is everywhere in women and it's different [to male leadership]," Dattner says, reeling off a list of those positive dissimilarities. Women have more integrity with money, women have legacy mindsets, women are collaborative, women are inclusive. They work in non-hierarchical and decentralised ways. But, in short, the way leadership is done is not the way women work. And this must change.
The voyage is the first step in a 10-year plan to network and skill 1000 women to be more confident at the executive table. The women will return to their homes around the world "dramatically more resourced and able to influence", armed with truly practical solutions.
"The Antarctic experience is less extraordinary than 84 women working together to work out how to build a better world. This is not a feel-good initiative, this is about an intense will to collaborate for the greater good."
While Dattner calls the initiative and its vast amount of organisation and international reach "loving, intelligent and creative", she is deadly serious about both its necessity and impact.
"We were just going to take a boat of women to Antarctica," she muses. "Have you ever wondered how a global movement starts? A global movement starts like this.
"This is not a game any more, we are so perilously close to the edge and women have always had a capacity to care for the young, the old, the past and our future. It is our strength, now is the time to use that strength."