Harassment and Discrimination

Outside Magazine’s “The Forest Service is Silencing Women” and Some Reflections

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Here’s an interesting and sad story from Outside Magazine. You pretty much have to read the whole thing. The headline is about the Forest Service and much of the story is about that, but part is also about how complaints are handled at USDA.

Rumor has it that NBC Dateline is running a 10 minute segment on the Forest Service – tomorrow (Fri, 8/31)

I’ve got two comments to add to this story from my own experiences.

(1) the story says..”The Forest Service responded by flooding the region with women it had done little to train, and a backlash ensued, as many men felt they were passed over for jobs.” Where I was, on the Eldorado National Forest in timber management working for Rex Baumback, he was able to hire many women simply by getting us from other Regions and the private sector. My attempt to hire the most qualified person in the country from North Central Station (woman) was made difficult because she came with a husband who needed to be employed (!). Rex and others managed to work it through. I think people like Rex proved it was possible to meet the Decree and also have highly qualified employees, but the way the Region went about it was alternating incompetence with (disproportional, IMHO) pushback, and shooting themselves in the foot repeatedly (incompetence? malevolence? who can know?).

Region 6, where I had come from, had a more pragmatic “well, we have to hire women I guess we have to figure out how to do it” attitude. Men, and non-diverse people, and diverse people are being, and have been, passed over for jobs for a variety of reasons. There tends to be resentment, but it seemed to me that resentment had almost a place of honor in (some places in) R-5 that it did not in other places I worked before and after.

(2) A person can get the impression from this story that these (EEO and grievance) processes and the people involved are incompetent and/or corrupt. I will share my own most recent story of filing a grievance in a later post, but the long and short of it is, the people were uniformly helpful and it worked out for me. With one exception, like these folks experienced, once you’ve done it you tend to be a persona non grata because you are not “taking one for the team” (yes, the same team that decided to mistreat you). The idea seems to be that if you stumble into one of these organizational grievance swamps, you should sink gracefully out of sight rather than fight.

If others would like to share their experiences with these processes, positive or negative, please do so below, or you can email me and I will keep your identity private. This is truly stressful and heartbreaking work for those folks, and I think the ones who are doing it right need to be noted and honored (I would also put the Employee Relations folks in this group). They are the only folks standing between employees and really, really bad situations. When they screw up, it is terrible. But many times they do not. Honestly, I can’t say enough good things about the people I worked with, and their help during a stressful and difficult time.

BLM’s Recent Efforts to Diversify Wildland Firefighting

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Thanks to Emily Wolfe of the Mountain Outlaw Magazine, for sending her story on BLM efforts to increase women’s participation in wildland firefighting and ultimately to hire “a workforce with ethnic, racial and educational backgrounds representative of the communities they serve—and treating them well enough that they stay.”

Here are a couple of excerpts:

BLM manages a 10th of the country’s landmass, or 247.3 million acres, more than any other government agency. Housed under the Department of the Interior, the agency oversees grazing, oil and gas leases, recreation, conservation and other uses. As of July 2017, it had more than 10,400 employees, and nearly 3,000 in its fire program. Of those in fire, 18 percent were women. Among firefighters, particularly the high-level hotshot and smokejumping teams, the ratio is much lower.

The agency’s 11 hotshot crews employ one to three women on a typical 20-person team, and this year there are three female smokejumpers of 140 nationwide. The six- person engine crews that comprise most fire line employees usually have one or two women, or none. Between all federal firefighting entities—the BLM, the Forest Service, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service—the number of women in permanent fire operations positions hovers around 12 percent.

Few women and minorities apply to work on the fire line in the first place, and retention is difficult for all employees. The job’s physical nature is self-selecting, plus most positions are seasonal, based in remote locations, and require long stints away and out of cell reception—all of which double as risk factors for harassment and assault.

Simply injecting women into the workforce isn’t effective. Armed forces in Canada, Norway and Australia have used the critical mass approach to gender integration, a social theory suggesting that 15 to 30 percent of a minority is necessary for that group to succeed. But fire leaders still remember the 1981 settlement to a class action lawsuit that forced the Forest Service in California to match the civilian workforce’s gender ratio, at 43 percent women. To fulfill the consent decree, as it’s still known, women were sometimes promoted over more qualified men, leading to resentment, attrition and degradation of institutional knowledge.

That resentment still lingers. “I was told three years ago during a friendly conversation with a male coworker that I was only hired because I was female,” wrote Lorena Williams in a High Country News opinion piece published in March. “Women are often seen as intruders, as tokens who were only hired to meet some kind of quota. We are treated as pariahs in our professional fields, regarded as little more than sexual-harassment cases waiting to happen.”

…

In February, Strelnik went public about the repeated sexual harassment and retaliation she experienced over her 17-year Forest Service firefighting career, a #MeToo moment she says was made possible by the catharsis of working on the initiative. Amos Lee, a supervisory engine module leader at BLM’s Boise District, isn’t ashamed to say he wants to spend time with his family instead of being gone for six to nine months each year. Many firefighters do, he says.

This time the assignment is focused on implementation. The project list includes providing family housing and childcare facilities for employees in rural areas; re-evaluating physical testing requirements; and supporting independent, state-level education and mentorship programs. One of their top recommendations is hiring a permanent diversity and inclusion employee, a position BLM fire leadership is now in the process of creating.

Fire Continuum Conference in Missoula last week

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Here is coverage by the Missoulian’s Rob Chaney.  He’s good at getting at the important points, but if anyone else attended (I didn’t) and has some impressions, please share.

“Fire conference in Missoula attracts international experts”

“To effectively fight fires, Forest Service chief says agency must first fight harassment”

“Also in Monday’s plenary sessions, Forest Service program director Sara Brown put the problem in personal terms in her afternoon presentation. The Oregon-based researcher and former smokejumper recalled how she built a tough, masculine persona to fit in with her male firefighting colleagues, to the extent she froze out other women who she didn’t think measured up.”

“Science may overtake tradition in wildfire fighting”  

“A fire that spreads from federal land into state or private property suddenly complicates who gets the bill for the suppression efforts. That makes cost-control a strategic objective that sometimes gets in the way of tactical opportunities.”

“After the fire, scientists brace for climate change”

“Across North America, forests and grasslands spent millions of years evolving with fire as a tool to clean out dead plants, regrow new ones and maintain the things animals need. But, as several top researchers at the Fire Continuum Conference in Missoula pointed out on Thursday, the old patterns are getting pulled up by the roots.”

(The photo is from a recent prescribed burn and accompanied this editorial.  My interest in this comes partly from living at the bottom right of that ridge-line the smoke is behind.)

Interior Agencies and Harassment- From High Country News

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A very special thank you to the High Country News for generating, and allowing us to post, the images above. This is of interest because, while some of the recent attention to sexual harassment has been focused on the Forest Service, there are agencies with similar missions in Interior, so we can ask “are they about the same, better or worse?”. And since these agencies (at least BLM) trade employees with the FS frequently, and the fact that Fire is an interagency effort, does it make sense for all federal land management agencies to approach this together?

Unfortunately, I don’t have the Forest Service figures to compare, but hopefully someone can provide them.

HCN has had an interesting set of pieces on the problems in BIA. Apparently the Director Bryan Rice has resigned, and, while not mentioned in this piece, my sources tell me that he was formerly Director of Forest Management at the Forest Service in the Washington Office. This supports my argument that it makes sense to address the problem across the FS and Interior agencies.

Here’s a link to HCN’s ongoing coverage of harassment in federal agencies.

Firefighters It’s Time We Lead the Way on Ending Harassment

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Whitewater-Baldy Complex, Gila National Forest, New Mexico, May, 2012

While searching for a photo for this post, I found Kari Greer’s fire photo website here. This site is worth checking out, as there are many amazing and wonderful fire photos.

I’ve been behind on my blog duties, partially due to discovering that backups of my computer stuff did not automatically include bookmarks from Chrome. Lesson learned. Anyway, here goes…
This is a piece from High Country News by Lorena Williams a writer and firefighter out of Durango, Colorado.

“It is such a hostile environment,” said journalist Judy Woodruff, discussing the PBS investigation. “Why do these women go into the Forest Service in the first place?”

I am one of these women, and here is my answer: The culture of firefighting is not an inherently “hostile environment.” For every coworker that has excluded me from the “boys’ club,” 10 others have made me feel welcome and safe in a professional work environment. I have faith in these good people to change a culture that has historically enabled sexual assault and retaliation. If we do not act as harbingers of change, we are by default complicit in the problem.

The victims interviewed for the PBS investigation are just a fraction of those who remain fearfully silent or have moved on from the agency. I have little doubt of their credibility. I have never been assaulted, fortunately, but I have experienced and also witnessed harassment and discrimination. In my view, it stems from the perspective that women are, and should remain, outsiders in the industry.

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I was told three years ago during a friendly conversation with a male coworker that I was only hired because I was female. It wasn’t true, but it illustrated what I fear most about this transition in our field: Women are often seen as intruders, as tokens who were only hired to meet some kind of quota. We are treated as pariahs in our professional fields, regarded as little more than sexual-harassment cases waiting to happen.

This sentiment — that working with women is playing with fire — has been hinted at by many of my colleagues throughout the years. Male firefighters at all levels feel hamstrung, suddenly censored, in what is a naturally high-risk, adrenaline-filled career that at times warrants aggressive command presence. In expressing their concerns, however, some male firefighters imply that simply maintaining an appropriate workplace environment is so difficult and out of the ordinary that it cannot possibly be done. And so, they say, they fear for their jobs.

It’s true that certain aspects of this job inherently challenge political correctness. We work in the woods, sleep on the ground, relate to each other through bathroom humor, teasing and goading. Spending an entire summer, day and night, with the same people means that professionalism inevitably slips into casual camaraderie. This is how we cope, how we bond and thrive. This gray area, where our professional lives become personal, is both rewarding and dangerous — prime territory for interpersonal chaos. But firefighter culture has to try to enter the 21st century; it can no longer hide fearfully behind patriarchal tradition. Times have changed, and fire culture needs to catch up.

Steps to Fixing the Forest Service Harassment Problem: Chief’s Phone Call Transcript

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Here is a link to the transcript of the all-staff phone call. Christiansen talks about her background and experience, and also what she is looking toward in the future for the Forest Service. It’s interesting for those reasons (and the fact that the Department is planning to get an Undersecretary sometime). There is a discussion with others about what the Forest Service intends to do about sexual harassment and some questions.

I think that they are right on the fact that it is an ongoing problem and will take an ongoing focus and pressure through time, and I think they are the right people and this is the right time. Based on the phone call, I would add a few twists:

(1) To fix it, we need to know where it’s a problem and understand predisposing factors. Let’s face it, most of the examples in the news stories are in Fire. Fire is a separate subculture in the Forest Service. A heat map is good, but a heat map that includes location and staff area would be better.

(2) On the call they mentioned a few outside groups including NOAA. Since Fire is a thing, they really need to bring in the other Fire agencies because FS people interact with them, and because agencies like the BLM are working on the same problem. I would say “know what they are doing, work together, but don’t wait for them.”

(3) And the most relevant people again, because we have to say Fire is at least part, and potentially most, if the problem and fire tends to have a militaristic tone, then work with the military and see what they are doing and how it has worked.. or not. Learn from them. Even if there weren’t a connection to Fire, the military has had ongoing problems in this area (including assault) and has had very smart dedicated people working on it. For example DOD has an entire Sexual Assault and Prevention Office.

(4) Absolutely, the first line supervisors need support in dealing with these problems, as one of the people on the call asked. They need to trust that those people they are asking for advice are not random people assigned by unknown entities who might make things worse. That element of trust is crucial.

(5) IMHO the questions in the previous (OIG) survey were haphazard and not directed at useful kinds of information. Use consultants, and your own high quality cadre of social scientists (who also have skin in the game over time) to figure out what needs to be asked, and how to ask it to get the answers you need to manage into the future. Run the draft survey questions by a variety of people.

(6) Post to the public what you are doing and develop annual reports, so employees and outside folks can track patterns over time. This will help the agency not lose focus when the next alligator biting its rear lunges onto the scene.

To relate to some of the issues in the military, here’s an example from the 2017 Service Academy Gender Relations Focus Groups..

Cadet and midshipman focus group participants primarily discussed a form of retaliation known as ostracism. Ostracism involves exclusion from social acceptance for making a report or intending to report protected communication, such as a sexual assault allegation. Fear of ostracism may be acute at the MSAs, since many focus group participants noted that cadets and midshipmen rely on the help and camaraderie of classmates to graduate.
Cadets and midshipmen students were also concerned that rumors of involvement with a sexual assault case could harm their careers and follow them in their future roles as officers. Due to the Academies’ small size, rumors travel quickly via word-of-mouth and victims are concerned about loss of anonymity.

FS Announces New Approaches For Fighting Sexual Harassment

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Anit-harssment workshop July 2017 at Albuquerque Service Center

This PBS News Hour is worth reading in its entirety.

The U.S. Forest Service is implementing what it’s calling a 30-day action plan to address harassment, sexual misconduct, and retaliation in the agency.

The changes come weeks after a PBS NewsHour investigation into these issues, especially in the agency’s firefighting ranks, along with the departure of Forest Service Chief Tony Tooke amid allegations of his own sexual misconduct.

Interim chief Vicki Christiansen announced the plan on an all-staff call last week, and in an email to staff Wednesday. Recent news reports, she said, had “focused a bright light on a problem the agency has been combating for years” and “made it painfully clear that the policies prohibiting such behaviors are not enough.”

A transcript of the call was given to the PBS NewsHour by two Forest Service employees.

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Additionally, Lago announced there would be an agency-wide workplace survey to look at employee perceptions of sexual and non-sexual harassment. In January, the Forest Service released a survey of harassment in the agency, but it looked only at Region 5, or the state of California, an area whose issues were the focus of a congressional hearing in December 2016. The Forest Service has never done a national survey of the problem, as the National Park Service did after similar issues were reported in its agency in 2016.

Lago also announced the creation of a heat map tool to identify particular problem areas, an employee code of conduct called “This Is Who We Are,” and standardized harassment trainings for employees.”

I will post the transcript on this blog in another post.

A couple of points: I think the survey on sexual and non-sexual harassment is good because plenty of people feel harassed for various reasons and it needs to be explored in depth. I also think the heat map tool would be great at helping to understand patterns and causes. I’m a little surprised at the assumptions that folks are making that these approaches are not enough and won’t work, since they have not yet been tried. One commenter on the News Hour story didn’t think a heat map would be useful.

Retired Forest Service firefighter Jonel Wagoner, who joined the Forest Service in the 1980s and alleged decades of harassment based on her gender, said she was skeptical of the “soundbites and fed-speak” she heard on the call.

“More training, more promises to hold people accountable … None of that has helped to change the culture to date,” Wagoner wrote in an email. She and other longtime employees recounted years of harassment and retaliation in an interview with the NewsHour.

f I were Chief, I would get retired Employee Relations folks in a room and ask them what they think would work. For example, I wonder if centralizing HR contributed to a de-emphasis on working on tough personnel problems on districts and forests. I know when I filed a grievance, being able to go down the hall to those folks (in the RO) made a big difference. I also wonder whether there should be a more formal approach to reach out to retirees and discuss our experiences, and what worked and didn’t. But it’s ultimately up to the people working today to figure this out and make it happen.

Here’s a link to the information on the efforts they were developing last July.

Firestorm of Misogyny- Evergreen Magazine

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Image from Evergreen Magazine
Evergreen Magazine had an interesting article here.

QUESTIONS FLORA RECENTLY SHARED WITH US AS THEY PERTAIN TO ADDRESSING HARASSMENT WITHIN THE AGENCY OF THE U.S. FOREST SERVICE:
What protocol is in place – within the agency – that effectively protects those who report harassment?
Is there a policy that addresses swift investigation and resolution? If so, is it being adhered to?
How fast and effective is the investigative process?
How quickly are these cases fully resolved?
What are the consequences if a USFS employee is found guilty of harassment?
How many individuals accused of harassment were moved in lieu of investigation?
How many individuals accused of harassment were investigated, found not guilty and then moved?
Are there protocols in place to prevent differential treatment in harassment cases by grade and position?
How many individuals have lost their jobs due to being found guilty of harassment?
How many individuals have left the agency due to ongoing harassment?
When do outside law enforcement agencies become involved? Are rapes and other sex crimes under a statute of mandatory reporting?

SUSAN MARSH WHO JUST PUBLISHED HER ARTICLE #METOO IN A CULTURE OF GOOD OLD BOYS, REMINDS US:
“In December of 2016 (just over a year ago), the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, held a hearing on sexual harassment and discrimination within the Forest Service. Some of its “take-aways” included:

Harassment and discrimination have gotten worse since 2008.
Witnesses testified sexual assault, harassment, discrimination, and resulting retaliation have increased since 2008.
Whistleblowers shared personal accounts of sexual harassment, hostile work environments, and discrimination.
The Forest Service has shown a lack of accountability and a poor record of investigating allegations of sexual harassment, with perpetrators often escaping discipline by retiring, moving, or seeking [and getting] a promotion.

Here’s a link to Susan’s piece #Metoo in a culture of good old boys” which is worth a read. Susan and I started on the same forest at about the same time, and my memories were similar:

There was no hint of sexual harassment. But once I went to work in an office instead of out in the woods, I found that gender mattered. Women filled lower-grade clerical positions; men were professionals and decision-makers. Being one of the few professional women was lonely: we were largely dismissed by the men, resented by the clerks, and condescended to by leadership.

To be fair, though, there were more ways to be “not OK” than to be OK. Technicians were not as OK as professionals, but people with too much education beyond a college degree were eggheads, and not OK either. I once got into trouble in Region 5 for writing in my Consent Decree Action Plan that we could design training for administrative folks in natural resources so they could become line officers.. definitely admin people were not quite OK! (I was told “not to get their hopes up”). Of course, most admin people were women. Timber people were OK but silviculturists were kind of geeky and geneticists.. well…an unnecessary millstone that someone upstairs had hung around the FS neck. Wildlifers could be questionable. and engineers.. well one got to be Chief and that was shocking! Line officers are the OK-est of all, of course. People who had never worked on a district would never be legitimate, like never ever. Being OK was indeed a very, very small target and many of us gave up the pursuit of fitting in somewhere along the way. I think that this is much better nowadays, but I’m curious as to what current employees think.

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Is the Science Biz Letting Women Down? I. Harassment- How Can We Still Not Know This?

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So here we are in 2018, and sexual harassment is still a thing. I agree with Dr. Judith Curry, the atmospheric scientist, that part of the problem might be that different actions are lumped together under “sexual harassment” and that makes it more difficult to address. As she says here..

In the 1990’s there was growing awareness of sexual harassment in the universities. In the early 1990’s, I was on a university committee to evaluate new training materials on sexual harassment. I was astonished when I saw that ‘winking’ and ‘elevator eyes’ were on the same list as rape and quid pro quo behavior. There was simply no hierarchy of sexual harassment sins — a problem that continues to concern me as we hear the latest litany of accusations.

The most vexing issue was ‘hostile environment’ and the subsequent ‘backlash’ if you reported anything. This issue became very real to me when a female faculty member in my department complained about lewd and crude cartoons being posted on the walls of the Center administrative offices. She complained to the Center Director – he wouldn’t take them down. She complained the the Department Chair, essentially no response. But then the backlash began, with attempts to harm her career. She lawyered up based on the backlash, and after several agonizing years she apparently won her case (details were never made public) and managed to salvage her career at the same university and go on to have a very successful career. What was exceptional about this case is that her job and career were salvaged in the outcome — other successful litigants in such cases usually ended up leaving their university because the situation was too hostile and unsalvageable. I suspect that having a female Associate Dean helped this to happen.

The failure to discriminate among the hierarchy of sexual harassment behaviors is evident in the current round of accusations. Behaviors in the ‘hostile environment’ category are particularly vexing, as individual women have very different sensitivities and desires in context of their casual social interactions with men. However, assault, quid pro quo and backlash situations are very unambiguous, and we need to make sure that ambiguous hostile environment issues don’t detract from the most serious transgressions.

My question is that we have excellent thinkers and scientists of all persuasions, from social to physical. Here’s a simple question: are sexual harassment efforts more successful if they break down the different categories of harassment and address them separately?

We spend oceans of research money on all kinds of future problems (like climate change). How can we know so little about this problem and how to fix it? Are some institutions (universities and fire research funders) so run by men that this doesn’t seem worthy of attention? Do the answers to these problems involve the relatively uncool social sciences instead of the always cool physical sciences? Who determines that figuring out fixes of current real world problems is less important than running models to attempt to predict things in 2100?

What would a random mix of women scientists come up with as key areas of research if their own research was not included in the possibilities (to avoid conflict of interest).. what if they could think outside the box, not what can I get funded, but what does the world most need getting done?

Wildfire Today on Sexual Harassment

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Bill Gabbert, of Wildfire Today, has a nice round-up of all the stories and news around this in this post.

He concludes:

Chief Tooke is, of course, innocent until proven guilty of the sexual misconduct allegations.

Our opinion:
This is a disgusting, demoralizing, distasteful, detestable scandal facing the agency where I spent 20 years. Looking at the sheer numbers, and knowing that allegations of sexual misconduct go all the way to the top, it is hard to fathom how anyone who has been mistreated can be optimistic that the harassment will stop, or that the perpetrators will be brought to justice.

This HAS to be the Forest Service’s number one priority — clean up this wreckage that is festering within their workforce.

Would you recommend that your daughter, girlfriend, or spouse apply for a job with the U.S. Forest Service?

Of course, I would say absolutely apply for a job with the Forest Service! If you are in, say coop forestry, or research, or a NEPA or silviculture person, you can go for 30 years or more without sexual harassment. If you are a woman and you want to go into fire, well then I would look at the statistics comparing women in fire in the Park Service, BLM, BIA, FWS and so on… even state agencies. I wonder whether they are available? Any folks know of these? Based on what I know now, I would say “stay out of Fire” not “stay out of the FS.”

Fire is part of the FS, but it is not the FS.