Comments on: Gender, Librarians, & Librarianship (A Somewhat Open Thread)

By: Guybrarians and Male Librarians | Pop Goes the Librarian

Guybrarians and Male Librarians | Pop Goes the Librarian — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 16:07:21 +0000

[...] BTW, for some real-world context and examples, Agnostic, Maybe has a very interesting thread from late last year dedicated to Gender, Librarians, & Librarianship. [...]

By: Andromeda

Andromeda — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 20:08:28 +0000

The feeling-like-they-have-to thing…man. I mean, it’s TRUE. It’s totally true and I see people wrestling with that all the time. And even among the highly educated, highly skilled, generally liberal people I know, women are much more likely than men to scale back their careers for a while in order to take care of children (which has impacts down the line in terms of salaries and job titles and so forth). And yet, and yet…

And yet #1: Women feel they have to make this choice much more than men do, even though men are just as likely to be parents. Why is it that a woman gets pregnant and everyone starts wondering if she’ll still be at her job in six months, and no one asks her husband if he will be? Why is it that when I’m out without my kid people who know I HAVE a kid often ask me where she is (aka who’s with her), yet people NEVER ask my husband that when he’s out without her?

And yet #2: My career is a million times better now that I have a kid. I’m ambitious and (mostly) focused and I have vision and creativity and a high profile and I had NONE OF THIS before I had her, and a lot of these things are directly traceable to the fact that I’m a mom now. We talk about the ways being a mom makes careers harder (which it totally does, enormously). But we assume it’s all conflict, all down side. It’s not.

By: Angela Pashia

Angela Pashia — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 15:54:10 +0000

Being at an academic library, I tend to think of this as an issue among all professors, not just in the library. There are plenty of studies out there that show significant differences in how students rate professors by gender. Before switching to LIS, I put in a couple of years toward a PhD in anthropology, and my funding one year was to teach a big intro-level lecture course. In that position, I had to pay attention to what I wore and even how I walked – male professors can shuffle in wearing worn-out jeans and a t-shirt and get respect, whereas a comparably dressed woman will be ignored and/or blatantly disrespected. As a woman, I had to put more effort into dressing the part and putting up a mental shield to help me fake more confidence than I felt!

By: Angela Pashia

Angela Pashia — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 15:43:32 +0000

While I don’t doubt that skill/confidence in negotiating salaries is part of the problem, I think there must be more factors at play. Looking at the aggregate averages, male noobrarians are making about $7500 a year more than their female counterparts. Had I done a better job of negotiating, maybe I could have gotten a grand or two higher, but I seriously doubt I could have gotten seven grand more per year.

By: T

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 02:52:12 +0000

I completely agree to this post and your previous one.

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 01:30:47 +0000

Karen — Or maybe there wasn’t bias in this case. They’ve shown themselves more than happy to hire women for my position (the two previous coordinators are women). While I got a job relatively quickly, I wasn’t the first in my class — which, again, is overwhelmingly female. I am among the lowest paid, as far as I can tell, among my classmates who got jobs. I’ve stated before that there are many managers in my system and that only four of us are men. The director and all the top folks in admin are women. Seriously, isn’t it at least a little dishonest to push until something is found that could be a problem? And, as a point in fact, “much, much longer” isn’t necessarily the case for those making more; they’re in positions that are valued more in our system, like children’s librarianship and systems librarianship (almost all women in our system). As far as pay goes, I’m given to understand that I’m simply the latest of many who has found the low pay a deterrent to staying in the field, including our webmaster (a woman) who is making several times what she did for us, while traveling the world, working from home and focusing on things she likes to do. I *have* worked in fields where gender is an issue. In my system, I’m not seeing that’s the case.

By: Maggie Killman (@maggiesuek)

Maggie Killman (@maggiesuek) — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 00:28:47 +0000

A little late to this conversation, but something I noticed from these posts is that the very fact of there being fewer males in the profession seems to make male candidates more desirable in efforts to level the playing field. This in turn puts the female candidates just entering the field at a disadvantage due to oversaturation.

I feel like an easier way to tackle this issue would be looking at it on a micro rather than macro level: what if efforts were made to draw candidates from the scarce gender into specific areas of the field? Encouraging more women to go into tech, more men to go into children’s/YA services, etc. Unfortunately I don’t have much empirical evidence to add to this discussion, just some thoughts I had as I was reading others’ observations.

Then again I’m not even sure this discussion is necessary given the fact that this female-dominated profession still fits into the general scope of a dominant American patriarchy (as evidenced by the people citing differences in pay, assuming men are managers, etc). At this point it seems the gender imbalance actually works to the advantage of men entering the field…but then again, maybe that’s further reason to even it out a little.

By: Phoebe

Phoebe — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 17:22:36 +0000

What made the three men most qualified?

By: Karen R. Harker, MLS, MPH

Karen R. Harker, MLS, MPH — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 03:28:03 +0000

Michael – the bias in your favor that you may have missed seeing may be getting hired so quickly in the first place. Salaries in librarianship are notoriously relatively low, even in hi-tech jobs. Those who make more than have probably been there much, much longer. So the fact that there are fewer men in the field may be because many men will not accept the relatively low pay.

However, I’ve known a number of hi-tech librarian men who purposefully left the corporate environment (and higher pay) seeking one with less stress and greater security. Of course, with the increase of corporate leaders in our public institutions, this ability to trade high salaries for less stress may be a thing of the past.

By: rudibrarian

rudibrarian — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 16:07:08 +0000

I was referring to negotiating starting salaries, as was the post I was responding to (new hires =starting salaries)