The “Real” Experiences of Female Forestry Professionals and the Abstract Female

In Finland women were allowed to enter forestry schools in 1965, when military service was no longer required for the admission. Nowadays women are still a 10 percent’s minority in forestry, and I got interested in them while working as an interviewer in an oral history project called Forestry Professions in the Changing Society. The interviews led me to study the gendered experiences in forestry and the relationship forestry professionals have with nature.

In explaining the research questions feminist perspective and in my case the eco-feminist perspective in particular, has been very helpful, in formulating questions like: who has the power to define the sex/gender -system of forestry and the principles of forestry works, what means a good forestry, a good forest? Feminist perspective is also useful as a reading method, but when I get to the interpretations problems arise: what is the relationship between “real” life experiences and interpretations based on abstract theories? The female/male roles and the feminine/masculine representations can be found and categorised in the interviews, but the jump from that level to more abstract female/male generalisations feels huge. What happens in the process when a researcher interprets the gendered experiences as cultural constructions? Can it be opened?

I will discuss these questions with an example of softness as a female characteristic in forestry leadership. In interviews female professionals often connected emotions and more personal relationships with employees with feminine, with women, and strictness with masculine, with men. This can be interpreted as part of forestry’s sex/gender -system, as one of the patriarchal assumptions, or can it? How to make interpretations of ethnographic material, of interviews, and verify them convincingly enough? Are interpretations also assumptions, or something more, or does it even matter?