Sustainable forest management requires broad participation and deliberation. Yet Sweden’s government, for which gender equality is a matter of sustainability and democracy, struggles to make significant headway in its forest sector, as the forest remains one of the country’s most highly gender-segregated sectors. We focus on the beliefs held by policy about what a sustainable forest sector is and what gender equality progress could be. We investigate the commonly held assumptions about women, and wonder if these could be restricting what women can accomplish in the forest sector. We show that increasing the number of women within a forest sector which continues to maintain rigid conceptions about forestry production values can only hinder sustainable transformation and halt the inclusion of other social groups and ideas in the changing rural landscapes of Sweden.