Sunny Stroeer spent much of her 20s in a male-dominated environment as a management consultant at Bain. She said it wasn’t until she left the corporate world and became an adventure athlete that she experienced such noticeable gender bias.
She was climbing Aconcagua in Argentina — one of the Seven Summits, or the highest peaks on each continent — solo when she was struck by how differently people reacted to her than to the men who were also ascending the 22,837-foot mountain.
“‘Where’s your husband? Where’s your guide? Where’s your partner? Are you sure you want to do this? This is really dangerous,'” Stroeer recalled hearing over and over. “It was just very explicit inequity and gender-based stereotypes.”
Stroeer quit her consulting job in 2015 and has since built a career in the outdoors, setting records in the mountains while running guiding companies and organizations aimed at getting more women outside. In addition to leading all-women expeditions, she’s the executive director of the Alliance for Gender Equity in Outdoor Adventure, or GEA Alliance, which has a Summit Scholarship program that supports women in mountaineering projects and outdoor adventures.
Women’s participation in outdoor activities has been rising. The Outdoor Industry Association said that for the first time in 2023, more than half of American women participated in outdoor recreation. Stroeer said all-women teams in the mountains are far more common now than when she started out around 2014.
Still, she said the contrast with consulting was striking. She was used to being the only woman in the room, but in the mountains, she said, the bias got “louder” and “weirder.” Unlike the outdoors, corporate America had guardrails, like human resources departments, formal policies and training, and ongoing conversations about equity in the workplace.
“I realized that there was none of that in the mountains, and I recognized that I was in a unique position to drive change,” she said.
Those experiences shaped her post-consulting career. In 2017, she started a women’s expedition company that organizes trips around the world. In 2019, she launched the Summit Scholarship program, aimed at helping more women get into mountaineering and the backcountry.
The program is geared toward women who are curious about mountaineering but don’t see a clear path in, potentially due to cost, lack of mentorship, or the sense that these spaces are not for them. The scholarships vary and can cover expedition fees, flights, gear, mentorship, and guides. The very first scholarship got 230 applications for one spot.
“I started looking at this as really a business problem with just massive unmet demand,” she said, adding she was inspired by hearing from so many women who wanted to get outside and learning what the barriers were.
In the most recent cycle this winter, she said they received over 2,100 applications from 82 different countries for a total of 13 scholarships.
The scholarships are open to girls and women as young as 14 and attract applicants of all ages. They include adventures like a three-day climbing retreat in Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, which requires no experience, and a five-day trek up Matterhorn on the Swiss-Italian border for people with more advanced mountaineering skills.
“It’s meant to address those women who are scrolling on social media and who are like, ‘Oh, man, climbing a mountain looks super cool. I would never be able to do that,’ but who have that curiosity toward the outdoors,” she said.
Stroeer said her goal is not only to get women outside.
“I think that the confidence and the self-actualization that happens in the mountains is something that carries back into daily life,” she said. “That’s what this program really is all about.”
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