Fashion
Skiing Is Different for Women. But It Doesn’t Need to Be.
My friend Sheldon Kerr says she’s getting her PhD in ski bumming, and I think she’s right. She’s on her way to becoming one of only 12 female certified International Federation of Mountain Guides Associations guides in the U.S.—she’s literally one of the best people in the world at what she does, but to get to the top she’s had to battle a range of unseen and insidious obstacles.
We met back when we both worked for an organization called Babes in the Backcountry (I’m sure the name didn’t help) which ran avalanche classes, clinics, and backcountry ski trips for women. I was just out of college, and Sheldon wasn’t even done yet, but while I was the lackey who schlepped gear and made sure everyone signed their release form, she was teaching classes and leading women three times her age.
I caught up with her recently when she was in Jackson Hole, working for Exum Guides, one of the oldest, most respected guide services in the country. When I told her I was coming to town she said she’d take me out to ski something scary. “We’re going to be the best ski mountaineering feminists in the universe,” she said in her typical tone of big-hearted sarcasm, as we walked out to the top of a couloir called Chuter Buck. She hummed and cracked jokes as she built an anchor and calmly told me how to rappel down into the chute on my skis. I was saucer-eyed and shaky-legged, and she was literally singing, barely even breaking a sweat as I begged for snack breaks and rest. She’s incredibly good at what she does—amazingly so in my eyes—but in a dude-dominated mountain guide world she’s still fighting against stereotypes. In becoming a full guide she has the added burden of both trying to carve out space, and pulling other women up beside her.
Gender is another fault line in skiing. It signals who is welcome and who stays. Who can lock down jobs, who might get paid to ski, who finds mentors and who gets marginalized. Who is comfortable skiing alone and drinking in a crowd. It’s hard to bro down and break in, when you are not, in fact, a bro.
Sheldon says that yeah, sure, she is physically different than the jacked dudes who are on the same career course as she is. But the hardest part isn’t the physical part, it’s finding the opportunities for learning and promotion when she’s judged differently at every step. She has few female peers, and even fewer female mentors, and as she progresses there’s the added pressure of having to be a role model. She wants to provide that broad mentorship she didn’t get, but it’s exhausting. The lack of female mentorship manifests itself in subtle, deeply ingrained ways, ones that easily push people out. “It’s such a physically intimate sport, and men don’t ask women to go on expeditions because there’s a level of it being inappropriate,” Sheldon says. “Think of how many dudes had older dude mentors and how strange that might be for a girl. I don’t see myself having the same kind of informal learning opportunities.”
Those informal opportunities, like the way a younger guy might be taken into new terrain by an older dude, are how people ascend in the guide world, and really any world. A lack of representation makes the sport less accessible for women. Sheldon’s trying to reverse the trend by arranging all-female expeditions. She also started an inclusivity committee within the American Mountain Guide Association to formalize mentorship, and address the subtle and insidious sexism within the guide certification process. “The microaggressions are so micro,” she says, noting how assertiveness is heralded in male guides but tracks as bossy in women. Sheldon knows that older guides probably aren’t intentionally excluding women, but holding space is a way for men to cling to something they, even unconsciously, consider theirs. It’s exhausting and hard to break into those spaces, Sheldon says. “I don’t really have time to start a social movement, but I think guiding, by showing up for work it’s quite the statement. There’s emotional and mental labor that’s taken to get there.”
I have felt a flicker of that mental labor on so many different ridgelines. I’m often the only woman skiing in a group of men, and when I am, I’m constantly computing a kind of attitude calculus. If I seem too soft, then I’m feeding into the idea women can’t hang. Too hard and I might look like a threat. The narrative is that, as a woman in a men’s world, you have to suck it up and be scrappy and tough to prove you deserve to be there. But not tougher than the dudes so you’re undesirable. Sure, tell me it’s all in my head, but I am always gauging group dynamics, and how I might be perceived. I can almost never let myself feel what I feel. The myth of women on the margins still holds weight, even though it was never fully true, and even though some of the best, most groundbreaking skiers of my generation have been female: Lindsey Vonn, Mikaela Shiffrin, Sarah Burke.
When my friend Mel moved to Telluride in her twenties, the ratio of men to women was reportedly 22 to one, and the ratio dictates the social scene. The odds are good, you get told as a new girl in a ski town, but the goods are odd. This winter, any time I rolled into town and asked which dirtbag I should talk to I was, almost without exception, pointed to a middle-aged man, like the ridge hippies and the Air Force. Those stereotypes reflect a partial reality, but they run deep, and they dictate who thinks they belong.
There are arguments and excuses in every direction, from physical to physiological: men are more risk-prone, they party harder, they’re stronger so they can do the necessary physical jobs. They’re better at navigating and more comfortable at being lost; they don’t have biological clocks, and they have wild oats to sow. They just like it more. But the ratio also speaks to who we allow to be risky and confident with their bodies in the first place.
I spent one winter working part-time in a gear shop. When people came in to rent skis, we’d ask them to quantify their skiing ability—type one, two, or three—so we could adjust the DIN on their binding, twisting the tension higher if they were better skiers. Men chronically overstated their ability and women categorically understated theirs. You could sense it in the way they sized up the release forms, and in the questions they asked. These are the same men who will hike up something steep and sketchy with their blood in their ears the morning after they fly in from New York, or sign up for a spendy weeklong heli-skiing trip. My friend Jooles, who manages a heli-ski company, says 85 percent of their customers are men, even when they try to reach out to women. Confidence comes from positive reinforcement. The guys at the rental shop nod approvingly when you say you’re a type three skier. Older dudes on ski patrol pick younger dudes to do control work with them. If you fit the mold, your presence is affirmed at every turn.
It is different to be a woman skier. It’s not because we like it less, but because we’re forced to be responsible in different ways. Many of the women I know who have stuck it out in ski towns have solid jobs and life paths that aren’t just pegged to skiing. They’re nurses and teachers and EMTs. Their lives are a little bit more full, even if skiing is close to the center. Jackson-based mental health counselor Jennifer Sofie Gulick says she has people of all genders coming to her to try to figure out the existential questions of how to grow up on the mountains, but she’s noticed women question it sooner. Her female patients often feel like they need to be responsible or closer to home even before they have kids. They tend to worry more about the physical risks of skiing.
When Jooles has asked women about why they don’t sign up to heli-ski, the two main excuses she gets are expense, and guilt about being gone for so long. She never hears the second one from men. I’ve seen how much the burden of responsibility falls on my female friends, even the wild children, like Rachael Burks, who I always find compulsively clearing tables at the end of the night.
I think about Rachael’s path to becoming an athlete, and, like Sheldon, how hard it’s been for her to claw her way to the top. To be a woman in skiing is to scrap for sponsor dollars, for opportunities, to have to pit yourself against other girls, to be the only one. You only get attention if you’re the very best.
That narrow path is the opposite of the latitude we give young white men to be messy, selfish, and focused on leisure. And it starts early. As girls we’re so often taught to see our bodies as a burden instead of a tool to use and break, let alone something we can leverage for pleasure. I grew up in a family that encouraged risk, regardless of gender, and I was—and still am—scrappy and tomboyish.
But for all the range I was given to be independent, physical, and dirty, I still soaked in ideas about what women’s bodies should look like. I wonder how differently I would absorb risk and physical pain if I had spent my adolescence and early adult years thinking about what my body could handle instead of how I could make it disappear. In the dude-dominated world of skiing, where they named the bunny slope after Playboy Bunnies, I feel the burden to buck that stereotype. To be talented and responsible and kind and fun and hot, with so little room for error.
Excerpted from Powder Days: Ski Bums, Ski Towns and the Future of Chasing Snow by Heather Hansman © 2021 by Heather Hansman, used with permission from Hanover Square Press/HarperCollins.
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