BEING AN ANOMALY: MALE LIBRARIANS
I know what it's like to be the only woman in male-dominated organizations -- uncomfortable! -- so I always wondered what it was like for men to work in female-dominated professions like librarianship. A while back, I asked my male readers about their experiences, and several of you responded. I also read a survey of male librarians in the March, 1994 American Libraries, and a book by Christine Williams, Still a Man's World: Men Who Do Women's Work. Between these, I think I've gotten some sense of the pleasures and awkwardnesses of this situation.
The biggest culture clash may lie in performance expectations. Several men said they felt they were more willing than women to make sacrifices for career advancement. What they demanded of themselves and those they supervised was achievement, excellence, competitiveness, enterprise, and hard work, and there was some resentment of women who fell short. One man quoted in American Libraries snorted, "There is an increasing sense that women can underachieve . . . . But this is supposed to be glossed over because they (women) are more 'nurturing,' 'supportive,' 'sensitive.'" Another man quoted in the article complained that "[women's] actual output is ignored in favor of their value as 'role models.'" One of my readers complained about women who return to library jobs after time off for family responsibilities but haven't bothered to retrain themselves for a world where OPACs have replaced card catalogs.
Those may be sweeping generalizations, but if there's a kernel of truth there, it should make for an interesting time come the annual performance evaluation. One library director, who was a truckdriver in his youth, was a little daunted the first time an employee cried when he criticized her work. He says, "supervising women has called for much more sensitivity to feelings than I ever needed supervising men. You can't really swear at women." Another reader noted that when he had to criticize men's performance, they didn't take it personally, but women nursed their resentment about performance critiques for a long time.
Christine Williams found a widespread expectation that men would naturally want advancement to administrative positions; she noted that whereas women were sometimes confronted by a "glass ceiling," men seemed to have a "glass escalator." Interestingly, this occurred regardless of whether the men wanted administrative jobs or not; one man who enjoyed his work as a children's librarian was downgraded for "not shooting high enough." Yes, they said, he was an excellent storyteller, and the children liked him, but "I wasn't doing the management-oriented work that they thought I should be doing."
A number of men resented being on the wrong side of a double standard. They didn't like women expecting them to do the heavy lifting jobs, deal with problem patrons, and work late night shifts (because personal safety wasn't supposed to be an issue for them). They didn't appreciate conversations in which female colleagues made dismissive comments about the entire male gender, and told them that, being men, of course they "didn't get it" -- especially since they knew that if they made similar criticisms of women they could be nailed for sexual harassment.
There's an up side to the anomalous position of men in this women's world, though, including love of the work itself. One man, who fell into the job of children's librarian, found that "I liked the work, and had a gift for storytelling and sharing." The fact that they get to deal with books and ideas, and patrons and colleagues who care about them, is clearly one of the most rewarding aspects of the job. Other men commented on the pace of the work -- one said he enjoyed working with women because "men are too territorial and competitive."
For one library director I spoke with, one of the great pleasures of working with women was that "it's easier to talk to women about the truly important things in life, family being one," and he didn't have to pretend to care about sports. (He tells about being at a professional conference while the NCAA tournament was going on. A male colleague, noticing he was from Iowa, started talking enthusiastically about the Iowa Hawkeyes' performance in the playoffs. Our hero, who didn't know or care that Iowa was IN the playoffs, was rescued by a female colleague who proceeded to talk basketball with the man for an hour.)
So, I now know a little more than I did before about being a minority. I realize that I'm as likely to make gender assumptions as men are, but less likely to be held accountable for them. Men have had to retrain themselves, learn to refrain from the kinds of sexual and sexist comments and jokes they might have made around other men, and learn to limit what they say and do to that which is legal and inoffensive. It sounds like now it's time for women to monitor our own assumptions, comments, and behavior in the same way.
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Re last week's article about the New York Times ripping freelancers' articles out of its database, see Barbara Quint's wonderful essay in NewsBreak, "Stop the Trash Trucks: a Tasini Case Damage-Control Proposal," at http://infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb010716-1.htm
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COOL QUOTE
Libraries are the real birthing places of the universe for me. I lived in my hometown library more than I did at home. I loved it at night, prowling the stacks on my fat panther feet. All of that went into Something Wicked . . .
Ray Bradbury, quoted by Stephen King in Danse Macabre.
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Ex Libris: an E-Zine for Librarians and Other Information Junkies.
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Copyright, Marylaine Block, 2000.
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