Problems With Forestry

My trusty steel toes

 

You know what’s hard? I’ll tell ya.

Being a girl and trying to dress adequately for a professional event in a male dominated field (read: forestry). That’s hard.

You are expected to be in dress clothes and look professional but also convey that you could throw on a hardhat and lay out a skidder trail. Now, to make things harder: you’re a girl.

It is so hard to find the line between not looking so feminine that people will discount your abilities but not dressing in a way that appears frumpy or overly masculine. It’s literally a nightmare.

Interviews are supposed to be stressful. I get that. But when you are more stressed about what to wear for shoes than questions like, “What is your greatest weakness?” or, “What is a time you made mistakes at work and how did you handle them?” you know it’s bad.

Should I wear heals? No, they’ll think I’m a girlie-girl.

Should I wear my steel toe boots? No, they’ll think I don’t know how to dress for the office part of the job.

How about sneakers? Ha-ha nice try. No.

Sandals? Maybe if you just really don’t want the job you could.

Flats? Too bad my pants are long enough to fit an Amazon…nope.

Of course this dilemma never begins until the night before at 9:37pm so it’s not like I can just run into town and find the perfect women’s-forestry-super-interviewer-shoe-of-the-year. (By the way, if you ever see an ad for such a thing, send it over this way and help a sister out…)

So guess what.

I wore my steel toe boots. Yup. I did. I cleaned &oiled them that morning so they looked brand new. And you know what? Then I had to worry that they would take one look at my brand new (looking) boots and think I had never done any real work and only wore them so that they would THINK  I did real work! ARRUUUGHHHGH! WHY ARE THEY SO JUDGY!

At this point I decided that I was being UTTERLY REDICULOUS and just left and went to my interview.

You would never believe what they said when they saw my shoes.

Nothing.

Because they didn’t pay any attention to my shoes at all. It was all over nothing.

There is no intended moral to this story, but I hope you enjoyed it anyway. I can’t be the only one who has thoughts like this about interviews. Why do we always assume that everyone is judging us so much? All that being said; I do still feel that it is very difficult to dress correctly for such events. Especially as a woman.