I am old enough to remember the first woman to graduate in my profession at my alma mater, forestry, and actually met her long ago. There was a gender bias when she started. She was advised to forget it, but she did eventually reach her goal which was District Ranger, and married another.
Women served as fire lookouts during the war due to the shortage of men, and there were two women lookouts the year I did that, one of whom was my student teacher for a time in high school. The other women served as cooks and flunkies. They are not strong enough to horse a chainsaw or heavy tools around.
Women in field jobs were a novelty in the 1970s and took advantage by going braless just to distract the males, which was quite effective.
Affirmative Action has eliminated selection bias against women and other minorities in my profession and actually works in their favor.
But there are still relatively few women and minorities in the profession, mainly because it does not appeal to them. The rural environment and working environment doesn't lure them like it does males like me. It's less attractive to African Americans, Oriental people, Hispanic people, and Native Americans than it is for women. I don't know the reason for this.
Once I mentored an African American woman who was being pushed into forestry by her advisor, a white professor interested in feathering his own nest. She stayed with me one entire summer and laid plans to return the next, but at the last minute realized she really did not want to work in the woods she failed to appear on schedule and took a lab job in a paper mill instead.
Those who do enter the profession do very well, sometimes better than they deserve.
I like working with people who are different from myself, but bias is bias no matter what the vector.
Forestry itself is in decline. It's been supplanted by environmental religion. I practice this religion myself, along lines of what I think is the best use of a particular land parcel. Some land is best for forestry and some is best for wilderness or something in between. I like wilderness the best, but in order to have more of it, you have to have more and better forestry in land that's most suitable for it, and those lands are being taken out of the queue.
Now the best forestry land is in the south, which is on its third or forth clearcutting go 'round, hurricanes, and the War Between the States and still looks pretty good.
We get the rest of our wood from China. It's cheap. |
