E57 — Women in Birding: A Conversation with Sy Montgomery, Debi Shearwater & Lynn Scarlett 🐦

This episode is a first for Naturally Scott — a panel conversation.

Scott Harris brings together three remarkable voices — Sy Montgomery, Debi Shearwater, and Lynn Scarlett — for an honest, thoughtful discussion about the history of women in birding, how the experience has evolved, and where things stand today.

Each brings a different perspective: science and storytelling, business and field leadership, and public policy and conservation. Together, they reflect on what it was like entering male-dominated spaces decades ago, the challenges they faced, the progress that’s been made, and the work still left to do.

🐦 What birding and science looked like for women decades ago
 ⚖️ Moments of exclusion, resistance, and unexpected opportunity
 🌎 How perspectives in science and conservation have evolved
 🤝 The importance of mentorship, inclusion, and community
 ✨ Why diverse voices make both birding — and conservation — stronger

This is a conversation about more than birding — it’s about access, perspective, and the people who help shape how we see the natural world.

This episode is also dedicated to Scott’s mother — an incredible mind, an extraordinary woman, and a quiet force who shattered glass ceilings long before it was expected. Her influence lives on in conversations like this.

📬 Stay curious & get bonus content:
 https://naturallyscott.kit.com/5fd12c6752

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:00

Hello and welcome to this edition of Naturally Scott. I'm your host, Scott Harris. As always, I am thrilled you are here. Today's a bit different. It's our first panel episode. We have three guests with us today, distinguished guests. I'm honored to have each of them. And it's kind of a neat deal because all three of these women were guests in my book, Why We Love Birds, which will be coming out, you know, April of 27th, so a year away. All three of them have been previous solo guests on the podcast. But we've come together today to have a little discussion about the history of women in birding and what they've experienced over the decades that they've been birding and how things have changed and how things might be the future. So we welcome Lynn Scarlet and Debbie Shearwater and Cy Montgomery. And we're going to have a conversation about what it was like, as I mentioned, a long time ago in the birding world. How has it changed over the decades? Why did it change? What are the things that happened? How is it now? And where are we going in the future? What do we need to do? What kind of changes do we still need changes? Are still things happening? So these are things that are going on in the conversation. All three of them are brilliant and fun and accomplished and have different perspectives on uh on the birding world and their involvement in it. So I believe you're going to enjoy this. Have a great time. Thanks for being a part of it. Take care now. Bye. I am so excited that you're in. I made it. I made it. I can see you, but I can't hear you. There's no audio, which I think is important in a podcast. That might be helpful, right? I think so. All right, Cy. Wait, is that you? No audio. Cy, are you in? I'm I see you. Hey. We can hear you. Hello, and welcome to this edition of Naturally Scott. I'm your host, Scott Harris, and today is a first for us. It's about our 56th podcast that we've done, which for me is thrilling. And this is our first panel podcast. And I have invited three people that I become friends with over the last year or so. All three of them were generous enough to be a guest in, I was going to say my book, but it's our book, Why We Love Birds. Um, each of them bringing a different perspective. And then each of them has been on the podcast uh as an individual and now collectively. And so I am extraordinarily grateful uh for the generosity of time and information and sharing that each of the women has provided for us as as readers uh coming up when the book is released and as podcast viewers. So it's a pretty cool thing. Um, you guys are all meeting today uh for the first time, which I think is remarkable as prominent as all three of you are in different areas, but maybe that's it. It's it's three different areas. We've got Lynn, I think it's fair to say that you might represent the government side of the work we're doing, and we'll talk about your time as Deputy Secretary of the Interior. And I love this story, I've told it multiple times, your four months as acting deputy secretary. Acting secretary. Acting secretary, and eighth in line for the presidency during that time, and which, you know, I just I cannot get over how cool that is. Um, Sy is the is the prominent author among us. She's published about 865 books on um most existing animals and some existing people, and we'll talk about some of those today. And Debbie is uh I love the phrase because she gave it to me, so I feel free to use it. But Debbie is the badass of the four of us, and she went out and started a business on the coast of California at a time and in a location and in an industry that women weren't starting businesses. So for me, this is an honor, an absolute pleasure to have the three of you here. And again, if you didn't get the names the first time through, it's Lynn Scarlet and Debbie Shearwater and Cy Montgomery. And ladies, thank you so much for joining me.

SPEAKER_01 4:02

So happy to be with you.

SPEAKER_04 4:05

I really this is this is gonna be fun. So this is, if you'll allow me just a moment, this is an homage to my mother. My mother was a spirited fighter, she was one of the early members of now. She has her war stories of what it was like being a woman in business and being the only woman in a room of 27 men and just all kinds of stuff that she went through. And she raised me as a feminist. And one of the things that I learned when I was interviewing the three of you and other women that let's say are on this side of 30, is that the world actually was different for you guys growing up and for a lot of women, not just in birding, but in all areas, but in birding certainly. And I wanted to discuss that. I wanted to honor the women that came before you and then the things that you guys have done, and talk about how things have changed in the last half century of birding and wildlife and those things, and some of the experiences that you've had, and then where we're going to go forward, how we can continue moving, how we can continue to make a difference and uh not make it uncomfortable or different for women to be a part of part of the world that they should be 100% welcome to. So, with that as the premise, I thought we would, and again, we'll figure this out as we go. It's my first panel discussion. So I imagine we'll be talking over each other every once in a while, and sometimes no one will answer out of respect to the others, but we will find our way through this. But Debbie, I'm gonna start with you. So you had a fascinating experience as an army wife, and you moved to Texas, and you talked about there were requirements of dress and attire, and that you couldn't go to college and until you got divorced, and all kinds of things that were going on once you discovered the birding world. So why don't you share a couple minutes of that and we'll use that as the kickoff?

SPEAKER_03 5:58

Well, yes, I was married very, very young, grew up in on the East Coast in Pennsylvania, and married an army officer, and and army life in those days was vastly different than what it is today. So I was told from the get-go that my job was to support the officer. And that was my job. So I was not permitted to work or go to college or anything. After about seven years of that, we ended up in California and I went to college. I got divorced, went to college and went to school and entered a traditional female field. I became a dental hygienist. And that was a job that I had for about a decade. And so I was in this very, very traditional female area. But at the same time, I started doing the boat trips, but not as a business, just for fun. So I had the perfect balance in my life of two two two or three days a week working as a dental hygienist and you know, then boat trips on weekends with friends and stuff for fun. And uh it felt very balanced and it was very nice in a lot of ways. But the birding world um just got more enormous after that. And I became dis disabled from my dental hygiene work and then launched into turning the boat trip hobby into a boat trip business and then fully into the extremely male-dominated birding world. So um, yeah, it was a it was a lot of changes. But it was all very good.

SPEAKER_04 7:37

Well, that's and we're gonna we're gonna get back to that, the extremely male-dominated birding world. And Lynn, I think you were in an industry that might be called extremely male-dominated when you were in the world of politics. You, if memory serves, you went to school at UCSB where you did not find a large number of birders, male or female, among the student body. And you went through education and policy and and then moved into politics. Uh, did you find that it was a little bit different being a woman in those areas than it was being a straight white male?

SPEAKER_01 8:12

Well, you know, I'm a little bit of an outlier, so I have to go back a little bit. I also grew up in in Pennsylvania, Debbie, in western Pennsylvania, and my mother was a birder. And so my introduction to birding at the age of six was through my mother. And then when I went to the university, got a little bit linked in in graduate school to the Santa Barbara Audubon world. And the luminary of that world was a woman named Joan Lentz, another woman. So my pathway actually was one in which I had women as my sort of partners in birding, if you will, or my entree into birding. I, of course, could observe around me that there were a lot of men, but my own personal experience was women. Now, you are quite right, in my profession, which was in public policy, public administration, first as a researcher and eventually into government. I often was one of the few or even only women in the room. I was the first woman deputy secretary of the interior, um, and would often find myself in dialogue, both before I went to the Interior Department and during Interior, where I would be one of the only women there. I will say though, Scott, by the time I got to interior, times had really changed a lot. So there were a lot of Fish and Wildlife Service refuge managers who were women, a lot of National Park Service superintendents who were women. So my experience was a little perhaps different than and I also had parents who, unlike what Debbie described in her circumstance, who basically said, you go, girl, you know, go fulfill your life, spread your wings, do what you want. So they were very enabling, and that really helped pave my way into the future.

SPEAKER_04 10:11

And did you realize at the time that the blessings that you were given in those areas might not have been the same for everybody else, or did it just seem as a matter of course to you?

SPEAKER_01 10:21

You know, that's a really interesting question. I think growing up, it just seemed like the way the world was. My mother was very empowering, my father was very empowering. It wasn't really until I found myself in the workplace and would hear tales from other women of circumstances they'd gone through that I realized how, in many ways, profoundly different my experience was, began to really pay attention to uh mentoring women and uplifting women to spread their wings. But yes, initially I just thought that was the way the world was until I learned otherwise.

SPEAKER_04 11:00

Fair enough. And we will get back to that as well. And Sai, and Cy was right, we become friends. Cy has been a blessing for me. And Sai mistakenly thinks that she doesn't deserve to be here, which I think is remarkably silly. Um, Sai is a five times New York Times best-selling author. She has written books that I absolutely adore reading. I'm a little upset because it just came up again this weekend that reading Psy's books have convinced me to no longer eat calamari. Um and so we were at a restaurant this weekend that specialized in calamari, and I was the only one at the table that didn't eat it, whereas historically I'm the one that grabs the bowl and doesn't let it go. So for that, I both want to thank and curse you, Sai. And Cy is not a traditional full-time birder. She has written books about birding, but she's written books about a lot of things: pigs and octopus and chickens, and well, I guess chickens are birds, but all kinds of different things. But one that touched me is you wrote back over three decades ago, Walking with the Great Apes, about three great women of science who had an impact in the world. And they were precursors to the three of you, and obviously they had to go through things that were even less fair than some of the stuff that you guys might have gone through. Sai, so tell us just a touch about yourself and what motivated you to write that book and what did you learn as you were writing it?

SPEAKER_02 12:21

Well, I can identify with Debbie. My father was a general in the army. I think, well, I know for a fact my parents' wish for me was that I would go into ROTC and failing that, I I would marry an officer because my mother loved my father and loved that life, but I wasn't gonna do it. Uh I was lucky in that, you know, a lot of people say, you know, I didn't identify as, you know, a little girl when I was growing up, and then they they switch gender. Well, I didn't identify as a human growing up. So I always, at first, I thought I was a horse. I told my parents as soon as I could speak that they were terribly mistaken and that I was a horse. And my mother rushed me to the pediatrician who assured her that I would outgrow it. And I did when I realized I was a dog. So I never felt like I belonged with other people, but that was fine because most of sentient life is not of that particular species. And I I think because of that, being a woman didn't bother me because I didn't think I was a person at all the whole time, and I kind of don't now. When I was growing up, I always knew animals, including of course birds, were my people. And I thought when I was little maybe I'd be a veterinarian because I always felt like my job was to help my people. But then I began to read, and I was born in 1958, so when I begin to read, it's the 1960s. My father is helping me read the New York Times and finding all the animal stories for me. Well, what were all the animal stories about in the New York Times in the 1960s? How everything was going extinct. And I knew about extinction because of the dinosaurs. And it was then that I decided that I might be able to help more animals writing about them, than even as a veterinarian. So when I did my first book, I wanted it to be an homage to three women who utterly changed the way we think of other species. And they were Jane Goodall, Diane Fosse, who studied mountain gorillas in Zaire and then Rwanda, and Barute Galdecast, who studied orangutans in Borneo. And they were the ones who gave science essentially the license to name animals, to see them as individuals, to not treat them as rocks, but as thinking, feeling creatures. And when I did my first field work, I was basically channeling Jane Goodall. My first actual fieldwork was in Australia. I wasn't getting paid, but the year before I'd gone on an Earthwatch vacation to study Southern Heren's wombats in South Australia. And I I loved it. You lived in a tent, you s you spent all day in the outback. It was awesome. So naturally I went back to my newspaper job with its insurance and its regular paycheck, and I quit and I moved to a tent in the outback and I studied emus. So birds, even flightless birds, were among my first loves. And in studying them, I adopted the methods used by my heroine Jane Goodall, which was to approach humbly, which was to have an open mind. And these were all features that her mentor, the man who picked her and Diana Barute, three women, to lead these incredible studies of humankind's closest relatives. He picked them not in spite of being women, but because they were women, because he believed in the strengths that women would bring specifically to the study of animals. Patience, persistence, and a new point of view.

SPEAKER_04 16:11

Well, there's Debbie, you wanted to say something? I just said, wow. Yeah, there's well that that's a that's an amazing truth. And I am I'm reminded of two things. Number one, I had a guest on the show named uh Christine Webb, and she wrote a book called The Arrogant Ape that was just released. I think Sa you, you're the one that put me in touch with it, right? You wrote the foreword. And she talks about exactly what you're talking about the the resistance to naming animals that are being tested and whatnot. And and you know, we've discovered that whether it's man on man or man on animal, we have to dehumanize people when we're treating them poorly, otherwise, you know, our minds would explode, um, I would imagine. Um, and so that is uh that is a fascinating history. And si, so you did that, you researched it, you wrote it. Have you seen those have you seen changes in the 35 years since you wrote the book?

SPEAKER_02 17:05

Oh my gosh, yes, absolutely. As a writer, when I would contribute articles to different magazines and newspapers, invariably, whenever you wrote about an animal, I would write he or she if you knew what sex it was. And they would change it to it. And they even did this to a bird who just laid an egg. So it was known what sex this creature was. Now, you don't always find animals referred to in the you know, more respectful way instead of cause calling them it like a piece of furniture. But that has changed. Also, the way you do ethology today, the way you study animals today, in the past, you weren't supposed to treat them as individuals, you weren't supposed to name them. Well, now the very first thing you do in a population is figure out who is who. Otherwise, you're not going to learn anything. So, what these women did was completely transform the way we see animals that opened our eyes up to their inner lives, their consciousness. We used to not even talk about animals having consciousness or birds having consciousness or animals purposely deceiving others. But anyone who has ever seen a bird pretend it has a broken wing in an effort to lead a predator away from its nest knows that animals do have consciousness. They do do things purposely. And while instinct is a wonderful thing and we use it all the time, even though we prefer to think that we think through everything as humans. And birds certainly are very instinctual creatures, and you can see this when, you know, Jack Daws will attack Conrad Lorenz's black shorts, thinking that it's another another black bird. They just flip some kind of switch. They're thinking about stuff too. And having the world insulted in this way, I think, is moving the needle to make us care more about their lives and let us know that they love their lives like we love ours.

SPEAKER_01 19:13

So, Scott, I'd like to dive in a little bit here because there's some common themes. So, Jane Goodall, of course, probably a hero of all of us, but um not just for women, by the way. Western um science, kind of rooted in Descartes, and I don't want to get too pedagogical here, but uh rooted in Descartes, really put put mankind on a pedestal and uh and that all other creatures neither had emotions nor real cognition. And it was Jane Goodall and her work being unschooled in that tradition, really, bringing her fresh eyes to the field when she was in Africa and began to describe the creatures and their complex emotional as well as cognitive interactions and actions that began to open up others to the notion that perhaps this idea that somehow mankind was apart with um the only creature with emotions and intellect and so forth was wrong. And so, to your question to Sai about whether the world has changed. In my view, if you look at the last 30 years of science, there's just been an efflorescence of science research on the cognition of animals, whether whether birds, whether apes, whatever it might be, but also increasingly on demonstrating the emotional breadth of animals. So I think, yes, the world has changed. With Psy, I agree that Jane Goodall was really an instrumental part of that changing narrative.

SPEAKER_04 20:55

Aaron Ross Powell And were there, now this is my ignorance, so forgive me, please, but were there women previous to Jane Goodall? I know there were women in science, but were there women in the wildlife sciences? Or was Jane Goodall really the first significant player?

SPEAKER_02 21:13

Aaron Ross Powell Well, she was given a great platform because of National Geographic. And Lewis Leakey, who was the famous paleontologist who established that Africa and not Europe or Asia was the birthplace of humankind, had a great deal of power. Now there there was another woman, oh gosh, I cannot remember her name because I'm flipping out, but there was a wonderful woman who studied giraffes before Jane. But she did not get on the National Geographic train, alas. Jane had a very powerful mentor. And the fact that, you know, she was so unusual being a woman and an attractive woman who's living among the apes that everybody's afraid of. Same with with Diane Fossey with these King Kong. Monsters, the mountain gorillas, who of course turn out to be these total sweethearts, and we're the King Kong monsters, and Barute with with her orangutans, they they also there's no nothing monstrous about them at all. They're just very intelligent, emotional creatures. But it made great copy. So I think that that shows again, though, even though I'm just a writer, I might be able to play a part, after all, in elevating folks.

SPEAKER_01 22:27

Yeah, Scott, there were many, many women. But part of the narrative of women being in the background, many women scientists, many of whom, by the way, in the birding realm, and we all know the names of many notable naturalists, if you will, in the birding world, going back a couple of centuries, were accompanied by their wives, who actually did a lot of the field research, drawings and so on and so forth. And even not so much in the birding world, but our favorite childhood storyteller, Beatrix Potter, she was an incredible scientist, and yet was not able to be in the French Academy of Sciences, nor have her scientific work published under her name. It was published under a man's name. So, yes, there were women out there observing, observing, observing, studying, adding to accumulated knowledge, but they were not elevated. And I think one of the I think SI really alights on something important. Jane had a tremendous visible mentor who was able to give a boost to the work she was doing in a way that perhaps some of these other earlier women did not benefit from.

SPEAKER_04 23:41

So, and I want to, in a minute, I want to shift this to the to the business side, Debbie, because you you took a different approach, and I think it's important to understand that. But Cy, you mentioned a couple of minutes ago that these women were purposely picked because maybe we can generically call it empathy, but an ability to look at a problem differently than perhaps men do. And I'm reminded, by the way, there's only one sport in the Olympics where men and women compete in the same sport at the same time with no different rules, and that is equestrian. And my daughter was a huge equestrian. She was in Sports Illustrated for her championship. She was a great rider. And so we got to talk to a number of Olympic riders. And the theory behind it was this, and you're not even allowed to say this in some circles, but it turns out there's a difference between men and women. Men have an advantage in that we are physically stronger than women. And so they were able to control a horse in that way that gave them an advantage over women. Women, on the other hand, were intuitively more sensitive to the horse and to their needs and empathetic. So they were able to counterbalance that strength. And so now when they compete, men and women, in the in the Summer Olympics in Equestrian, they can each play to their strengths a little bit. And obviously the winner is normally a woman who's a bit stronger than most women, or a man who's a bit more empathetic than most men. And so they combine those two skills. But I think it's I think that's one of the things that we've lost, and you guys might see it differently, is the ability to say there is a bit of a difference. There are things that are are different between men and women, and it doesn't mean that men are any more capable or women are any less capable, but the approaches are sometimes different, which makes them extraordinarily valid and I think important. I think to look at things from multiple eyes, you know, is is just uh just an odd thing. Debbie, when you fired up your business, 44 years, by the way, of running pelagic birding trips, which is just unbelievable to me. Most of us are excited if we get to go out once or twice a year. And Debbie did this for 44 years. But you were walking into a male-dominated industry, right? Oh, yes. Not a lot of women running ships in the out of Monterey Bay or San Francisco or San Pedro or wherever you were. Were you welcomed with open arms? Was there a lot of thank God there's finally a woman getting in this industry? Or was it a little more challenging than perhaps it would have been if I had tried to start it?

SPEAKER_03 26:19

Oh, if you tried to start it, it would have been a piece of cake. No problem. Yeah. I mean, I can remember the first time I walked into a uh a fishing shop, uh, which is a shop that basically has sport fishing boats, and they take sport fishermen out. And you could go out singly as an individual or you could charter the boat. And then I walked in and said, I want to charter the boat. And I was uh 25 years old, blonde haired, and I can't remember the guy behind the counter just standing there like staring at me, like, are you crazy? And uh it took a few years, but ultimately I would say, you know, I did most of the trips I did were from Monterey, but I did a lot of trips out of Bodega Bay, Half Moon Bay. Basically, I did trips out of almost every port up and down the California coast from Crescent City to San Diego. And ultimately, in a in a few years, I earned the respect of those boat owners, those shop, those shop people. Um, and they came around to it. But also the other thing is these um captains, like when I did my trips out of Monterey, they didn't know anything about bird identification, seabird identification. They did kind of know the birds, because they had like different names, like they called um Arctic churns were tuna birds to them. And um they had they had names for them, you know. And I can remember trying to te teach uh one of the older captains, Charlie Denny, and I go, the ones that look like footballs to you, those are the rhinoceros auklets when they fly. And eventually everybody, I mean the captains of the boats, they all really got into it because taking out a boatload of birdwatchers was infinitely more easy, an easier day than taking out a boatload of fishermen. That was much, much easier. And then they got into it so much. I gotta tell you this one thing, they got into it so much. This one guy, one captain said, I saw a bird I never saw before out on the bay today. I said, Well, what did it look like? And he said, It was pointed on all four ends. I said, You saw a booby that's pointed on all four ends, and um, so you know, the boat people came around pretty easily. But the birders and the birders that be, and the birders in so-called positions and the birding world, that was another story altogether, completely different.

SPEAKER_04 28:46

So you're gonna tell that story, but let me let me back up for a second. So it reached a point where the professionals, the captains, the chummers, the deck hands, the those people, they came to accept you as a peer and an equal. Is that fair to say?

SPEAKER_03 29:01

Yes, but then there was one female captain in Monterey, and I was out with her one day, and I told her I saw jumpers. Now, jumpers, that's the fisherman's term for albacore breaching out of the water. I said, you know, I said, Kathleen, there's jumpers over there, and you would always want to go fish albacore. If you see albacore, you want to fish them. That's an incredible fish. And um she didn't believe me. And unknown to me, she got on the radio and she called another captain on the marine radio and she said, Debbie said she saw jumpers. Did she? And they said, Yeah, she says there's jumpers, there's jumpers. So they did all all the the captains and boat people, they all came around pretty easily. It was money for them and it was easy.

SPEAKER_04 29:50

Well, and uh well, that's a that's a good combination, by the way. As a small business owner for 40 years, I would be wide open to somebody if they brought me money and it was easy. It never occurred, but if it had, I would have welcomed it. It didn't matter to me. You could have been male, female, you could have been an orangutan. You bring me easy money, I'm in. But you were saying it wasn't as easy among the birding community members as it was among the we'll call them fishing professionals?

SPEAKER_03 30:19

No. The birding world was a different world altogether. And it stayed that way for a very long time. It was um, you know, I started, you know, I just started doing a few trips. It was very small, and then I thought, well, let's do a trip in November. And uh the local birders in power, physicians of so-called power were all men, and they said, Why? Why would you go out there in November? There's nothing there. And well, I went ahead anyway, and I did it.

SPEAKER_04 30:59

We're just making step stools and toilet paper holders. Anyway, I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_03 31:04

No, no, it was it was for for real. I mean, and it went on for a long time. Why would you do that? Why would there's nothing out there? Why would you go out there in February? I want to see Lisa on Albatross. You know, and that it was just yeah, and I did, yeah. And it was like, you know, it was just there was and there was a lot of other other ways too that manifests itself.

SPEAKER_04 31:26

And by the way, we could lose our whole show if we get Lynn going on Midway Island and Alp in Albatross. It's uh that's a whole other story. So do you think, Debbie, that that has changed over time?

SPEAKER_03 31:37

As far as how women are treated in the bird watching world? Yes. Maybe. I'm not gonna there are more women in uh positions that were only occupied by men at one time, so that has changed somewhat. But there's still a lot of the same old good old good old good old boy, good old boy club thing going on in a lot of areas, but it has improved. I mean, I was the first female speaker at a 100-year-old bird club on the east coast of the United States. I was their first banquet speaker who was a woman. So it's and I was invited by another woman, and she was the first female president of that club. That was a hundred-plus-year-old club.

SPEAKER_01 32:27

I don't know, you know, it's Scott, I have to provide a little bit of a counterweight here from my own experience. I mean, there's no question that birding has been for many decades male-dominated, and and each of us has our own experiences. But my observation is, especially in recent decades, many, many, many women birders, and just right here in Santa Barbara, an incredibly collegial group of birders, male and female, with very little observation of kind of one-upsmanship and that sort of thing. And a very good friend of mine, Elizabeth Gray, is now the CEO of National Audubon. She's a scientist herself with a background in ornithology. I I I always am cautious about sort of broad assumptions. Yes, we do experience different circumstances, and there has been male domination. And as we said in science, and as Sai pointed out, certainly science and bird science dominated historically by men. But at the same time, I've always found a lot of really great male colleagues birding for a long, long time, but also enjoyed a lot of women birders for a long, long time. And I did also want to put a cautionary note in your comments about horsemanship and strength and empathy and so forth. Certainly some people more empathetic than others, some people certainly stronger than others, but I'm always really cautious about applying those characteristics purely on a on a gender basis. There's just so much diversity in individual people, whether male or female. So that's my word of caution on getting too stark a differentiation between women and the world of birding and our individual experiences.

SPEAKER_04 34:26

Well, fair enough. Fair enough. The the empathy thing, I think, could of course be debated for a while, and it has been the the pure physical strength is is I mean, by every measurement, i there is a differentiator there, um, for better or for worse, I guess. Um, in your experience uh early on in science and early on in writing, have things changed over the decades in in any way, better or worse for you?

SPEAKER_02 34:51

I think early on for me as a journalist, I no longer look very young, but I used to look very young and I was female. But you can turn that to your advantage because you're not frightening people. They don't feel threatened. And no one saw me as somebody with power or someone who was competing with them. So, you know, if this was the evil pipeline company that I was investigating, the guy would walk out of his office and ignore me rudely, and I would go through everything on his desk. They would never suspect I would do that. Um, if I was interviewing some Dalit in in India, they didn't feel frightened by me as they might by some tall male Westerner. So sometimes that works to your advantage. And for me, all that mattered, I didn't care how people treated me as long as they didn't shoot me in the head. I just wanted to get my job done. And so you always you find a workaround. And I bet both of you have found workarounds that are quite creative in your work. You just kind of they used to call it uh my father, who was a prisoner of war, uh, he was taken to the Philippines and the the word was to quan something. It meant to just it meant essentially to MacGyver something. I've I've been lucky enough to be able to MacGyver my my way out of any problems being a woman might have paused, or use it in some cases to my advantage.

SPEAKER_04 36:27

Do you do you find that that you do you have to utilize that talent or that skill less as time has gone by, or is it unchanged?

SPEAKER_02 36:37

I mean, it's hard to tell because the older you get, I mean, if if when I was in my twenties, I was just some reporter from the Courier News in Bridgewater, New Jersey. And today when I call somebody up, I can usually tell them, you know, I've written thirty s thirty-nine books. So I have a little more a little more respect. But um yeah, it's it's it's hard for me to tell. I do see a lot more women in positions of authority um than I used to in the f in the field. I mean, as Lynn was was saying, women always were contributing importantly to um science, but often their names were not the names that were in the journals. Often they were doing at least half the work and their husband was getting a hundred percent of the credit.

SPEAKER_04 37:31

And that's a bad thing, right? Just so we're clear.

SPEAKER_02 37:34

I'm not for it, but getting work done is kind of I think uh, you know, the most important thing is getting the work done.

SPEAKER_04 37:41

I have to share a story. My my mom has passed, but she was she was my shining light for as long as she was there. And she told a story that I think you might appreciate, and some in the audience might. She was at one point the head of all of purchasing for Rockwell International, which was a pretty big gig. And they were doing a three or four-month tour to go visit a half dozen of their biggest suppliers. And she actually brought with her a team of 26 people plus her. And they traveled around the country and they went to all these places. The other 26 people were all men. And the last place that they went to was in San Francisco, and no need to embarrass the company, you know, 40 years, 50 years later, but huge company and giant boardroom. And and when when my mom and her team of 26 people walked in, there was a big, giant whiteboard, and somebody at the company that they were visiting had taken the time to call Rockwell and get the title of all 26 of the men. And they had put them in their hierarchical order from top to bottom, and then offset, lower right, was my mom's name and a dash and secretary. And the assumption by the person who made the phone call was it's not even worth asking what the 27th person is because we know. So when the when the when the second in command got up, he was invited to speak first. He got up and he said, Thank you so much for having us. It's such a pleasure, and da-da-da. And I think it's probably a really good idea for me to introduce you to my boss. And then he introduced my mom, who got up. Now I assume the person making the phone call probably still doesn't have a job. Um, but that's an unimaginable story from a man's point of view. If it had been 27 people on that, if all 27 had been men, they certainly would have gotten all 27. And I don't even know that it was necessarily misogyny as much as it was just training and habit. And, you know, it's Lynn, you talked about now how there's a number of women in position of power. Elizabeth, you know, who's who's been on the podcast and is in the book and you know, and all those things. But if you go back maybe 20 years before you were deputy secretary, probably not as many, I would imagine, as there were, you know, at the height of your involvement there, and certainly not as of today. You know, the parallels of how many women Congresspeople and and governors that we have compared to when the four of us were growing up, which was pretty much zero. And so I love to see that. Debbie, you are you're starting um a new birding festival a year from April, uh, the Fault Line Birding Festival out in your area, which I have no doubt is going to be spectacular. But in your experience, do you think, well, of course, you're the woman that started the whole women pelagic thing, but would it have been nearly as easy? Not that it is easy, starting anything like that is difficult, uh, gender aside, but do you think you would have had a more difficult time 20, 30, 40 years ago than you do today? I mean, are people taking you seriously?

SPEAKER_03 40:51

Yeah, yeah. No, I don't think it would have been any harder twenty or thirty years ago. But I do want to speak to your story you just said about your mom. I've had two relatively recent stories on the exact same vein. Where a story where a very large monograph was published on a seabird species, and my data set was probably the most important data set in the whole paper. And my name was being left off the scientific paper as a co-author until I insisted otherwise. Okay, so it still happens. And you're in the other part of that story and a different story, but the other part of what you were talking about with your mom, I was asked to speak at a very prestigious yacht club. This is a by invitation only club at their luncheon, and um I was walking in with a male friend of mine who was carrying whatever some stuff for me, and a couple of the members were arriving, and one of the members looked at my friend and said, You must be our speaker today. And my friend stopped right there in his shoes, and he said, I most certainly am not. Let me introduce you to her. And I was the only female in the room of 55 men at this very prestigious club. I was very well received, they were very happy with the whole thing, but yeah. So I'm telling you, yes, we have made progress. Could we do it better? We could. Could women do better? They could. Kind of one of the most shocking things to me was to find that there are women who absolutely do not lift up other women at all. And I had the surprise of my life when I started the World Girl Birder Group on Facebook, that so many women were critical of the whole thing. And had one woman even went to print and publish an article in a major birding magazine about how no, we don't need that type of thing. And if I was asked to speak as a speaker at an all-female birding event, I would decline because it's just not necessary. And this year she's speaking at a birding festival that was basically set up to try to have all female speakers. Go figure.

SPEAKER_04 43:11

Maybe she changed her mind. Yeah, well, hopefully the minds can change. So I hate this because we're already coming close to the end of our time, and Cy, I know you've got fewer than 10 minutes. Um, the premise of my inviting you, and and by the way, my premise could be wrong, but my premise in inviting you was that I had imagined that things were more challenging 30, 40, 50 years ago for women in the birding world, as well as in the political, business, and publishing world or scientific world, and that things have gotten better, but nothing is ever perfect. And so, how can they continue to get better? So I would love for each of you to take a minute or two and respond to that. Maybe you didn't think It was more challenging 40 years ago than it is today, or maybe you think we've peaked and there's no reason to get better. And in either case, my premise is wrong. Um, but I'm wide open to that. It's one thing I did learn from my mother is how remarkably often I am wrong on things that I assume are easily understood by everybody. Actually, if you would react to that, just your view on what I originally invited you guys here for, and not surprisingly over the last 45 or 50 minutes, have learned learned that some of it is different.

SPEAKER_01 44:34

Well, I think there's no question that matters whether it's in the birding world, business, certainly government has evolved with more empowerment and engagement of women over the last, say, 30, 40 years. I think that's undeniable. I think it's also undeniable that as Debbie just illustrated, one still encounters these sort of disconnects where somehow, as a woman, people greet you with surprise if you are the head of the delegation or whatever it might be. But for me, uh important thing in my own life, I've had varied experiences, and as I noted, started out my birding with my mother. So a woman was essential in my birding life. But for me, I love mentoring both women in the workplace when I was at Interior, then the many years I spent at the Nature Conservancy, and then now I'm on the advisory council at the at the Brenn School of Environmental Science and Management and work with graduate students. And I love mentoring young women and encouraging them to, you know, go forth and and fulfill their dreams. And so to me, to your to your the premise is certainly correct that there has been change over time and we still face challenges. But in my lived experience, what I strive to do is figure out how to enhance the opportunities for everyone through the experiences that I've had. And I love doing that.

SPEAKER_04 46:12

Well, that's fantastic. Thank you. Cy, if you would, just on the off chance that we lose you, I know you've got a hard stop.

SPEAKER_02 46:20

Yeah. Well, first I want to say, Scott, that your mama did a good job. And she's looking down at you from heaven. So, and thank you so much for bringing us together. I I think that as more um women are welcomed into birding and into science and into industry, one of the things that we're showing is that the more folks from different backgrounds that you've got bringing their talents, their experience, their vision to solve problems, to look at the natural world, the better off we are. And we need more women, we need more black people, we need more queer people. We we if you want to solve problems in this world no matter what they are, we need everyone to feel welcome and we need to take advantage of all of their experience and background.

SPEAKER_04 47:18

That's very well said. And Debbie, I realize I put you in the unfortunate position of having to follow Lin and Csai, which I would not want to be. I would have much rather have gone first. But if you would, uh your point of view, your thoughts.

SPEAKER_03 47:32

I would echo everything that Lin and Cy have said, and your mama did do a good job. You're very lucky in that vein. Yes. And very, and it's just um, yeah, we have we have come some distance. That's there's no question about that. No question at all. And we just need uh keep going, keep going in the same direction, and calling out you know, these good leaders like Sai and Lin, and uh having them on a podcast like this is one step. So I see it as a very positive thing.

SPEAKER_04 48:04

Well, I want to say thank you to all three of you. This is the word is overused and undervalued, but I mean it sincerely. This has been an honor for me. There is a reason that I asked each of you, and it has shown through in the last hour. And when you talk about leading by example, which I think is oftentimes the most critical thing, you can legislate and do all kinds of stuff, but I think the the biggest stepping stone to success is leading by example. And the three of you have each done that in your field. You're exemplary in the work that you've done and the way in which you've done it. And and I'm proud to consider you friends, and um proud to have had you on the show today, and I want to say thank you very much to each of you.

SPEAKER_01 48:43

Thank you, Scott.

SPEAKER_00 48:44

You've been listening to Naturally Scott with Scott Harris. Naturally Scott is hosted by Scott Harris, produced by Justin Harris, directed and edited by Frank Sierra. Follow us on our YouTube channel at Naturally Scott and Instagram at naturally Scott Harris. If this conversation resonated with you, please follow the show, leave a review, and share it with someone who needs to hear it. Naturally Scott thanks you for viewing and listening to this podcast.