As I approach my sixties, I find myself reflecting on a life lived as a woman in fields long dominated by men. For decades, I led in technology while, in parallel, cultivating another life rooted in learning from the natural world. Eventually, I left a corporate environment that clashed with my values and too often failed to recognize the contributions of women, and stepped more fully into the work that had been calling me all along.
Today, I am a woman naturalist with French and Breizh roots, spending nearly every day in the field, learning from the land, and sharing what years of attention have taught me.
I came to natural history through decades of attention. I was always a nature explorer in the truest sense of the word, not to conquer, not to collect trophies, but to be in relation. The formal naturalist work came later. The knowing had been accumulating all along.
The naturalist world is no different from many others. Women continue to navigate patterns of erasure and exclusion that are often subtle, yet deeply entrenched.
That experience is not mine alone. There has been some progress, and I can see it in the work of women who have reshaped parts of this field from within. Look at the legacy of primatologist Jane Goodall, the work of forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, and many others who have been steadily shifting what counts as knowledge and who gets to produce it.
But in everyday community life, the imbalance remains. Subtly yet persistently, women naturalists are still overlooked. We lead the walk, and someone else gets the microphone. We build the knowledge base, and someone else publishes the interpretation. We have been doing this work, patient, relational, reciprocal, for as long as there has been ground to tend and seasons to read. And still we are asked to justify our presence in the land we never left.
In our field, perhaps more than ever, the collectors of names are celebrated over the keepers of relationships, those who connect species to place, season, memory, and community. That too is a form of erasure.
We are keepers of time. We read the season before the calendar catches up. We know the first spring ephemerals, the first wood frog call, the first insect emergence, not as data points, but as obligations, as relationships, as the texture of a world we have committed ourselves to paying attention to, a language learned through years of observation and data that deepen attention rather than define it.
We are holders of knowledge, not the extracted, transactional kind, but the kind that accumulates through return, through presence, through caring about what happens to a place across years and decades.
We are guardians of reciprocal traditions, ways of being in relation to land and life that predate the institutions that have so often failed to see us.
This is not new. It carries the long shape of erasure.
Jeanne Baret from France, the first woman to circumnavigate the globe, disguised herself as a man just to board the ship and do the work. She collected thousands of botanical specimens along the way. The flowering vine she helped bring to scientific attention was named Bougainvillea, after the expedition leader, not after her.
Beatrix Potter from the United Kingdom brought rigorous scientific attention to mycology at a time when the Linnean Society would not admit her. Her research on fungal spore germination had to be read aloud by a man because she could not present it herself. She is remembered for her illustrations of rabbits, not her scientific work.
Rachel Carson from the United States spent her life studying marine ecosystems with patience and precision, then wrote a book that shifted the course of environmental policy. The response from industry was not to engage her science, but to dismantle her credibility as a woman, as an alarmist, as someone presumed to have no authority in the natural world.
Ynes Mexía from Mexico and the United States, a Mexican American botanist and field explorer, collected more than 150,000 plant specimens across the Americas, with major work throughout Mexico and South America. Her contributions to botanical knowledge remain far less visible than the scale of her work would suggest.
And in our own time, forest ecologist Suzanne Simard from Canada, whose research reshaped how we understand forests as interconnected living systems, continues to defend and reinforce the legitimacy of that work while still navigating resistance to its full acceptance.
These are not exceptions. They are the structure, repeating across places and ecosystems. From European forests to North American coasts, from Latin American mountains to global voyages shaped by colonial expeditions, the pattern holds. Different landscapes, same pattern of recognition and erasure.
And still the women go out. Still, they crouch at the edge of the vernal pool. Still, they photograph, record, annotate, remember. Still, they teach their children, their neighbors, their communities, outside the institutions that do not invite them in.
The land does not overlook them. The moths come to those who wait. The wood frogs call on the same March nights they have always called, and there are women who have been counting those nights for twenty, thirty, forty years, without grants, without titles, without anyone handing them the microphone.
I came to this field late by some measures. Not late by mine.
I have been exploring since I can remember, crouching beside things, staying still long enough for the world to forget I was there, learning names and, more importantly, their stories, not to own what I encountered but to be in better relation with it. The phenological work, the protocols, the careful recording of first emergence and last call, all of that came with time. The attention was always there.
And so I know something about what it means to carry knowledge that institutions often dismiss, to do work that does not always come with a title, to love a field that has not always made room for you, and to use the rigor of data and long-term observation to help widen what counts as ecological understanding.
I write this for the women who are still out there at first light, in the rain, on their knees beside something small and extraordinary. Named and unnamed. Credentialed and not. The ones the poster does not feature and the ones the land has always known.
You are not the assistant on this walk.
You are the ones who know.
© 2026 Claire O'Neill. Text and photographs by the author. All photographs feature friends from the Earthwise Aware (EwA) community.
