Well-being at work among forest sector female officers, a qualitative research (MetsäNaiset)

Mainly women work in the forestry sector as officers. In a survey carried out by the Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke) in 2020, women's (n=53) well-being at work was lowest compared to other respondents working in the wood supply chain (n=1222) when assessing workload, strain, recovery and interaction.

The research questions of the project are:

1) What everyday factors of work undermine the well-being at work of women working in the forest sector?

2) What measures can be taken to improve women's well-being at work?

The project will be implemented as a joint project between the Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke) and the University of Helsinki (HY) on 1 May 2025-31 December 2026. The partners are Marja Kallioniemi (Luke) and Hanna-Riitta Kymäläinen (HY). The project is funded by the Metsämiesten Foundation and the Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke).

The project will interview a total of ten (10) forestry officer women during the summer and autumn of 2025. We hope that the research participant wants to discuss everyday life and work. We are looking for interviewees who are interested in furthering the goals of the project. We are looking for a group that would represent different educational backgrounds, different age groups and whose participants would work for different employers (public, association, company). We also hope that the subjects would have different lengths of work experience and different family situations (including family mothers with children, possibly also those doing care tasks for relatives).

The project is carried out in accordance with the ethical guidelines of the Advisory Board on Research Integrity (TENK), which the Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke) and the University of Helsinki follow. The collected project material is reported anonymously so that the interviewee cannot be identified later.

The project is partly based on Luke's earlier project "Working well-being in the wood supply chain" (TimberWB) and the article in Finnish "Kirjallisuuskatsaus työhyvinvoinnin keskeisistä teemoista puuhuoltoketjussa: psyykkinen kuormittuminen, työtuntien määrä ja naisten tilanne”, published in Metsätieteen aikakauskirja in 2024.