Feminized Labour
Librarian stereotypes are so prevalent in popular culture that the library profession has playfully and/or sardonically adopted them. Examples of these exaggerated feminized stereotypes are depicted in book cover parodies, such as the Bookmobile Bad Girl and the Reference Tramp. These caricatures of librarians enact their role by always answering the call (with a "Yes!"). They are the ones who "give it away all over town." Along with Morgenstern's acolytes they occupy the far right of our workplace refusal kinship diagram.
Men populate the other side of the our diagram when we look at how workplace refusal is gendered. Men in music like Todd Rundgren and Johnny Paycheck have literally made a fortune celebrating refusal. Male characters like Peter Gibbons in Office Space foment rebellion and bond over it with co-workers. Other male characters like Dante and Randal in Clerks simply revel in turning up but preferring not to work.
When academic librarians seek to prove themselves and create externally recognizable value, whether through the credential of the MLS, or through determining which achievements will be acknowledged by faculty appointment and promotion committees, we distance ourselves from the service/maintainer and feminized side of the profession. We re-define our role to align more with the masculine to prove our worth alongside our other colleagues in the patriarchal world of the ivory tower.
As argued by Seale and Mirza (2019):
Why would we do this? Though we may seek prestige, our efforts rarely lead to increased influence or power within the academy. The truth is that many of the collective benefits depicted in the 9 to 5 film back in 1980 are still among those most valued by today's workers: on-site daycare, job-sharing, flexible hours. One of the most hoped for benefits imagined in the 9 to 5 film hasn't materialized, though: equal pay.the actual work involved in academic librarianship is frequently invisibilized. This invisibility is only emphasized by the fact that much of that work entails emotional labor or maintenance.... Academic librarianship’s erasure of feminized forms of labor and the field’s “inherent femaleness” is inextricable from its search for markers of professionalization outside of librarianship, in the form of non-MLS degrees, more appealing domains of knowledge, and nonfeminized types of labor (258-259).
"Isn't the academy becoming a more welcoming place for women?" you might ask. "Aren't half the students we serve women?" In terms of gender balance in the professorial ranks, particularly in the United States, in the most recent American Association of University Professors' salary survey we find that religious institutions have finally got their gendered salary gaps down to a single digit percentage (AAUP 2021). That's good news. But the survey data also show there's still an 86.8 percent difference between number or men and women serving as full professors at private-independents (AAUP 2021).
Picture a woman going up for faculty appointment or promotion. When the time comes for her to convince decision makers that what she does is worthwhile, only 16% of those people are likely to identify with her at the most basic level of having experienced gendered labour like she has. Things aren't likely to get better soon in the US, because the outlook for the academic job market and compensation is pretty bleak. This past year "real wages for full-time faculty decreased for the first time since the Great Recession, and average wage growth for all ranks of full-time faculty was the lowest since the AAUP began tracking annual wage growth in 1972. After adjusting for inflation, real wages decreased at over two-thirds of colleges and universities. The number of full-time faculty decreased at over half of institutions" (AAUP 2021).
The patriarchal organization of the academy with its sliding wages and hyper-competitive employment situation is where academic librarians work and are compensated. Further complicating the compensation outlook within academic librarianship are pay gaps between innovators (often gendered as masculine) and maintainers (often gendered as feminine) and how they are comparatively compensated. Popowich (2019) explores this tension and more, observing that:
In this situation how do you justify yourself, your cost, your service? How do you hang on to your part of the pie if you're really working in the empty middle of the doughnut hole?Librarianship—like the world itself—is full of contradictions or antinomies, tensions, productive or causal, non-static dichotomies, dialectical “unities of opposites,” such as that between enlightenment and social control, between concrete library work and the more intellectual labor of library science, or between men’s and women’s work, the center and the periphery, etc. (209)
