Women in Vanguard of a Diverse Forest Service : Equality: About 45% of the agency’s employees are female, including several supervisors and district rangers. The California region has done the most to promote women to positions of responsibility.

As the U.S. Forest Service finds its way between the clear-cuts and the spotted owls, more of the pathfinders are women.

No one would say that Smokey the Bear is female, but as the agency embraces the idea of biological diversity in the forest and drops the emphasis on producing timber, it is doing so with a work force that is more diverse.

“There is a recognition that we can no longer continue to be a militaristic type of organization of white men making all the decisions. Our organization needs to look more like the public we serve,” said Gloria Brown, the Ashland District ranger on the Rogue River National Forest.

“There’s a critical mass there now” of women in leadership jobs, said Liz Agpaoa, Galice District ranger on the Siskiyou National Forest and a member of a task force that is reinventing the agency.

“We are starting to look at it not as something we have to manage, that we have to deal with, but as something we want.”

Women weren’t always something the Forest Service wanted.

The 1931 “Forest Ranger’s Catechism” for the national forests in California includes a picture of the ranger on horseback, wearing his Smokey Bear hat, gazing up a rugged, rocky slope.

“Can a woman become a forest ranger? No. Women are not appointed by the Forest Service as members of the field force even if they pass the civil-service examination,” the catechism says.

By 1992, a civil rights report showed that 40% of the Forest Service’s 32,000 employees nationwide were women, including 10 of the 122 national forest supervisors and 100 of the 671 district rangers.

The numbers continue to increase. This year, 23 women are heads of national forests and 112 are district rangers.

The region that has done the most to promote women, by far, has been California, where a 1973 discrimination lawsuit filed by a female scientist produced an affirmative action program. Now women make up 45% of the work force, and six of the 18 national forest supervisors are women.

Women have made the fastest gains in fire management, where they hold 55% of the professional positions, according to Vicki Jackson, who monitors the affirmative action program in California.

It was easier to recruit women for firefighting jobs, because they didn’t need as much schooling as they would for forestry or engineering, Jackson said.

At the same time, the Forest Service is developing more professional diversity in management, Jackson said. District rangers once came almost exclusively from the ranks of foresters and engineers. Now biologists and recreation specialists are common.

That helps to broaden the agency’s mission, which was heavily focused on producing timber before lawsuits over the northern spotted owl forced the Forest Service to recognize it had to do a better job protecting wildlife.

Mary Lou Schnoes was with a group of Forest Service biologists last year who met with Jack Ward Thomas. Appointed chief of the agency last fall, Thomas is the first biologist to hold the top job.

“He asked us how many of us aspired to be district rangers,” said Schnoes, who works on the Galice Ranger District.

Not many hands went up.

“He said, ‘How do you expect to change this agency unless you take it by the horns? That is exactly how the agency will change, through a change in personnel,’ ” Schnoes said.

Joy Belsky, an ecologist for the Oregon Natural Resources Council, criticized the agency for failing to invite more than a few women to present their research at a recent conference on ecosystem management.

“Where men are already dominating a field, there is no way for women to get into it,” said Belsky. “They become leaders in new fields.”

Sue Olson, spokeswoman for the Siskiyou National Forest, said she wished women in the Forest Service did a better job of serving as mentors to other women, so they wouldn’t have to break the same ground over again.

The conflict between logging and the northern spotted owl in the Northwest illustrates that the Forest Service is facing more complex questions than the ranger on horseback in the 1931 catechism.

“I think having less testosterone in the Forest Service is going to improve our outlook,” said Joel Pagel, a biologist in the Rogue River National Forest. “I think our aggressiveness in trying to please people made us rush through things. Women might bring us to actually slow down and look where we’re going a lot more than we have in the past.”