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On the surface, birding might seem like neutral ground—an activity that any curious, nature-loving person can enjoy, regardless of age or gender. Go on a hike with your local ornithological club and at least half the attendees will be women. Circle the marsh with your binoculars and you’ll probably see a woman doing the same.

But female birders don’t always feel comfortable in the field, even with the rising awareness . Many of us keep on despite frequent put-downs and hostility, enduring dismissive comments about our knowledge and in the worst cases, sexual harassment. I’ve had men touch my hips to correct my perfectly fine birding stance. A ranger at a national wildlife refuge winked and told me about his “big, loaded gun.” My friends have been propositioned in parks and stalked by drivers along country roads. Not even a 16-year-old can bird in peace without commenters .

Like most matters of importance, women have been integral to birding from the get-go. Female ornithologists drew attention to avifauna in the late 1800s, and suffragists helped the movement take off in the early 1900s. Today, 42 percent of U.S. birders . Personally, female birders have run my world ever since I picked up a field guide in college. My ornithology professor was a woman. My boss at ̽����ѡ is a woman, as are most of my colleagues throughout the office. My birding circle is mainly members of the Feminist Bird Club.

And yet men have the loudest voices and the most power in the industry. The closer you get to the top of the birding, conservation, and academic ranks, the more the gender balance tips. At ̽����ѡ, for instance, the membership is 72 percent female, but the executive staff is 75 percent male—and the organization has never had a female president in its 114 years. This pattern persists industry wide. Men hold the highest positions at the American Birding Association, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and the American Bird Conservancy. They dominate bookshelves, festivals, competitions, and gear and travel ads. They build their reputations and livelihoods around the practice and reap the greatest profits.

For birding to be equal, we need more women in charge—and that's a change we're finally starting to see. Female leaders around the world are launching clubs and businesses that not only offer a safe space to bird, but also spread the wealth and agency to those who’ve long been discounted.

Judith Mirembe, Kimberly Kaufman, Molly Adams, and the founding members of The Phoebes are just a few examples of women trying to transform the community from its core. As most of them told us in interviews, the goal isn’t to split the birding world by gender; it’s 2019 and we’ve fought too hard against misogyny on all fronts to do that. The point is to gain parity, educate against prejudices, add new dimensions to the sport we love, and bring men along with us as we try to create a better, safer culture for everyone.

If men aren’t down with that, we ask them to please step aside so that we, the women, can get to work. —Purbita Saha, Associate Editor

Graphics by Alex Tomlinson; research by Lexi Krupp, Jason Gregg, Jillian Mock

Growing up in western Uganda, Judith Mirembe’s parents told her stories of the , or Kanyamunyu. If the little black and white bird appeared in their compound early in the morning, the family would know to expect guests. When she was four years old, they saw a wagtail three times in one week. “Coincidentally, we received visitors,” Mirembe says. “That is how my love for the birds was born.”

Birding became Mirembe’s passion. She’d watch flocks rise from the trees in nearby forest patches and fly to the crops surrounding her home. But she didn’t consider pursuing her favorite creatures professionally until she enrolled in a university in Kampala in 2012. Even as she was working toward a degree in environmental science, she worried about career prospects after graduation. Well-paying jobs are scarce in Uganda, and the market would be even tougher for her: The unemployment rate for women in their twenties and thirties as that for men.

Mirembe approached Herbert Byaruhanga, the managing director of and her brother-in-law. She began training part time with him to build her birding skills while juggling her schoolwork. She couldn’t afford to buy high-quality binoculars during her apprenticeship and was grateful when a female tourist from Australia eventually gifted her a pair.

Mirembe was armed with the skills and gear she needed, but the odds were still against her. For one thing, across Africa, birders generally, and bird guides especially, skew male; in Byaruhanga’s 20 years in the business, he’s encountered an estimated 120 male guides and only 30 female ones. What’s more, clients or employers might hold her gender against her. “Birdwatching has become popular in Uganda, but the woman’s place is still seen as belonging to the kitchen,” Mirembe says.

With Byaruhanga’s encouragement, she decided to form a group dedicated to empowering jobless female college graduates to break through the male ranks of the industry. She recruited 10 ladies and launched the club in 2013. Over the years, dozens of employed members of the group have helped to teach fresh guides and connect them with tour companies across the country. The costs of training and gear are largely covered by scholarships and donations. In 2015 the club received $30,000 from the United Nations Development Programme. In addition, they’ve received funds from friends, international and local fairs, and the Uganda Wildlife Authority.

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Uganda Women Birders currently has 50 new and longtime members, 30 of whom are employed by tour groups. On average, Mirembe says the guides can earn $1,200 for a two-week expedition. (An annual salary would be roughly $5,000, based on eight or nine trips.) Compare that to the $600 the average Ugandan makes in one year, and the benefits of the business are clear.

In addition to helping members achieve economic independence, the club is working to change societal attitudes around gender equality by hosting presentations on how female guides can be breadwinners. “Only 2 out of 10 women we train get support from their partners after marriage to continue birding,” Mirembe says. “This has to change.”

Support is also needed to get the women through the rigorous training period. Mirembe, who now works as a bird-population-monitoring coordinator at the nonprofit , says that it takes at least two years to acquire the skills and confidence for bird guiding—and even then, the graduates aren’t guaranteed a stable career and income. After seeing the high dropout rates of club members, Mirembe realized the group needed a more reliable job engine. So this past August she launched a birding company, Women Adventures Africa, to employ women who trained with the club. “This company will give women hope that if they train hard, they will have a job at the end of the day,” Mirembe says.

Women Adventures Africa is still in in its infancy, but Mirembe is committed to hiring only female freelance guides and paying each of them $80 to $100 per day, until she can take on a regular staff. The target clientele, she says, are travelers who believe in the guides’  knowledge and leadership and want to elevate it.

Mirembe recognizes that the appeal of female guides isn’t limited to Uganda; she’s helped women in Kenya and Rwanda launch their own economically motivated clubs in recent months. “It gives me a lot of encouragement to keep moving, as we are building a chain,” Mirembe says. “My hope is in building stronger networks that [we] will learn from each other and have competent women birders to effectively conduct tours continent-wide.”  

Linda Alila, an ornithology intern at the Nairobi National Museum, is the co-founder of the . To her, the new venture is a way to not only earn a living from birding, but also contribute to avian research and conservation. “Women birders will have an opportunity to be citizen scientists through our efforts,” she says. “If we understand birds’ ecological and economical importance, we will help in sustainably conserving them.” One way to achieve that, Alila says, is by encouraging the use of the global , which allows birders to map their sightings and track regional migration patterns.

Like the Uganda club, Kenya Women Birders supports 50 passionate members, including university students, tour operators, leisure birders, and guides. They face many of the same challenges that Mirembe has encountered, but thanks to the ground she’s broken, the path will be smoother for the women birding behind her.

At a birding festival in Florida several years ago, Kimberly Kaufman was listening to a panel—ostensibly the region’s birding experts—discuss avifauna and its conservation. She looked at the slate of all men sitting on stage before her, and then at the gathered crowd, where she recognized several women with deep knowledge of local species. As the men spoke, she felt the urge to say something grow stronger and stronger—until finally Kaufman pushed down her discomfort, stood up, and asked: “Why are all the panelists men?” Onlookers gasped, murmured, and gradually broke into applause.

The simple query generated a shocked response because Kaufman had questioned a long-standing norm. Men fill the vast majority of speaker slots at the country’s leading birding festivals. But not at the , the annual festival in northwest Ohio that Kaufman co-founded 10 years ago, and especially not last year.

To attract tens of thousands of lens-toting enthusiasts to admire migrating warblers as they pause before crossing Lake Erie, she books birding’s biggest stars (including her husband, Kenn Kaufman) to speak during the 10-day festival, as well as several lesser-known experts, including accomplished women and trans people. When planning the 2018 event, she noticed a “groundswell” of awareness around sexism in birding, so she decided to focus on women even more than usual, booking them for . (This year are women.)

Tiffany Adams presented on urban birding, Ashli Gorbet told stories of migration science, Catherine Hamilton and Kelly Riccetti taught field sketching, and a panel of “Power Women” recounted their experiences breaking the Big Year glass ceiling.

Kaufman believes it’s important to foster the change she wants to see. It’s a philosophy she has embodied throughout her notable career in ornithology, from her early days as a bird bander, as the executive director of (BSBO), an inspirer for clubs for young birders in 20 states, and more recently as the founder of the Biggest Week. She’s watched with satisfaction as issues of diversity and inclusion have skyrocketed to the fore of her industry. And she’s using her power to elevate new voices and overlooked experts, many of whom are female.

For Adams, who has been trying to break into an ornithological career for the past few years, presenting at last year’s festival provided a springboard to other opportunities, including press attention around her vision of urban birding and, this month, a presenting gig at a prominent environmental-education conference. “It gave me hope that if I can do this, if I can speak at such a prestigious engagement, what else can I do?” Adams says. “It opened my eyes to the possibility that being a birder and building a career around it is not a fairy tale.”

Kaufman’s interest in helping lift others up stems from her experience as an outsider in the birding world. She grew up on a farm in northwest Ohio, where she spent her free time poking through nearby woods, swamps, and marshes. She felt a deep connection to nature generally but didn’t take special notice of birds. “My family was so poor, there were times when my parents were struggling to feed the five of us [kids], much less a feeder,” Kaufman says.

She didn’t catch the spark until her late twenties when she spied a group of striking yellow birds outside an office window—American Goldfinches, she was told. “The entire course of my life changed in that moment,” says Kaufman, who owned a home- and office-cleaning business at the time. “If something like a blazing-gold American Goldfinch has been under my nose my whole life and I missed it, what else is out there?”

She soon began volunteering with the state wildlife agency to monitor Bald Eagles nesting near her home. Unsated, she trained as a bird bander and worked as a researcher at BSBO. There she had several masterful female mentors, but at conferences she was often the lone woman in a group of men. “Not a single one of them would assume that I was a fellow bander,” she recalls; they presumed she was someone’s girlfriend. But she found that her knowledge far surpassed that of the average bander, thanks to the high volume of birds she handled at BSBO, and that realization gave her the confidence to assert herself when men tried to dismiss her.

“I see this happen so often, that women get dissed in the field and they don’t say anything; they don’t speak up for themselves,” Kaufman says. Using these moments to start constructive conversations is important, she explains, both to establish female expertise and to prevent further indignities. “You don’t have to be rude to say, ‘How funny that you would think that I’m not the field trip leader—is that because I’m a woman?’ ” she suggests. “It’s not just about teaching people to ID birds, but also teaching people how to be better human beings.”

Her approach has boosted many young birders, especially female. “Younger women in their teens can fall into confidence traps, where even though they have this expertise, they don’t feel like they do compared to their male counterparts,” says Auriel Fournier, a bird researcher at Mississippi State University who met Kaufman, her “bird mom,” at BSBO when she was 10 years old. “Kim’s been really good about providing the mentoring and support to give those women the ability to take those next steps, whether it’s leading field trips at the birding festival or organizing talks at the Ohio Young Birders Conference.”

While Kaufman is thrilled to see women gaining prominence and is dedicated to doing her part to elevate them at the Biggest Week and beyond, she stresses the importance of supporting anyone with a birdy passion—female, male, or transgender. “If we just treat everyone with respect and the benefit of the doubt from the start,” she says, “we’ll all do better.”