That’s Not How it Was: Sharon’s Response to Tinder Box Book Review

I have seldom read a book review whose narrative runs so contrary to my lived experience. My opinion is that we can’t solve real world problems if we frame them at some abstract ideological level, and ignore the nuts and bolts of the way people behave in the real world. Or we extrapolate from one part of the FS (region, staff area) to the entire agency.

All I can share is my personal experience.  I was involved in women’s issues on the Eldorado National Forest in Region 5 for part of that time.

It all started with the idea that women should not be discriminated against in hiring in the government, including the Forest Service.  However, we were.  I was there then, as my forestry degree was in 1975 from Berkeley. I was told the FS wasn’t hiring women, so I went back to school.  One of the reasons I was working on a  Ph.D. is that I couldn’t get hired in any other work than being a research assistant.

So Region 6 simply got on with hiring women.  I was hired off a cert to work in Lakeview, Oregon.  As a new employee, I was taken under the wing of our Forest Silviculturist, John Nesbitt, and inculcated with FS culture via lots of field lunches and one-on-one time, or as one-on-one as it could be given we were all in the upstairs of the Fremont SO with about 20 people in the same space.  This was all pre-cubicle, pre-flex hours, pre-smoking in the office bans.

I applied for laterals because my husband was working on the West side and guys were always selected over me.  Because Region 6 had second-order discrimination problem in some sectors.. a hiring official wouldn’t actually discriminate, but would listen to gossip by people who didn’t like women professionals.  My Forest Supe once called the Supe on the Umpqua to held me get a lateral. That Supe said it was up to the Ranger, who had heard bad things about me.  My Supe had a list of people who supported me, but those didn’t count.  It could be that they were only biased against uppity women, but a person has to wonder whether uppity =self-confident, which was a leadership skill in men and a problem with women.

In hopes of my husband and I finding work together, I moved to Region 5 to head up a new genetics lab working on national forest problems.  I did have some culture shock when I moved to Region 5.  There were many organizational and management issues  with the way the Consent Decree was carried out.

For example, I tried to hire a well-qualified woman, but she was part of a dual career couple and I was told we couldn’t hire him (from outside).  My boss Rex somehow finessed that, for which we were all immensely grateful. It involved getting the North Central Station to hire him back.  My point is that there was an idea of what we should be doing, but at the same time, well-intentioned, but impractical, barriers to actually doing it, that is, hiring women.

We had to do “consent decree action plans” and I wrote an idea about having a natural resources training so that we could hire experienced administrative women into line officer jobs. The RO told me to stop talking about it, as it might raise peoples’ hopes.

In my experience, fire, of all the areas, was worst.  Women would call me from Region 6 and say “hey what’s up in 5, they keep bugging me to accept a job there at a lower grade level than I currently have, maybe they inhaled too much smoke from those illegal marijuana grows?”

My boss, the Timber Staff on the Eldorado, Rex Baumback, managed to hire a female check scaler, two geneticists and a nursery manager.  He was (and is) as far as I know a “get it done” kind of person. Unfortunately, it seemed as though the whole process was run by a group of people hired to do paperwork, and telling us what not to do.  When the Consent Decree kept running into trouble, I suggested that they put more of a can-do, knowledgeable person in charge who understood the agency.

There was a lot of resentment at the time, for sure.  Our Forest Supe had a meeting in which someone stood up and said “there are no opportunities for white males in silviculture” and I stood up and said “look around you and at who is in the RO”.  I was told to .. be quiet.

This quote in my view is breathtakingly untrue:

In their place the agency introduced a lethal plutonium rule. Incoming employees would not be required to adapt to their senior employee’s expectations or traditions – so essential to meeting mission objectives. Rather, the new employees would see to it that the seniors adapted to their expectations and innovations.”

I’m thinking of where I worked at the Placerville Nursery.  Pat, the Nursery Manager, Safiya, the Resistance Geneticist, me and Betsy and Suellen who worked in the lab with me.. were hardly vectors of revolution.  And it’s just silly to think we were.  We were just trying to do our jobs, and we adapted to the culture.  As Larry H. has pointed out, one of the values was getting the Wage Grade lift and pack crews paid, with the idea that they needed the money most.  I wonder if getting rid of the many women in HR via centralization cut out the heart and soul of the outfit (but that would be another post).

One more thing that I think is important.  At the same time that women came into the workforce, many specialists were hired, like me.  Transportation engineers, wildlife biologists, soil scientists, botanists, archaeologists.  There’s another whole history that says that’s where “the problem” started.  So I’m not sure that there IS  a “problem.” Just change, that can be managed better or worse, more or less gracefully.

At some point when I was in DC,  the Pinchot Institute held a session where Chief Thomas spoke.  It was at one of those swanky, think-tanky places whose name I can’t remember now. He mentioned that there were many women wildlife biologists and they weren’t listened to because they were wildlife biologists.  I asked the question “but I’m in silviculture and people don’t listen to me either, maybe it’s the fact that they’re women, and not just anti-wildlife bias?”  Later, when I read the Chief’s journals, I noticed that the only woman who seemed to show up in them was Katie McGinty.  I’m only pointing this out to say “if you don’t like the changes in the FS at that time, it’s hard to separate the “woman” part from the “new kinds of specialists” part.”

I’m sure that there are plenty of female TSW readers out there who can share their own experiences.