>It's pretty interesting to read all the speculation on the lack of young,
>female birders, or birder "hotshots", especially since most of it is being
>written by men.

Teresa, you beat me to the punch by a matter of hours. I too was struck
by the fact that the discussion was one of men speculating about women,
rather than simply waiting for the numerous women on this group to
tell us!

This alone may partly explain the phenomena under discussion...

A very good note, BTW.

>But seldom discussed is
>birdwatching for the sheer beauty and variety of it. As you can see from
>some past threads on this discussion list, women sometimes are ignored or
>ridiculed when expressing an emotional aspect of a birding experience.
>Although just as many men came to her rescue in the ensuing discussion,
>it's telling that an emotional comment set off such a controversy.

I'm going to add some observations from my experiences trapping and banding
raptors. Most seasons we have about 50% rookies, and overall our crew
(averaging twenty-five folks for 10-12 weeks) is about 50%-50% M/F.

The women do as well as the men learning the ropes, and as sheer strength
is not a consideration but rather hand-eye coordination (in trapping,
not banding which just takes diligence) they do just as well. In fact,
our best and most experienced trapper (12 yrs) is a woman (the Goddess
of Trapping, as we like to call her), though a couple of us less-grizzled
male types are nearly as good.

Yet, every year, more men than women end up being at the top of the
heap when we tote up trapping results. Trapping raptors - at times
300 a day - is intense, much like competitive birding.

I have a simple theory for our project's environment: there are always
a couple of men who are basically just sexist and must be in charge
when working with women. They may not be ASSIGNED to be in charge, but
they make it clear by their attitude that they think they SHOULD be.

Teresa mentions that it doesn't matter how many men disagree with
certain offensive or insensitive behavior - the old "bad apple"
syndrom at play. The same is true in our project's environment, and
indeed much of life: it doesn't matter if 95% if the fellows around
treat their women co-workers as ... well, simply CO-WORKERS ... the
other few are a painful annoyance. I asked one of our "F***ing rookie
all-star" crew members this fall (had the best crew ever!) why she
wasn't interested in being a blind leader, and about how difficult it
was to deal with a couple of fellow male crew members as a peer and
dealing with them as a "boss", even for a day, just wasn't appealing.

Despite the fact that she enjoyed working with the majority of the
fellas.

It must be much worse when men greatly outnumber women in a situation.

Outgoing Oregon Governer Barbara Roberts, first woman guv of OR, was
asked whether she encountered sexism as governor a few days ago.
She said, in essence, no - not as traditionally meant. But, over and
over again men she worked with in politics, business etc would assume,
upon first meeting with her, that she knew nothing of the state's
industries, budgetting, financial statement, etc - i.e. the basics
of the job. After realizing she did, no problem (at least that she's
willing to admit to in public!) But, this basic hurdle had to be
overcome over and over again. Is it a surprise, then, that so many
woman would appear not to bother?

-Don Baccus-