Ami Burns – Submariners only care whether you’re competent at your job

I think the question was always ‘are we going to be accepted?’ and will it make things difficult?

All of those questions, and I think the anxiety was probably greater than the event because it transpires that Submariners only care if you are competent at your job.

Simon: Right. Isn’t that wonderful?

Isn’t it wonderful, exactly. You know, they just want you to turn up and be good and it doesn’t really matter what gender you are.

There are amendments that need to be made to sort of allow women to be accommodated on a boat, and that’s probably what caused the biggest issue in that you know you might have 60 people sharing three showers for the whole Patrol and at first because we were being correctly cautious about segregation, you know three girls had one shower and the other 57 people then only had two showers.

They were more bothered about that and they only had two toilets instead of three, you know.

That’s probably the biggest teething problems.