Celebrating Women Climbers and the Insights from Priya Kochhar's Powerful Memoir Dissertation
- Veronica Lee
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 8 hours ago
By Veronica Lee
1st Feb 2026
I met Priya Kochhar in the boulder field at Fairhead in April 2023, and it turned out to be one of those small moments that stays with you. I have been climbing at Fairhead since 2007, and back then it was rare to see another woman in the boulders. These days, sharing space with female climbers feels completely normal, but it has not always been that way.
As time went on, I kept bumping into Priya in different climbing settings, and what started as chance encounters slowly grew into an unexpected and really lovely friendship. We would talk for hours about everything from climbing to life, once long enough that I even picked up a £100 parking fine. One topic we kept coming back to was her master’s dissertation, Examining the Role of the Women’s Memoir in Contemporary Mountaineering Culture. I found it fascinating. Her work illuminated many feelings I had about gender inequality in climbing and beyond. Some concepts were new enough that I needed a dictionary, but her dissertation gave words to emotions that, I am sure, many of us have felt but could not express.
I'd love to invite you to explore Priya’s dissertation as a way to celebrate our gender differences, because increasing our awareness, even in small ways, is a step towards building a more inclusive climbing community and world.
The Changing Landscape for Women in Climbing
When I first started climbing at Fairhead in 2007, seeing another woman in the boulders was almost unheard of. The climbing community felt overwhelmingly male-dominated, and that shaped how I experienced the sport. However, over the years, both the rise of commercial climbing gyms and a collective push to promote women in the sport have encouraged greater female participation, making climbing more welcoming and diverse.
This shift is not just about numbers; it reflects broader cultural changes, where women’s stories and experiences are gaining recognition. Priya’s dissertation highlights how women’s memoirs in mountaineering offer unique insights into these cultural changes, by challenging traditional narratives and revealing the complex realities of women climbers.
I remember these moments so clearly because of the support of the women around me. There was no sense of division or expectation, just the simple joy of climbing together.
Understanding Gender Inequality Through Memoirs
Priya’s research explores how women’s memoirs in mountaineering expose the ongoing gender inequalities in the sport. These are some of the underlying themes revealed in the memoirs, made visible through Priya’s thoughtful analysis rather than explicitly stated by the authors:
Hegemonic expectations: The pressure on women to conform to traditional gender roles, even in adventurous spaces like climbing.
Internalised misogyny: How women sometimes absorb and reproduce negative beliefs about their own gender.
Barriers to recognition: Women’s achievements often receive less attention, or are framed differently to men’s.
Reading her dissertation helped me understand feelings I had but couldn’t fully articulate. For example, the frustration of being underestimated or the subtle ways gender biases show up in climbing culture. Priya’s dissertation gave me language to discuss these experiences openly.
The Power of Storytelling in Climbing Culture
Storytelling is a powerful tool for change. Women’s memoirs do more than document climbs; they challenge stereotypes and inspire new generations. Priya’s work shows that these stories:
Create a sense of community among women in climbing and mountaineering
Highlight diverse experiences and identities.
Encourage reflection on how climbing culture can become more inclusive.
By sharing their journeys, women climbers contribute to a richer, more honest picture of the sport. This helps break down barriers and opens the door for more equitable participation.
Personal Reflections on Gender and Climbing
Discussing Priya’s dissertation sparked many personal reflections. I recognised the impact of societal expectations on my climbing journey. For example:
Feeling the need to demonstrate that I was worthy of tackling the same climbs as the male climbers.
Navigating spaces where I was often the only woman.
Experiencing moments of self-doubt linked to internalised biases.
These reflections are common among women climbers, yet they often remain unspoken. Priya’s work encourages us to bring these feelings into the open, fostering understanding and support.
How Priya’s Dissertation Can Inspire Change
Priya’s dissertation is more than an academic study; it’s a call to action. It invites climbers, organisers, and communities to:
Recognise and challenge gender biases.
Support women’s voices and stories.
Create environments where everyone feels welcome and valued.
Reading her work can help us all appreciate the strength in our differences and work toward a climbing culture that respects and celebrates all participants.
A Resource for the Climbing Community
Included below is a synopsis of Priya’s dissertation, written by her, along with a link to the full PDF. I encourage every climber, regardless of gender, to read it. It offers valuable insights that can deepen our understanding of gender dynamics in climbing and beyond.
By engaging with this work, we take a small but meaningful step toward a more harmonious and inclusive climbing community. Celebrating women climbers means listening to their stories, learning from their experiences, and supporting their journeys.
Download Priya Kochhar’s full dissertation here: Priya Kochhar - Women’s Memoir in Mountaineering Culture (PDF)
Synopsis:
‘Examining the Role of the Women’s Memoir in Contemporary
Mountaineering Culture’
By Priya Kochhar
Left: A very happy Priya at Fairhead after leading Railroad (E1 5b)
Right: Priya leading Destitution (E2 5b), Oileán Gabhla (Gola Island), one of her favourite places to climb
Hi I’m Priya, and I wrote ‘Examining the Role of the Women’s Memoir in Contemporary Mountaineering Culture’ for my MA Dissertation project in 2024. I’ve lived in Béal Feirste
since 2018 and have done pretty much all of my trad climbing in the North of Ireland and
Dún na nGall, and I have loved getting involved in the community here. When I was deciding on my dissertation topic, I’d just taken a year out and spent the whole time working and climbing, so I realised that I wanted it to be about the development of rock-climbing communities from the perspectives of women. I settled on writing about the Irish climber and mountaineer Clare Sheridan’s Uncoiling the Ropes (2020), and the American climber, Lynn Hill’s Climbing Free: My Life in the Vertical World (2002).
The introduction to my dissertation briefly details a history of women’s writing, and the use of the women’s memoir in challenging the social acceptance of male superiority and female inferiority. This socially constructed division between men and women underpins the issues women faced in mountaineering from the emergence of the culture in the 1800s until the 1970s-1990s, as historically, they were largely excluded from mountaineering community spaces and often treated as sexual objects. As 19th century Romantic authors often described nature in a sexualised, feminine way, they were either consciously or subconsciously applying the socially constructed gender divide to their understanding of humanity’s relationship with nature. The theme of division between the conquering masculine humanity and the untamed, feminine natural world, needing to be conquered, remained popular in mountaineering literature far beyond the end of the Romantic era. When women finally entered mountaineering spaces on the human side of this division, whilst obviously being feminine, the misogynistic ideas that arose from the language of this division, made it difficult for women to feel safe or taken seriously. When I talk about this division in the introduction, the phrase I will use is ‘rationalist dualisms’.
I found Paddy O’Leary’s book The Way That We Climbed (2015) very useful in providing
historical context for Sheridan’s memoir. O’Leary’s mention of a small number of women’s
names during the earlier years of a fledgling Irish climbing community suggests that their
presence was slightly better received there than in the British community, where they were deliberately excluded. He also describes the emergence of university mountaineering and climbing clubs, and how the differing attitudes at each university, and in the society at large, affected the position of women. O’Leary mentions Sheridan a few times, praising her as a key figure in the development of rock climbing on the island of Ireland.
Joseph Taylor’s Pilgrims of the Vertical (2010) provided the historical context for Lynn Hill’s memoir. Taylor describes how the beginning of rock climbing in Yosemite Valley was dominated by the Rock Climbing Section of the Sierra Club, which did admit some women, apparently because they enriched the community for the men. Taylor writes about how when the club scene was replaced with individual climbers who were mostly male, it became a hypermasculine environment which strongly favoured men, and ultimately served no one. As the hypermasculine atmosphere peaked around the 1970s, strong female climbers began to arrive, including Lynn Hill, and they challenged unfair perceptions of female rock climbers both in Yosemite Valley and further afield.
In the main two chapters of this dissertation, I write about how Sheridan and Hill’s
interactions with members of their communities inform and develop their understandings
of their positions as women in climbing and mountaineering. They also grapple with
frustration towards media representations of women in climbing, and problematic attitudes in the competition circuit. Both women seem to approach their personal climbing with the intention to test themselves and learn from the climbing process, recognising the ultimate power of nature over their human forms.
I was inspired to write about these women because not only are they rock climbers, working hard to improve their strength, technique and rope skills, they are also women, who found themselves negotiating respect simply because they were not men. They, alongside other women, are responsible for the greater equality and freedom that women in rock climbing and mountaineering enjoy today. We are now responsible for continuing this work as a whole community, so all benefit from greater understanding of, and respect towards each other, regardless of gender, or other perceived differences.
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