Wāhine in Forestry Conference 2023
On the weekend of March 25-26 2023, our team members Heather, Sally, Michelle, Mel and Sarah travelled to Hanmer Springs to take part in the first Wāhine in Forestry conference.
Wāhine in Forestry is the brainchild of Erica Kinder (Chair of the SNI Wood Council) and is a professional development group for female foresters. Any female who works or is involved in the forestry sector is welcome – students, contractors, forest managers, researchers, policy makers, tree owners, consultants, map makers, the list goes on!
Surprisingly, for a forestry conference, very little was said about trees or forests the entire weekend.
The sessions for the first day covered:
- - Who we were and why we were there
- - The power of body language (owning greetings/handshakes)
- - Leadership – what makes a good leader, what we want from our leaders, different leadership styles, and how we are all leaders in our day-to-day jobs
- - Different pathways into various forestry roles (actually a large number of us came into forestry from other pathways, not via the School of Forestry or Toi Ohomai)
The keynote address was given by Dr Ellen Nelson (formally from the NZ Army) on “Removing barriers for women working in male dominated workplaces”. Her talk was an interesting blend of army anecdotes, her drive to extract NZDF advisors and their families from Afghanistan, and her post-army research which boiled down into some key messages:
- - Motivated staff need autonomy, a sense of belonging and a shared/common purpose
- - Simple things like having a uniform designed for women to fit the female body, or renaming masculine terms to make them gender neutral goes a long way to making the workplace more inclusive for women
- - The workplace was originally designed by men for men, but not much has changed since then (although Covid has given everything a good shake up). Again, simple things like scheduling meetings to avoid school drop off and pick up times, more flexibility with working from home, or working around families (even if this means working in the middle of the night in your pj’s) can make the workplace more enjoyable and inclusive for everyone
- - If you can be your authentic self at work, then you will feel more comfortable, and therefore be more inclined to give work your best efforts.
Sunday morning saw (some of) the team getting up at the crack of dawn to take part in yoga or forest walk sessions. After breakfast we spent some time with Ellen, helping her and her team (a former SAS commander) validate their current leadership development research project that they are undertaking for Food & Fibre.
We wrapped up the conference with a summary of the sessions, and things we were all going to take back to our workplaces/lives. Some finished off the conference with another networking session in the Hanmer hot pools.
We wrapped up the conference with a summary of the sessions, and things we were all going to take back to our workplaces/lives. Some finished off the conference with another networking session in the Hanmer hot pools.
It will be great to see how this group develops and grows over the next few years, and hopefully PF Olsen will have more females at the next conference.
Key messages from the weekend:
Key messages from the weekend:
- Believe in the potential of people
- A bunch (ideally <10) of normal people working together brilliantly = a high performance team
- Tell people your needs and expectations – if you don’t speak up, nothing will change
- You have SMART skills, NOT soft skills (these are the skills that are people based and hard to teach)
- To be safe, seen and stretched = a high performance team
