The View from Women in Natural Resources:

Life Experiences and Advocacy for Gender Equity Fill the Pages

The Women in Natural Resources editors and columnists each responded to a set of questions that were designed to elicit information about backgrounds and current professional situations, and their thoughts on women’s issues.  The responses of six women are presented below.  The group includes two editors and four columnists.

Women in Natural Resources has been lucky to have an extraordinary group of women involved in it’s production over the years, and the current group is no exception.  All are well educated and work in diverse, important, and influential positions throughout North America, covering the gamut from government agencies, academia, and private business.

The questions asked of each were:

·     What is your current job or position?

      ·     What is your professional background?  (job history or career path)

      ·     How did you get interested in writing (or providing other editorial contributions) for Women in Natural Resources?

      ·     How long have you been working with Women in Natural Resources?

      ·     What special obstacles or problems do you think women in the natural resources fields face today?

      ·     Are things more balanced and equitable, or less equitable, now than when you first entered the natural resource professions?

      ·     Do you think gender issues are being adequately addressed in academic preparation of natural resource professionals?

      ·     Do you have other networks or groups that help you connect with women natural resource professionals?  Describe them.

      ·     If you had to change careers and no longer work in your current job, what would you pursue instead?

Women in Natural Resources is edited by Sandra Martin, who also works fulltime as an editor at Washington State University.  Sandra has been the editor of Women in Natural Resources since late 1999, and has also worked in distance education as an editor and as an instructor, and was a research scientist for the U.S. Forest Service for six years.

The journal’s long-time contributing editor, Daina Dravnieks Apple, has been with the U.S. Forest Service for almost 26 years and began her career as a natural resource economist at the Pacific Southwest Research Station in Berkeley, California.  After eight years, Daina went to the San Francisco Regional Office (Region 5), and served as Regional Appeals Coordinator and on the Engineering Staff.  In 1990 she transferred to the national headquarters in Washington D.C. and served in several positions over twelve years, including Assistant Regulatory Officer, National Forest System strategic planner, and policy analyst focused on water resource issues.  Daina recently spent 14 months as Administrator, Workplace Relations, for Region 5 of the U.S. Forest Service in San Francisco, and is currently a Staff Assistant to the Deputy Chief for Programs, Legislation, and Communication in Washington D.C. 

Barb Springer Beck lives in western Montana and is owner and president of Beck Consulting, a firm specializing in natural resource issues.  Barb writes “A Management Column” for each issue of Women in Natural Resources, focusing on a series of job-place issues and topics associated with professional growth and development.  Barb spent 13 years with the U.S. Forest Service and held diverse positions, including Forest Archeologist, Litigation and Appeals Coordinator, District Ranger, and Forest Staff Officer.  She has been a private consultant for ten years. 

Jonne Hower is the book reviewer for Women in Natural Resources.  She is a Public Affairs Specialist with the Pacific Northwest Region of the Bureau of Reclamation in Boise, Idaho.  Jonne works half-time on developing and maintaining the Bureau of Reclamation’s Pacific Northwest website, with the rest of her time devoted to special projects, such as developing brochures, displays, and other communication products. 

Jonne came of age at a place and time when women were encouraged to train and work in teaching, nursing, or secretarial careers.  A car accident that claimed her sister’s life and nearly her own changed her plans for college, and she began a year later than her classmates.  Jonne attended a small school in a large metropolitan area.  Feminism and the first Earth Day literally changed her world.  She decided to study ecology, and chose to major in range management because it provided more courses in ecology than her college’s forest management major did (at that time, forest management was all about logging).

Jonne earned a B.S. in Forestry (Range Management) and was hired as a Soil Conservationist for the Soil Conservation Service (now the Natural Resource Conservation Service).  She was recruited into the newly-formed Public Information Office for the agency, and also began working on an M.S. in Communications.  Jonne left for a state agency, then took a short-term appointment as a writer on an EIS staff, and also completed her M.S. degree.  Then, it was the Reagan years and there were few permanent jobs to be had in public agencies.  Jonne took several short-term appointments but eventually left federal service.  She spent ten years working as a massage therapist and following a path of personal and spiritual growth.  She returned to the federal government as a writer on an EIS team.  She was slated to start a job as Public Affairs Officer for the Oregon Trail Center in northeastern Oregon with the Bureau of Land Management, but the job was eliminated due to government cutbacks.  She was reassigned as Public Affairs Officer for the BLM Vale District.  Jonne applied for a transfer to her current position in 1999.

K.D. Leperi provides unique first-person interviews with Senators and Members of Congress in her column, “Capitol Focus.”  She is currently a Special Assistant to the Deputy Administrator for International Services in the Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service in Riverdale, Maryland near Washington D.C. and is involved in a variety of sanitary/phytosanitary issues that affect U.S. agricultural imports and exports.  K.D. remembers, as a ten-year-old girl, how much she loved the outdoors and how captivated she was by the story of a small bear who survived a raging forest fire.  Inspired, K.D. organized a neighborhood club for prospective Smokey the Bear friends.  Two summers later, camping in the Rocky Mountains with cousins, K.D. found her calling as a botantist, but high school requirements to dissect a frog made her change her plans.

While in college, K.D. worked part-time as a recreation specialist for several municipal parks and recreation departments.  The Director of Parks & Recreation asked K.D. to serve as a management intern, and she found her first mentor.  After graduating with an M.S. in Public Administration, K.D. accepted a budget job with the Office of the Comptroller for the Energy Research & Development Administration—the precursor to the Department of Energy.  Her job offered her a broad perspective on different facets of energy as well as the political process.  K.D. worked in a variety of financial jobs in federal service before moving into her current unit in 1992.

Joanna Kafarowski has added geographic breadth to the journal’s columnists, reporting on issues and events with her north-of-the-border perspective in “From the North Country.”  Joanna is a consultant in natural resource management, a part-time instructor in the Department of Geography at the University of Northern British Columbia, and a doctoral student in the Natural Resources and Environmental Studies program at the same university.  She has a Master’s degree in Geography, specializing in protected areas planning and has worked as a consultant in this field, as well as in land-use and community planning at the local, national and international levels for over ten years.

Journeys to Women in Natural Resources

Sandra Martin came to Women in Natural Resources in 1999.  She was working at the time for the Hornocker Wildlife Institute, a nonprofit research group associated with the University of Idaho, and wrote an article about the Institute’s research for the journal.  Sandra had subscribed to Women in Natural Resources for years and knew the former editor, Dixie Ehrenreich, as a colleague at the University of Idaho.  Sandra had held a series of jobs after leaving her position in federal research in 1995, and each helped her to evolve interests and skills in writing and editing.  When Dixie Ehrenreich planned to retire from her editorship, Sandra worked with her and took the journal on.

Daina Apple first discovered Women in Natural Resources in the mid-1980s, when it was called Journal of Women in Forestry.  At that time, Region 5 of the U.S. Forest Service was under a court order that required the agency to bring more women into the workforce and to promote more women into higher positions traditionally occupied mostly by men.  Daina knew several inspiring and influential women in natural resources fields, including Sally Fairfax, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Gerry Larson, a colleague in the Forest Service.  Daina considered both Sally and Gerry to be trailblazers, and interviewed each of them for Women in Natural Resources.  Gerry, the first female Forest Supervisor, was Daina’s first interviewee, and Sally was her second.  The topic of the Forest Service Consent Decree (court order) was so controversial inside the agency at that time that Daina did not attach her name to the Fairfax interview, published in 1986.

Barb Beck wrote her first article for the journal describing her experiences as a fire fighter and the piece was published in September 1989.  Barb enjoyed Women in Natural Resources and thought it a great publication that furthered women’s work in the natural resources fields.  In 1995, Barb made the suggestion to editor Dixie Ehrenreich that a column on management issues should be included in each issue.  Dixie liked the idea and asked Barb if she would write the column. 

Women in Natural Resources began publishing in the 1980s while Jonne Hower was away from natural resources work.  When she returned to the natural resources field, she read a request for a Book Review editor in the journal.  Jonne was already an avid reader and she wanted to develop her writing skills.  She applied for the volunteer position as Book Review editor, and has been providing her opinion about books within issues of Women in Natural Resources ever since.

K.D. Leperi first wrote for Women in Natural Resources in 1999, the same year she was accepted into the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Senior Executive Service Development Program (SESCDP).  K.D.’s experience in the SESCDP and the mentors she met in the program made her want to share her experiences.  She sought out a venue for publishing her articles, and found fertile ground at Women in Natural Resources for her articles on her own development within the SESCDP program.  This writing and publishing fostered her desire to explore other issues and write other articles, including those about policy as set by our elected officials in Washington D.C., her own professional home.

Joanna Kafarowski has been an avid reader of Women in Natural Resources for some time.  Writing for the journal was a natural transition for her, built on her long experience with women’s issues and with writing and publishing.  Joanna researched and developed long-range fundraising plans and policies for the national women’s organization, Girl Guides of Canada, in the late 1980s.  She was a freelance writer and editor for most of the 1990s, and wrote many articles and book reviews for newspapers and periodicals in British Columbia focusing on environmental issues.

Opinionated Women Speak Out

WiNR’s editors and columnists are all mid-career, mid-life women.  As a group, they have long and diverse experience in the natural resource professions.  What are their opinions about the special obstacles that face women in these professions?  Do they find the current climate in the natural resource professions more equitable than when they first entered their chosen professions?  And what is their opinion regarding the inclusion or acknowledgement of gender issues within academic programs that prepare today’s natural resource professionals?

Sandra Martin thinks women face the same obstacles in these professions today that they have for decades.  These include: suspicion that women can’t do hard physical work that might be required; suspicion that they can’t provide the leadership that some positions might require; not enough assistance with balancing family demands with work (Sandra thinks that the majority of these family demands do indeed fall on women, not on men); sexual harassment; and the glass ceiling.  In general, though, Sandra thinks the natural resource professions are more equitable now.  The problems listed here were the same in the 1970s when she was an undergraduate and first entering her natural resources career, but the degree to which the discrimination occurred then was much more harsh, more widespread, more obvious, and more tolerated. 

Sandra does not think that gender issues are adequately addressed in academic natural resource programs.  She believes that there is a prevailing opinion that gender discrimination is an outdated concept and has been dealt with; ie. there are few remaining problems of this kind.  If a problem does exist, it is seen as aberrant and the institution rules and regulations are considered adequate to deal with it.  Sandra thinks that in reality, though, the institutional system is not adequate to deal with the daily slights or more insidious problems that still exist.  She believes that it’s a common phenomenon for a few faculty (ie. women faculty) to become the unofficial counselors for all the young women undergraduates and graduate students.  These women faculty often must be the advocates when discrimination occurs. 

Daina Apple’s response took a more egalitarian approach.  Daina notes that there are fewer jobs in natural resources these days, and prospects for the future are not all that good with continuing cutbacks in federal and state agencies.  Daina thinks the natural resource graduates of both genders will have difficulty finding jobs related to their academic training in the near future.  Daina also suggests that equitability may be measured by the number of women who have achieved high positions in natural resource management, and finds that by this measure, things are more equitable.  In general, Daina believes that there is less discrimination based on gender than when she started out as a young professional 25 years ago.  More women are applying for, and being placed in, the highest levels of the Forest Service.  For example, Sally Collins is in the Number Two position of Associate Chief, Elizabeth Estill is Deputy Chief for Programs and Legislation, and Mary Sally Matiella is Chief of Staff to the Chief of the Forest Service.  Ann Bartuska is the new Deputy Chief for Research and Development and there are several women Associate Deputy Chiefs, including Barbara Weber in Research, Susan Yonts-Shepard in Programs and Legislation, Robin Thompson in State and Private Forestry, and Gloria Manning in the National Forest System Deputy Area.  Other recent examples include Linda Goodman as Regional Forester in Region 6 (Pacific Northwest), Gail Kimbell as incoming Regional Forester in Region 1 (Northern) and two female Research Station Directors:  Linda Donoghue at North Central, and Marcia Patton-Mallory at Rocky Mountain.

Daina observes many more women in natural resource majors now than in her student days, and believes diversity in the academic setting is not as much of an issue as it was 20 or 30 years ago, when classes consisted mostly of men.  However, once women enter federal agencies, they may face gender-based biases that still occur at times in conservative organizations such as the Forest Service and BLM.  Although agencies increased the numbers of women and minorities in their work force in the 1980s and early 1990s, organizational cultures of the major federal agencies continue to be paternalistic and authoritarian, and have not evolved into open, egalitarian, or participatory workplaces, while many modern private companies embrace these philosophies in order to attract and keep talented workers.  This may become a significant problem as younger professionals enter the workforce; workers who are not interested in being part of paternalistic organizations but rather value their independence and expect to significantly influence how they do their work.  These workers will not be satisfied with following rules and regulations, at least, not for long.  In fact, workforce statistics show declines in numbers of women and minorities in these large federal agencies from the high point of the 1980s and early 1990s—a trend that can only partially be explained by agency cutbacks. 

Barb Beck thinks that while safeguards and procedures are in place for the most egregious conduct against women—things like sexual harassment—subtle, and in some cases even unconscious, discrimination is still at work.  Barb believes that these problems are not as pervasive as they once were, but small acts or omissions have probably adversely affected most women in their natural resource careers.  Barb comments that many natural resource professionals in the U.S. are employed by government agencies, and she believes that the biggest obstacle facing women, and men as well, is the general lack of respect for government employees.  Morale problems are often the result.  One of the draws of natural resource work is that it has meaning, and most of us want meaningful work.  When one’s efforts are met with a constant barrage of roadblocks, skepticism, doubt, and even disdain, it hurts and could have the effect of discouraging one’s career aspirations.  Even so, Barb believes that women have made tremendous progress in the federal employment sector.  This is evidenced by the numbers of women in line positions such as Forest Service District Ranger, Forest Supervisor, and Regional Forester; BLM Field Office Manager and State Director; National Park Superintendent; and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Refuge Managers.  Barb celebrates the fact that the current leaders of the National Park Service and Department of Interior are women.

However, Barb suggests that there are areas that have not progressed as far as others.  For example, Barb feels that there is much room for improvement in gender equity in state fish and game organizations.  She also notes that women seem to still be under-represented in federal resource staff roles, and in academic natural resource programs and departments, as well. 

Jonne Hower echoes Barb’s thoughts regarding public opinion of government employees, whatever their gender.  Jonne thinks that general public hostility to civil servants or public service is an obstacle facing women in natural resource professions.  Related issues include an ill-defined national public policy for natural resources, a lack of consensus of the role of public land in our society, and public schizophrenia about “wild land” and the consequences of being in that wild land.  Jonne also feels that the tension that often exists between work and family can create obstacles for women in the professions, too.     

Jonne finds that the view of current equity depends on where you stand.  From her vantage point beyond the half-century mark, she finds it difficult to know what it’s like for today’s young women as they enter the natural resources work force.  But, she fervently hopes that things are better for the young women than they were when she began.  She notes that whenever she has had the opportunity to be on a campus in the last few years, she finds that most of the natural resources student organizations are led by young women.  This, Jonne believes, bodes well for the leadership of the next generation of land managers.

Jonne graduated from college in 1973, and does not feel that she has enough experience with academia since then to respond to the question of how well gender issues are being addressed in university preparation of students in the natural resources.  She took this opportunity, though, to express dismay at the lack of “real-world” experience some professors seem to have.  In comparing her college experience with her professional career, Jonne concludes that academic preparation has little to do with what is needed in the work place.  

Although gender equity legislation has allowed more women into natural resource fields, Joanna Kafarowski still feels that systemic discrimination occurs.  Natural resource management remains culturally-based and women who adapt to the dominant masculine culture are much more readily accepted than women who do not.  Joanna notes that today, discrimination is less overt than in the past, but it still exists.  She entered the natural resources professions just ten years ago after experience on other career paths, and she finds that conditions have not changed much in the past decade.

Joanna believes emphatically that gender issues are not adequately addressed in academia.  Based on her experience with Canadian universities and colleges, she finds that gender issues are only raised if an instructor has an interest in developing a course or integrates material on gender into the existing curriculum—a unique perspective that is usually lacking, unfortunately.

The Women in Natural Resources editors and columnists continually demonstrate their dedication to promoting women’s issues, especially as they relate to the natural resource professions.  Do they have networks or groups that help them focus and nurture their interests in these issues?

Sandra Martin did have such a group a few years ago.  She organized a local group of women working in and studying natural resource professions in the early- to mid-1990s in her home region on the Washington-Idaho border.  The group met irregularly to socialize and discuss their shared experiences.  This group also had an annual project—providing a day-long field workshop for as many as 50 8th grade girls that introduced them to different natural resource professions through hands-on activities.  This group of women met for about five years in one form or another, but eventually ended when Sandra no longer had the time to sustain it, and others did not step in.

Daina Apple belongs to WILMA, Women in Land Management Agencies, a nationwide network of women.  While living near Washington D.C., she was part of a subgroup of WILMA that met occasionally when group members traveled to the capitol. 

None of the other WiNR women had any experience with organized women’s groups, especially related to natural resources, but several noted the importance of networking, even if just with specific individuals.

Other Passions

We ended our questionnaire on a note that might illuminate the inner character, or perhaps just the inner longings, of our group.  What would they choose to do if they could change careers? 

Sandra Martin would like to be an artist.  She would love to pursue further education in art, or just have the time to explore on her own.  Daina Apple would not go so far afield.  Daina would chose to return to natural resource policy analysis, especially of water resources.  She was pursuing this topic in a Ph.D. program at George Mason University in Virginia before she moved to California for a new position with the Forest Service in 2001.  If Barb Beck could no longer be a consultant, she says that she would want to be either a baker or a pro hockey player.  Jonne Hower would prefer not to work, but would rather garden, read, and raise kids.  If she did have to work, though, Jonne might practice as a psychotherapist, or perhaps teach, especially in a remote, rural community.  She notes that she would provide opportunities for both kids and adults to learn computer skills, as well as skills in building self-esteem, values clarification, and critical thinking.  And, she’d like to have a cooking class, too!  Joanna Kafarowski responds that she is a firm believer in changing careers several times and has done so already.  If Joanna was to change again, she would be a vagabond and roam the world as a traveler.  “And,” she wrote, “I am completely serious.”