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[This year's December Days are categorized! Specifically: "Things I should have learned in library school, had (I/they) been paying attention. But I can make that out of just about anything you'd like to know about library school or the library profession, so if you have suggestions, I'll happily take them.]
Here's the thing: If you were to take a survey of a cohort of librarians, you would find that a little over 8 of ten of the librarians look female-bodied. (The actual percentages, of course, are different, because there are plenty of people whose gender identity doesn't fall into the binary, but a lot of surveys have yet to routinely set up gender identity as a text field (if you are doing a survey, gender is a free text field, and anyone who says otherwise should be corrected until they get it right.) The presence of such a heavy skew has much to do with the idea that the librarian is currently seen as a nuturing, serving profession, and is therefore female-coded. (And, as such, pays less and requires more education than a comparable position that is male-coded.)
This was not always the case. One of the books I read this year, The Librarian Stereotype, indicated that the profession of librarian used to be associated with a particular type of man - one who had failed at professions that required more masculinity than he could muster. The fussy, effeminate man was thus perfectly placed in something suited more to his temperament, and would just have to deal with the associated loss of face and respect from other men. After a while, though, with the entry of women into the workforce in serious numbers, fussy men gave way to women, who could be, surprise, paid less than the men for doing the same work. And with the shifting of the library and librarian to be seen more of a teaching and customer service profession, instead of as a curator of the collection for srs bzns, the association has gotten only stronger.
I'm also going to add on to that the idea that most people remember their youth services and school librarian most clearly, either as the person who they interacted with most, who did story time for them, or the person that is doing story time for their smallings. Most of those librarians are women, and the things that people are remembering the most about those librarians are female-coded sorts of things. It's also not helping that in much the same way that the cohort of male-bodied teachers that joined up in the recruitment drives of the last few decades were swiftly shunted into technology, social sciences, maths, sciences, and physical education - the subjects that are "facts" and very male-coded - and placed in the upper grades, where there's more lecturing and less having to teach behavior as well as subjects, male-bodied librarians are being moved into technology, adult and research services, and management, and therefore away from the nuturing roles often associated with youth services librarians.
So I've worked with my current organization for slightly more than ten years. Admittedly, in many ways, I conform to some of the stereotypes with male-bodied people - I brought gaming systems to my library, I generally do the technology and science-focused classes at my location for children, I enjoy the graphic novel collection, and up until recently, when I stopped being the one available during early release days, I was the person who did most of the teenager-focused programming and collection management at my location. (I still do the collection part, as well as the non-fiction weeding.) There's more than a few stereotypes that I'm playing up to the hilt. Then there's storytime. And school visits to children for reading and getting library cards and summer stuff. Which is strange because, well, for about eight of those ten years, cumulatively, there was exactly one person in my organization cohort that looked like I did.
When I started, someone else who looked like me was one of the two teen librarians (we have only two named teen librarians for our 19-branch systems, and they only work half of their time for matters for the system - half the time they're the teen librarians for their branches. Youth Services Librarians are expected to be support minions and do other teen-related things in their own branches.) but then went up into system management. For a short while, there was a person who did youth services work for one of the smaller branches that looked like me, but then left to pursue a reasonably-successful career in piano playing and raising children. And then there was a very long time where nobody in my oganizational cohort looked like me until this year, when someone who looked more like me (but of a different skin color, which is even better, because librarianship is a very, very white people profession due to the high educational requirements to get the job as a librarian proper) joined up as a youth services librarian. And we got another person who is handling theyouth services work at one of the smaller branches, too, so there are now, for the first time in ten years, two people who look like me in my cohort meetings! YAY!
There are also eighteen other people in my cohort who don't.
Now, if you look outside my system to the city system right next door, there's also another person who looks like me (but again, of a different color, yay) who has been in that position for many years. But is also the only person who looks like them for their cohort as well.
Library school didn't prepare me for this. Society sure as fuck didn't prepare me for the idea that I might be the token in a cohort, instead of the comfortable majority person. And while the library system as a whole is reasonably good about not tokenizing me and others who look like me, there are still some thing that I do get asked to do that are mostly related to how I look and sound. Like checking a restroom for something, or being present when someone feels intimidated to remove that factor. Or being present to talk with people about things that they assume and expect a male-looking person to be an expert in.
My story times have been referred to as "Dad story times" (as a compliment) because of their focus on gross motor movement, dance breaks, and stories that have lots of shoutable loud parts and funny voices and the like. I doubt, somehow, that all the others are "Mom story times" of course - they're just story times, the unremarked-upon default. They're pajana-clad and fairly relaxed about the idea of story time as a formal education environment, even though there's a lot of learning that takes place all the same, which is often noted as a special element that's interesting and worthy of note. I don't think I'm doing things wrong, because my kids and their accompanying grownups have a blast while they're there, but when I go to observe other story times, I don't see others doing things the same way that I do. It's a little hard not to feel weird when everyone else is doing things differently. Maybe that will change now that there are more people potentially doing "Dad storytimes."
But there's an extra complication now that falls under this topic, and it seems to be a thing that's come to a more prominent realization in the time since I've started. When I started in at the library, Lawrence v. Texas wasn't that far in the books, and the experiences that were in focus were the lesbian and gay parts of the acronym, in trying to have collection that highlighted those experiences and to make sure that the library wasn't uninentionally promoting homophobia or allowing materials to be censored based on their gay and lesbian content. Through observation and overhearing and putting things together, along with being trusted to be told about it, it turns out that at least a few people in the cohort fall into those parts of the acronym. (Neat.) To our credit as an organization, we seem to be doing quite well about making sure that partnerships of all sorts are covered under the insurances and other benefits that are offered by the organization. (If I recall correctly, the most recent executive director of the library had a partner where those arrangements would be needed to make sure both partners were covered.)
In the ten years since, however, the acronym has expanded itself and is much more inclusive of the rest of QUILTBAG (although there's still some bi erasure and not a lot of literature that we can get that have bi characters, outside of the graphic novel collections - hell, it took until this year before Harley Quinn was canonically bi), with no small amount of focus on the T part, but also some ace characters, and plenty to go around for queerness. (And quite a bit of autism spectrum stuff, too.) Unlike with lesbian and gay people, though, the adoption rates of making sure it's safe to be yourself in the organization have been less swift and thorough than they could be. We've also added in the widespread importance of the use of proper pronouns when addressing a person and their staff. Some of the staff have been brave enough to put their preferred pronouns on their name badges, but it's not always the case that those pronouns are used correctly or the correct gender identity is used to describe them. At least one person has left the organization because their supervisor continued to deadname and misgender them unapolgetically after being repeatedly corrected as to the proper pronouns and name to use. Another person in the organization expressed almost a giddy glee to me when I used their correct pronouns in the sentence right after a coworker used the wrong ones. They shouldn't have to feel happiness from someone using their pronouns correctly without prompting. It should just be.
(Someone, not me, promulgated the handout I brought back from a preconference session at the state library conference on trans inclusiveness that talked about using gender-neutral language, avoiding the use of gendered titles, and being comfortable to ask about a person's pronouns. Nobody knows who it was that did it, but I'm happy they did it.)
I am very happy, though, that our organization doesn't use gender fields for our users (as our ILS has the gender binary and N/A as options) and our policy on names is that we use the name the person tells us is their name for their account, so nobody is stuck with a wallet name or a deadname as their official account name, with the possibility of a preferred name being present in some other field that has to be explicitly looked at. I was completely thrilled when someone came up to me and asked to change their name from a masculine-sounding one to a feminine-sounding one, and all I had to do was change the name, without asking embarassing or intrusive questions.
We could do more, though. Like having explicit space on our name badges for pronouns, to normalize the practice. We could do more to help people who don't look like white women get through librarianship schooling, and even more so to see whether or not someone needs all the education to be a librarian, or whether experience could be used as a proper substitute, since many of our non-professional staff do a large amount of the work of the librarian, and would just need some additional coursework or experience on philosophy and possibly collection management for libraries. We can try to make our librarians look and speak the language of our communities - my location used to be able to speak nine languages passably enough to do interactions. We're down to about six with some staff shifts and the like, but "multlingual" should be a requisite rather than a preference for library staff. Which might have barred me from getting a job, as my second language isn't one of the popular ones for the United States and was essentially fourth-semester proficieincy. That said, I have been able to use it for interactions with some of the members of our communities. It's not their primary language, but it's enough that we can get our interactions across. We need to have more programs that partner with and use the members of our community that don't look like us. We need to be out in our communities more, takng resources to the places where the people are, insead of expecting them to come to us and interact with people who look like us on staff.
I knew, going in, that I was going to come out, want to be a youth services librarian, and would probably stick out some in a profession that was mostly different than me. But library school did not do a good job of training me about the possibility that I might be the only person who looked like me at the library, and how to not only make sure that my organization isn't treating me like a token, but how to make sure that my organization isn't treating others like tokens, either. We're behind a curve that we should be on the leading edge of, and schooling should have done a better job teaching us about intersectionality, institutional discrimination, and other social ills that the library has been and still might be complicit in, depending on the location and the people in charge.
Here's the thing: If you were to take a survey of a cohort of librarians, you would find that a little over 8 of ten of the librarians look female-bodied. (The actual percentages, of course, are different, because there are plenty of people whose gender identity doesn't fall into the binary, but a lot of surveys have yet to routinely set up gender identity as a text field (if you are doing a survey, gender is a free text field, and anyone who says otherwise should be corrected until they get it right.) The presence of such a heavy skew has much to do with the idea that the librarian is currently seen as a nuturing, serving profession, and is therefore female-coded. (And, as such, pays less and requires more education than a comparable position that is male-coded.)
This was not always the case. One of the books I read this year, The Librarian Stereotype, indicated that the profession of librarian used to be associated with a particular type of man - one who had failed at professions that required more masculinity than he could muster. The fussy, effeminate man was thus perfectly placed in something suited more to his temperament, and would just have to deal with the associated loss of face and respect from other men. After a while, though, with the entry of women into the workforce in serious numbers, fussy men gave way to women, who could be, surprise, paid less than the men for doing the same work. And with the shifting of the library and librarian to be seen more of a teaching and customer service profession, instead of as a curator of the collection for srs bzns, the association has gotten only stronger.
I'm also going to add on to that the idea that most people remember their youth services and school librarian most clearly, either as the person who they interacted with most, who did story time for them, or the person that is doing story time for their smallings. Most of those librarians are women, and the things that people are remembering the most about those librarians are female-coded sorts of things. It's also not helping that in much the same way that the cohort of male-bodied teachers that joined up in the recruitment drives of the last few decades were swiftly shunted into technology, social sciences, maths, sciences, and physical education - the subjects that are "facts" and very male-coded - and placed in the upper grades, where there's more lecturing and less having to teach behavior as well as subjects, male-bodied librarians are being moved into technology, adult and research services, and management, and therefore away from the nuturing roles often associated with youth services librarians.
So I've worked with my current organization for slightly more than ten years. Admittedly, in many ways, I conform to some of the stereotypes with male-bodied people - I brought gaming systems to my library, I generally do the technology and science-focused classes at my location for children, I enjoy the graphic novel collection, and up until recently, when I stopped being the one available during early release days, I was the person who did most of the teenager-focused programming and collection management at my location. (I still do the collection part, as well as the non-fiction weeding.) There's more than a few stereotypes that I'm playing up to the hilt. Then there's storytime. And school visits to children for reading and getting library cards and summer stuff. Which is strange because, well, for about eight of those ten years, cumulatively, there was exactly one person in my organization cohort that looked like I did.
When I started, someone else who looked like me was one of the two teen librarians (we have only two named teen librarians for our 19-branch systems, and they only work half of their time for matters for the system - half the time they're the teen librarians for their branches. Youth Services Librarians are expected to be support minions and do other teen-related things in their own branches.) but then went up into system management. For a short while, there was a person who did youth services work for one of the smaller branches that looked like me, but then left to pursue a reasonably-successful career in piano playing and raising children. And then there was a very long time where nobody in my oganizational cohort looked like me until this year, when someone who looked more like me (but of a different skin color, which is even better, because librarianship is a very, very white people profession due to the high educational requirements to get the job as a librarian proper) joined up as a youth services librarian. And we got another person who is handling theyouth services work at one of the smaller branches, too, so there are now, for the first time in ten years, two people who look like me in my cohort meetings! YAY!
There are also eighteen other people in my cohort who don't.
Now, if you look outside my system to the city system right next door, there's also another person who looks like me (but again, of a different color, yay) who has been in that position for many years. But is also the only person who looks like them for their cohort as well.
Library school didn't prepare me for this. Society sure as fuck didn't prepare me for the idea that I might be the token in a cohort, instead of the comfortable majority person. And while the library system as a whole is reasonably good about not tokenizing me and others who look like me, there are still some thing that I do get asked to do that are mostly related to how I look and sound. Like checking a restroom for something, or being present when someone feels intimidated to remove that factor. Or being present to talk with people about things that they assume and expect a male-looking person to be an expert in.
My story times have been referred to as "Dad story times" (as a compliment) because of their focus on gross motor movement, dance breaks, and stories that have lots of shoutable loud parts and funny voices and the like. I doubt, somehow, that all the others are "Mom story times" of course - they're just story times, the unremarked-upon default. They're pajana-clad and fairly relaxed about the idea of story time as a formal education environment, even though there's a lot of learning that takes place all the same, which is often noted as a special element that's interesting and worthy of note. I don't think I'm doing things wrong, because my kids and their accompanying grownups have a blast while they're there, but when I go to observe other story times, I don't see others doing things the same way that I do. It's a little hard not to feel weird when everyone else is doing things differently. Maybe that will change now that there are more people potentially doing "Dad storytimes."
But there's an extra complication now that falls under this topic, and it seems to be a thing that's come to a more prominent realization in the time since I've started. When I started in at the library, Lawrence v. Texas wasn't that far in the books, and the experiences that were in focus were the lesbian and gay parts of the acronym, in trying to have collection that highlighted those experiences and to make sure that the library wasn't uninentionally promoting homophobia or allowing materials to be censored based on their gay and lesbian content. Through observation and overhearing and putting things together, along with being trusted to be told about it, it turns out that at least a few people in the cohort fall into those parts of the acronym. (Neat.) To our credit as an organization, we seem to be doing quite well about making sure that partnerships of all sorts are covered under the insurances and other benefits that are offered by the organization. (If I recall correctly, the most recent executive director of the library had a partner where those arrangements would be needed to make sure both partners were covered.)
In the ten years since, however, the acronym has expanded itself and is much more inclusive of the rest of QUILTBAG (although there's still some bi erasure and not a lot of literature that we can get that have bi characters, outside of the graphic novel collections - hell, it took until this year before Harley Quinn was canonically bi), with no small amount of focus on the T part, but also some ace characters, and plenty to go around for queerness. (And quite a bit of autism spectrum stuff, too.) Unlike with lesbian and gay people, though, the adoption rates of making sure it's safe to be yourself in the organization have been less swift and thorough than they could be. We've also added in the widespread importance of the use of proper pronouns when addressing a person and their staff. Some of the staff have been brave enough to put their preferred pronouns on their name badges, but it's not always the case that those pronouns are used correctly or the correct gender identity is used to describe them. At least one person has left the organization because their supervisor continued to deadname and misgender them unapolgetically after being repeatedly corrected as to the proper pronouns and name to use. Another person in the organization expressed almost a giddy glee to me when I used their correct pronouns in the sentence right after a coworker used the wrong ones. They shouldn't have to feel happiness from someone using their pronouns correctly without prompting. It should just be.
(Someone, not me, promulgated the handout I brought back from a preconference session at the state library conference on trans inclusiveness that talked about using gender-neutral language, avoiding the use of gendered titles, and being comfortable to ask about a person's pronouns. Nobody knows who it was that did it, but I'm happy they did it.)
I am very happy, though, that our organization doesn't use gender fields for our users (as our ILS has the gender binary and N/A as options) and our policy on names is that we use the name the person tells us is their name for their account, so nobody is stuck with a wallet name or a deadname as their official account name, with the possibility of a preferred name being present in some other field that has to be explicitly looked at. I was completely thrilled when someone came up to me and asked to change their name from a masculine-sounding one to a feminine-sounding one, and all I had to do was change the name, without asking embarassing or intrusive questions.
We could do more, though. Like having explicit space on our name badges for pronouns, to normalize the practice. We could do more to help people who don't look like white women get through librarianship schooling, and even more so to see whether or not someone needs all the education to be a librarian, or whether experience could be used as a proper substitute, since many of our non-professional staff do a large amount of the work of the librarian, and would just need some additional coursework or experience on philosophy and possibly collection management for libraries. We can try to make our librarians look and speak the language of our communities - my location used to be able to speak nine languages passably enough to do interactions. We're down to about six with some staff shifts and the like, but "multlingual" should be a requisite rather than a preference for library staff. Which might have barred me from getting a job, as my second language isn't one of the popular ones for the United States and was essentially fourth-semester proficieincy. That said, I have been able to use it for interactions with some of the members of our communities. It's not their primary language, but it's enough that we can get our interactions across. We need to have more programs that partner with and use the members of our community that don't look like us. We need to be out in our communities more, takng resources to the places where the people are, insead of expecting them to come to us and interact with people who look like us on staff.
I knew, going in, that I was going to come out, want to be a youth services librarian, and would probably stick out some in a profession that was mostly different than me. But library school did not do a good job of training me about the possibility that I might be the only person who looked like me at the library, and how to not only make sure that my organization isn't treating me like a token, but how to make sure that my organization isn't treating others like tokens, either. We're behind a curve that we should be on the leading edge of, and schooling should have done a better job teaching us about intersectionality, institutional discrimination, and other social ills that the library has been and still might be complicit in, depending on the location and the people in charge.
