Women’s stories and experiences with wildlife 821


interviews with participants afterwards. We also conducted open-ended interviews and participant observation with students and research fellows across socio-economic strata at a conservation research/action organization during January–May 2018, including 11 students (seven women), two women postdoctoral fellows, and eight senior fellows (three women) about their personal life stories, including research, work and education and their feelings about gender and caste as related to conservation. In 2019,we conducted phone and in-person interviews with eight conservationists (four women) working in prominent NGOs to ask about gendered assumptions and the integration of gender in their work. Interviews were conducted in Kannada in villages by SNJ and LMG, and in English with NGO workers and students by MJG and SNJ. In Tanzania we draw from .2 decades of research by


MJG on conservation politics and Maasai knowledge about wildlife, including participant observation at hun- dreds of meetings and informal interviews with residents (2002–2004, January–May 2005, October 2006–July 2007, January–July 2009). In the summer of 2018, we conducted one focus group interview with seven young men, and one with 23 women, and informal interviews with local infor- mants (five men, three women) about changes in conser- vation management. In 2019 we conducted specific follow- up interviews regarding women’s stories about wildlife and changes in conservation management with 10 women. Interviews were conducted in a mixture of Swahili and Maa and translated from Swahili into English by MJG, and from Maa to Swahili and English by TMN.


Results


In both India and Tanzania, we found that women were not included in conservation work or research to the same extent as men, although this is beginning to change, and thatwomen in both locations have a great deal of knowledge about their environment, which they pass on through teach- ings, songs, stories and daily labour practices.


Participation in conservation management


In both locations, women were only marginally involved in conservation-related research and decision-making, albeit with changes underway. Informal interviews with colleagues and students working on conservation in India revealed long-standing assumptions that women were shy or too busy to attend meetings. Gender was a topic covered in so- ciology class, not something to worry about in the field. In Tanzania conservation practitioners reflected similar senti- ments and suggested that Maasai women were not able to speak in front of men, did not knowmuch about wildlife be- cause they did not travel far from home, and should be in- cluded in conservation through women’s projects such as


cultural tourism, beadwork, and beekeeping activities. In both places, a couple of female representatives were often believed to be able to represent all women at meetings. Interviews with wildlife conservation professionals in


India also revealed that similar assumptions guided many of their decisions and led to a lack of inclusion of women in their work. All acknowledged that womenwere underrep- resented in their work and gender was poorly addressed. One female interviewee suggested this was related to wildlife conservation itself being masculine:


Large cat biology is all about territory, the wild, an animal that needs its own space and is only found in certain places. That’s a very masculine way of looking at it!


Others explained the lack ofwomen’s involvement as related to gender relations within communities. One woman said she felt safer with male field assistants, who were also more confident in the field. Others said that female field workers were unable to interact with as many community members, and another explained it as the natural division of labour:


Field assistants are men, we don’t have women. It is more convenient, because of the nature of the job. In the weaving centre we have women, but for the work that includes a lot of walking in the field it is mostly men.


Multiple respondents also suggested that women just did not know about wildlife, as reflected in the statement: ‘Women are really busy, preoccupied with housework. They don’t often go into forests and won’t know about wildlife.’ In the Tiger Reserve, women consistently remarked that


few people from conservation and development NGOs spoke to them. Interdisciplinary researchers working in the area confirmed they interacted almost exclusively with Soliga men. They explained this as related to personal con- straints preventing them from talking with women, but also suggested that women did not go to the forest as much as men, and were held back by traditional leaders, who were men. Many Soliga women agreed that women were often afraid to talk in front of strangers, or in large groups, par- ticularly in meetings dominated by men. Our own observa- tion of a meeting of a non-timber forest product (NTFP) group illustrated this: few women were present, and they scarcely spoke. When we asked why this was the case, a prominent older woman who goes to many such meetings explained:


Women think slowly, they take time to think about what to say. That meeting was all about other things, if they had spoken about how much NTFP is coming in, from where, we could have participated.


When we asked other women in the Reserve why they did not participate in meetings, some said it was because they were held at inconvenient times or locations. Yetmost agreed that they should be included in conversations about forest management. When asked what they could contribute, one woman explained:


Oryx, 2021, 55(6), 818–826 © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605321000363


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