A Female Dominated Profession or Not?

Last week’s IST 511 guest speakers were excellent. They were: Blane Dessy, former Director of the United States Department of Justice Library and currently the new Director of the Federal Library and Information Network at the Library of Congress, and Stephen Weiter, former law librarian and new Library Director for SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Both librarians who spoke to us were very interesting speakers and gave us a lot of advice about our future profession. Both librarians hold very prestigious positions and have worked very hard and long to get to those current positions. Both librarians also happen to be men.

Before you start to groan, let me say that I am not pointing out the gender of the presenters to complain, nor am I trying to be antagonistic in any way.  I simply found it noteworthy and it reminded me of the complexities of the gender divide in the library profession. One of my professors, a PhD student, mentioned in class once that although librarianship is widely viewed as a female dominated profession, that is not actually true. To say that librarianship is a female dominated profession would imply that there are more females than males in leadership and director positions. While it is a fact that there are more female librarians and library students (a glance around any of my classrooms will attest to that) male librarians tend to dominate in library leadership positions. Some* have argued that this is not actually true, but something in me tends to believe that it still might be.

I know that our last two guest speakers were women, and I think that it is good for us to have both male and female guest speakers in our introductory course. The representation of both genders in the profession brings more diversity to our class lectures, and I think that everyone has benefitted from hearing all the speakers thus far. I also know that Syracuse University’s Dean of Libraries is a woman, and that there are countless other women in leadership positions in libraries. I would just kind of like to see those statistics for myself. If you have any more information for me on this topic, please let me know. It would ease my mind a bit to get some more concrete facts.

*Note: I have tried to do a little research on my own. In her article, A Female-Dominated Profession in the Male-Dominated Workforce of Higher Education, Turner states that “William Fisher’s The Question of Gender in Library Management…addressed a misconception about males in leadership roles in library management” (5). I have tried to gain access to Fisher’s article for myself, even though it is a bit outdated, but the SU Library will only get it for me via interlibrary loan. I might just have to wait to find out more…