When Pipiet Larasatie describes forestry as her destiny, she means it pretty literally. She means she's from Indonesia, home to one of the world's largest tropical forests. She means that, when she became the first person in her extended family to attend college, her parents urged her to major in forestry because that was how the wealthiest family in their neighborhood made its money. She means her subsequent work in the Indonesian forestry sector qualified her for scholarships to pursue her master's in forest products marketing in New Zealand, and now her doctorate in wood science at OSU's College of Forestry.

Forestry, Larasatie said, "is always finding its way to call me," and it's a call she answers in innovative ways. While many of her colleagues in the Department of Wood Science and Engineering study wood physics, anatomy or chemistry, Larasatie studies the industry's "human dimension." Some of her recent work includes researching public perceptions of tall wood buildings and securing a grant of nearly $130,000 to study business development in the cross-laminated timber industry. Her doctoral dissertation, which she will complete in 2020, is on a topic as important as it is potentially divisive: gender diversity in the forestry sector and higher education.

Forestry has a long history of being male dominated, with movement toward gender parity more a matter of feet and inches than leaps and bounds. In the wood science department at OSU, male faculty members heavily outnumber females, and among graduate students, males outnumber female and non-binary students two to one.

Larasatie, who was at first hesitant to speak about her gender diversity research, has nothing but wonderful things to say about the support she received from her adviser, Eric Hansen, and her department when she opened up about what she was learning. It wasn't until she traveled to a wood science symposium away from campus that she got the response she'd been dreading.

She was socializing at an after-dinner event when "a big name" in the field approached her. There, in a room where most of the attendees were male, he began asking her skeptical, dismissive questions about the gender diversity research she'd presented earlier that day. That was when she decided on her dissertation topic. This very interaction was the embodiment of why it was important to study gender diversity in the field.

Larasatie's work is especially important in a field suffering from a decline in the number of students who seek degrees and careers in forestry.

"We don't have a lot of people who want to come to forestry and work in forestry," Larasatie said. Increasing gender diversity would be one important step toward modernizing forestry's image and attracting talented new employees who, Larasatie is discovering, are driven as much by a company's "cool" reputation as a paycheck.

Her research also indicates that women-specific networks and mentorship can be key to females succeeding in this male-dominated field -- and she believes in practicing what she preaches. She's the creator of the #womeninwoodscience, an online space where women in the industry can build virtual community. She also currently mentors two female forestry students at OSU: Ping Liu, a master's student who works in Larasatie's lab, and Taylor Barnett, an undergrad funded by OSU's Mentorship Employed Program.

"I don't know a lot of undergrads who are doing the same things as me," said Barnett, who has appeared with Larasatie on a radio and TV show, been a second author of an academic article, and will help present research at a conference in Brazil. Thanks to Larasatie, Barnett has had the opportunity to meet other forestry female leaders and is excited about going on to do graduate work in forestry.

The forestry industry as a whole may still have work to do before it will be considered "cool" by a broad cross-section of potential scholars and employees. Pipiet Larasatie, on the other hand?

"She's really awesome," Barnett said.

Story by Gretchen Schrafft, photo by Hannah O'Leary. Story originally published in the Fall 2019 Oregon Stater, a publication of the OSU Alumni Association.