On Being the Library Web Chic
Jul 1st, 2006 by Karen
So I’m hoping you’ve seen Karen, Jane, or Dorothea’s posts (prompted in part by LITA’s Top Tech Trends lack of women) about techie women in the library profession. I want to raise my voice in support for exactly what they are saying. Dorothea nails it on the head when she say:
So there isn’t just a glass ceiling in librarianship (and there is a well-documented glass ceiling; this profession is majority female, but its administrators are majority male). There’s a glass wall, between women and systems librarianship. Subtle and not-so-subtle peer pressure telling us that them geeks, they’re Not Us.
For the most part my male techy colleagues in LibraryLand treat me well. At the moment, I’m lucky enough to work with (gasp) another women in system. However, having been to code4lib in February I can say it was one of the most educational, strangest and saddest experience of my life. The conference content was phenomenal, it is the conference that I’ve attended that I learned the most at. However, Dorothea was not joking when she said there were less than a dozen women in attendance and there was only one woman who gave a formal talk. Add to that a subtle clickishness going on with the #code4lib guys and the fact that I found myself doing a double-take at dinners when I noticed I was the only female at the table. When I got back to my hotel room and could decompress, I felt uncomfortable to the point of thinking that maybe I’d made a mistake in attending.
In the 5 1/2 years I’ve been a librarian (always involved in technology) its has always been this way. At my previous job, nearly all of the campus IT folks I dealt with were male. Nearly all the people involved in technology and libraries in SUNY were male. It drove me nuts. There were two tiny bright spots. One was that the Library Director’s boss, the head of Information Resources was a woman, a former librarian. The second was Natalie Sturr at SUNY Oswego who showed me that there were “supertechy” women and they’ve been around for awhile unrecognized.
Then the day came when I wanted to start a blog and was trying to come up with a name. I wanted to start my blog to talk about what I was doing and let other women know that “Yes, there are women working on technology things in libraries! Yes, there are women librarian coders!” So I thought back to when I started working at Cortland and people were learning my name. The guys in IT had a terrible time remembering my name (I’m awful at names so I don’t hold this against them.). I remember being at a function and meeting someone new from IT who all of a sudden realized who I was and said to me “Oh you’re the girl in the library who does the website.” The experience stuck with me and when went to name my blog I decided that I was proud to be “the girl in the library who does the website”. Hence, my blog name.
Still, I can name off the top of my head all the women I know in the spotlight for involved in technology and libraries. The ones I know who are “super-techy” or coders I can count on one hand. It frustrates me greatly that I feel like there isn’t a woman in systems librarianship who I can idolize and look up to. I don’t want that to be the case for future women in librarianship. So I work to help other women interested in technology in libraries to learn more. I provide support for the other techy women I know. I go to conferences and talk about what I’m doing. I try to promote and push myself and the other techy women (I hate doing this it makes me feel icky but NOBODY is going to do it otherwise). I wholeheartedly agree that we need to get together and act collectively on this issue.
Great post. I agree on self-promotion feeling icky… which is a message we’ve absorbed.
I could kiss you. I spent much of Friday coping with pushback on my post. Thanks.
Thanks for posting on this. I wasn’t able to go to the conference, but am interested in it (and hope it continues). I’m particularly interesting in hearing how people think it could be better. You mentioned the possibility of more women speakers and (getting rid of) a clickishness (which was uncomfortable).
Do you have suggestions about how to attract more women? I’m not sure, but I think last year a call for topics was put out on the code4lib mailing list. Are there other places the call should be made or should it be made in a different way or … ? Since I wasn’t going I didn’t pay too much attention to the submissions but I liked the voting process.
The conference seems to me to be a great opportunity for having a participant driven conference. I guess the question is how do we reach all the possible participants?
[...] Here’s to hoping that code4libcon 2007 is a watershed moment for women library technologists. [...]
I wish you were in Australia about a month ago. Both myself (manager) and my information officer are real geeks, and took a great deal of joy in the fact. Even though our jobs and our IT both limited our scope, and neither of us does actual coding, we loved playing about with whatever IT we could use to make our clients’ lives easier. We’ve pioneered reading blogs and rss for our clients, and are also the resource people for wikis as well. AND the manager of our Department’s website (90,000 pages - it’s big!) is also a woman. I tend to just “collect” people like this, and we all help each other. I guess it’s also different here, in that Australia is just that much smaller than the US.
Women and technology and libraries and blogs…
K.G. Schneider asks 2.0: Where are the women? and Dorothea Salo and Karen Coombs chimed in. As your average white guy, I don’t have a good answer, and some of the answers that I have come up with sound like……
You got pushback on this post?! Oy vey. Well, I got pushback on the comment I made on the LITA blog, which might have been my motivation. If the guy had said, “oh, right–not enough women,” I might have been placated. Telling me that the panel was limited to people who had published on the topic (come on!) sent me skyward.
Kevin, see Dorothea’s post about how to made conferences more accessible to women.
[...] More links on this topic from other bloggers: On being the Library Web Chic (Library Web Chic) Technorati Tags: working women, system administrator, network administrator, techies, public libraries, family life Link to this article · Post to del.icio.us [...]
[...] As you can see, I have very mixed feelings on this whole gender issue thing and I don’t quite know what to think. I’ve been hesitant to write anything about gender issues, because I don’t really feel like I fully understand it all myself and I certainly don’t know how to make things better. But I thought maybe a confused post might just be the best kind, because it raises questions. Sexism isn’t what it was in the 50’s. It’s not so overt and it doesn’t limit our opportunities as much as it did before. But it does still exist in many subtle forms that are much more difficult to identify and eradicate. But is it really the reason that there are fewer women participating in tech conferences? I don’t know. Has it kept me from succeeding in this field and getting speaking gigs? Definitely not. I’ve gotten much more recognition in the past year than I rightly deserve. And I only really know from my own experiences. But, like I said before, maybe it’s because I’m more on the idea side of tech than on the coding side. Maybe there still is an old boys network in the world of digital librarianship. Dorothea and Karen would certainly know better than I. But how do we fix it? I think it takes a lot more than putting more women in speaker roles at the Code4Lib and Access conferences, though that is a start. How do we change attitudes? How do we change the subtle messages girls get in schools that leads them away from tech and self-promotion in the first place? It’s not something I have any answers to. [...]
Aw, cheer up, you can look up to and idolize me anytime :)
My experience in academic library systems was very different from yours; I’d say there were more women coders there than men. On the other hand, yes, the top management was male. (I think that has changed over time, though.)
Perhaps because I’ve mainly worked in the SF Bay Area where geeks of all genders abound, the split is less noticeable, at least on the software side. I have noticed that on the hardware side, especially in data and phone communications network management, the staff is more likely to be male.
[...] De afgelopen week heb ik op verschillende Amerikaanse blogs (Free Range Librarian, Dorothea Salo, Karen Coombs) gelezen dat de vrouwen, als het om techniek gaat, in de minderheid zijn. Deze schrijfsters vragen zich terecht af waar zijn de vrouwen?, als het gaat om het spreken op seminars en dergelijke. Ikzelf uit mij regelmatig tegen een mannelijke collega als ik weer eens de enige vrouw ben tijdens een vergadering. En ook ik vraag me dan af waar de overige vrouwen zijn. Zeker in het bibliotheekvak. Op de BDI zat ik in de klas met 3 jongens! (klas van meer dan 30). Veel van deze mannen halen het tot in het management en de vrouwen, die blijven “hangen” achter een informatiepunt of in een Backoffice. Misschien zie ik het te zwart-wit maar van zo’n onderzoek gaan mijn nekharen recht overeind staan. Als die vrouwen nu eens wat meer zelfvertrouwen kregen, zich wat meer gingen verdiepen in de techniek van de computer in plaats van er zomaar een te kopen. Ik weet bijna zeker dat de uitkomsten van zo’n onderzoek heel anders zouden zijn. Ik hoop daarom ook dat als het onderzoek volgend jaar weer gedaan wordt…. dan niet de conclusie zal zijn dat vrouwen geen innovatoren zijn. [...]