“The Only Female in the Room:” A Conversation with Dijit Taylor 

In science, simple narratives are hard to come by. Dijit Taylor, AMC’s first female director of research, has a good one. 

When her team relocated parts of the Crawford Path to preserve Robbins’ cinquefoil (Potentilla Robbinsiana), a plant only found above treeline in the White Mountains, it was on the endangered species list. Today, it’s not. 

It’s the kind of success story conservationists dream of. But off-mountain, working at AMC wasn’t as straightforward. Taylor came to the organization in the late 1970s, a time when few women were hired for positions of leadership  

“It wasn’t unusual for me to sit in on a meeting where I would be the only female in the room… I took on the persona of a person who questioned a lot of traditions just because I felt like I needed to have something that I could count on myself to offer,” Taylor recounted. 

She faced sexism and workplace discrimination throughout her time with AMC. The job she originally wanted, Hut Croo in the White Mountain backcountry, was off-limits to women. Shortly after the birth of her second daughter, AMC called Taylor back to full-time work, and Taylor left the director role.  

After AMC, Taylor had an extensive career with land conservation organizations across New Hampshire, retiring as executive director of the New Hampshire Land and Community Heritage Investment Program in 2021. More women followed in her footsteps at AMC, breaking down the barriers she pushed up against. Both her daughters worked in the huts, and the youngest, Bethany Taylor, now leads them as huts manager. 

We sat down over Zoom with Dijit to discuss her time at AMC, the good parts and the bad, being a working mother, and what it meant to see her daughters on Croo a generation after she was excluded.  

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

 

Matt Morris: 

So just to get started, it’d be great if you could talk about how you first started working for AMC and what your background in science was before that. 

Dijit Taylor: 

OK, [I have] an undergraduate degree in geology from Middlebury and an almost completed master’s degree in resource conservation from Cornell. We moved to Berlin [New Hampshire] in the summer of 1977, and I got a short-term job writing science curriculum for the Berlin school system through some kind of federal grant that helped support, theoretically, the many unemployed, needy people at the time.  

And AMC also had money for a modest number of new employees, with some kind of federal support for a downturn in the economy. I interviewed both for a position in the education department and the research department. I thought, ‘Huh, I’ve done education before, because I’ve been a classroom teacher before I went to graduate school. Why don’t I try research?’  

So, I accepted the job in the research department and started in. And it was great fun. 

Matt Morris: 

What were your proudest accomplishments working in the research department? 

Dijit Taylor: 

Oh, that one’s easy. We relocated the Crawford Path in Monroe Flats so that we could save the Potentilla robbinsiana. It was on the endangered species list at the time we did all that. And it has now been removed from the endangered species list. 

You don’t have many success stories like that in your life. It took place over a long time. I didn’t start that project, and I wasn’t there when the plant was removed from the endangered species list. But I was party to getting that trail section moved, and I had summer employees who talked to the guests at Lakes of the Clouds and on the trail about the importance of moving the trail. And I’ve never seen the blessed plants in bloom in situ either. 

Matt Morris: 

That’s a big accomplishment though, whether you’ve seen it or not. That’s very big. 

Dijit Taylor: 

It is a very big accomplishment, yeah. Looking back over my career, that’s one of the pieces that I’m particularly proud of. 

Matt Morris: 

What was it like being a woman in leadership at AMC at that point? How did that affect getting big projects like that done? 

Dijit Taylor: 

The research program was up and running when I stepped into it and hiring processes at AMC, at least for those kinds of positions, were very casual at the time. I basically became Research Director because the director that was there when I was looking took another job. And there was no procedure for searching for a highly qualified applicant that I was aware of. They just said, ‘Do you want to do it?’ And I said, ‘Sure.’ So that was informal.  

There were not a lot of women in leadership positions at the time. It didn’t particularly feel like a leadership position at the time. It just felt like doing my job.  

Matt Morris: 

It sounds like, correct me if I’m wrong, [the research department] was relatively new and unestablished at that point. 

Dijit Taylor: 

The program was established by my predecessor in the position. I actually touched base with him to get a little more information about the background, and the research department was established because both Trail Crew and Hut Croos were observing dramatic erosion on trails.  

The then Executive Director of the organization felt like this was a problem that needed some attention and decided to create the research department to explore that. Their first task was to create management plans for the areas around the huts. And this, I think, was in conjunction with some of the National Forest planning. They usually were supposed to do five-year plans.  

It wasn’t unusual for me to sit in on a meeting where I would be the only female in the room. Which, I don’t know how often you have the opposite of that these days, but it’s a little weird. I took on the persona of a person who questioned a lot of traditions just because I felt like I needed to have something that I could count on myself to offer in these meetings where I was the only person.  

I was lucky because there were two other young female people working in programs most of the time that I was in the research department. So, we had each other for company. One of them went on to become the first female Huts Manager and the other one was in the education department. I know she didn’t get to be the head of the education department. So we weren’t necessarily quite on a level, we were just colleagues working together. 

Matt Morris: 

You mentioned feeling like you needed to put on a persona as the only woman in the room, could you talk a little more about that. 

Dijit Taylor: 

I’m essentially an introverted person. But sitting in those meetings, I knew that I needed to contribute something. One way that one could approach being in a meeting [is] to be the one that was always going to ask the ‘Why are we doing that’ question and challenging the old boys’ mentality, I guess. 

Matt Morris: 

Since your time in the research department, what have you seen a change as far as the representation of women at AMC? 

Dijit Taylor: 

I mean, the back story is I wanted to work in the huts, and women weren’t working in the huts at that time. I was told there’s like two jobs for women at Pinkham [Notch Visitor Center], and I didn’t have the chutzpah to try to get one of those two jobs. The women who have the real story are the ones who convinced the club to start hiring women to work in the huts.  

But, clearly, over time women have increased their participation in all of AMC’s activities, to the credit of the club and the benefit of the users of the hut system. Many women are better at guest services than many men just because of the way society trains us to be. 

Matt Morris: 

And now your daughter, Bethany, is the huts manager. What’s that meant to you? 

Dijit Taylor: 

I love it! So many parents have children doing things that they can’t understand. My husband’s parents never really understood what he did as a city planner. And I understand the jobs that both of my daughters have because I’ve either done them or been close to doing them. It helps to bridge the generation gap to have that professional context in common. 

Matt Morris: 

When they were moving into their positions, is there any advice you gave them from your experiences? 

Dijit Taylor: 

The first daughter that worked for the AMC was a college student and was just working at Pinkham because she was a such a serious athlete that she wasn’t sure that being in a hut would allow her to train sufficiently. And I had no advice for that because I was never that serious an athlete. I thought she was crazy not to take a hut job when she was at Pinkham. But she was on her own course, and that was fine. It was her engagement with that that allowed her to get a fall seasonal job in the huts. And it was the fact that she was known in the huts that probably allowed her sister, Bethany, to get her first job in the huts.  

There’s a story that when the then huts manager saw the youngest of the Taylor daughters—he had interviewed her by phone—looked at her and said, ‘Oh my gosh, I didn’t know you were so little. Can you actually do this?’ And yes, she could actually do it. 

But no. Having not done the huts jobs, I didn’t have any inside knowledge of how they worked and how they should be in them. I’ve largely been a parent who is supportive and encourages them to do their own thing in their own way. Teach them to be independent and let them freely go do it. 

Matt Morris: 

You mentioned that after AMC you worked more on the land conservation side of things. Can you elaborate on that? 

Dijit Taylor: 

Oh, absolutely. How I left AMC is kind of interesting.  

When I took over as director of the research department, I had just come back from a maternity leave with my first daughter, and I was working part time. I took another maternity leave when Bethany was born and came back. And shortly after I came back, I was told that I had to work full-time if I wanted to hold the position of director of that department. I could stay in the department if I wanted to as an assistant or something with a new director that they would hire. Or I could just flat out leave. As I was having childcare issues at the same time, leaving was my better option.  

I said that when I was working part-time and being a parent part-time, I had the best of both worlds. And then after a while, it was also the worst of both worlds. So it was a good time to leave.  

I had a very part time job in Berlin. But we left Berlin in 1990 and moved to the Concord area, and then the youngest child was in school. So I started looking for work. I worked for the New Hampshire Rivers Council and the Merrimack River Watershed Council doing river advocacy work. And then I picked up a job with the New Hampshire Wildlife Federation, where they had a very cool program that was collecting research on the impact of having land in conservation on town budgets. We had a slide show called the ‘Dollars and Cents of Saving Special Places’ that we trotted around to any town that would listen to it that showed that if you keep land in conservation, your taxes are not going to increase as dramatically as if you build it all up in houses.  

I went on from that to work at the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests in a program called the Center for Land Conservation Assistance that provided education and training for the 50 or so land trusts in the state. 

That position crashed in a downturn in the economy and was eliminated, and after that I worked briefly as a consultant and then went on to work as the executive director of the New Hampshire Land and Community Heritage Investment Program, which is a quasi-state entity that gives out matching grants for land conservation and historic preservation. That was my favorite job ever, and that’s the one I retired from. 

Matt Morris: 

That’s an extensive list of organizations. 

Dijit Taylor: 

It’s a lot of jumping around. When you are the primary caregiving parent, you don’t get the kind of career stability that some people of my generation were able to have. 

Matt Morris: 

Have you seen any societal changes that have made it easier for mothers that are in your position today, versus when you were a younger mother? 

Dijit Taylor: 

Well, there are daycare centers even in rural areas now, which we really didn’t have at the time. Basically, your only option was to find somebody that was staying home that could take care of your child while you were working.  

I was living in Berlin, New Hampshire, so my experience was not necessarily the same as it would have been if I’d been in a more developed area. But the childcare provider that I found was a classmate, a high school classmate of a sister of a friend of mine. And it worked out OK for a while. And then it didn’t work out OK. 

Matt Morris: 

Are there any stories you can think of where being a woman gave you different perspective on how to move a situation forward [in the workplace]? 

Dijit Taylor: 

I would like to have a great story about that. At the time I was working so hard just to be treated as an appropriate professional that I was not consciously trying to bring forward any of the female type skills that theoretically we’re better at. So, I don’t think I have a story like that from those AMC days.  

Just to be taken seriously, it was pretty hard work to be considered an appropriate kind of person to be in that position and be a scientist. 

Matt Morris: 

What would you potentially say to women in conservation today? 

Dijit Taylor: 

Go for it. Absolutely. You’ve got the law with you now. You’ve got society much more with you than it had been. And it’s a fantastic field as long as you don’t mind not making very much money. The world of conservation is not going to be particularly financially lucrative. But you meet the most wonderful people and get to go to the most wonderful places.