Feminised Labour
Library work, like nursing, cleaning, caregiving, early childhood education, and social work is a profession where efforts tend to be performed by feminised labor. Labor that always says "Yes" when faced with human need.
There's a parodied librarian stereotype evident in the Bookmobile Bad Girl and the Reference Tramp. These caricatures of librarians who 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 end of the bell curve in our workplace refusal kinship diagram. Men populate the other side of the curve when we look at how workplace refusal is gendered. Men in music, like Todd Rundgren have literally made a fortune celebrating refusal. Male characters like Peter Gibbons in OfficeSpace 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):
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)
Why would we do this? "Isn't the academy becoming a more welcming 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).
Writ large we can imagine this imbalance if we 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 labor like she has. Things aren't likely to get better any time soon in the US either, as long as that will cost money. This past year "The survey found that 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)."
This patriarchal organization with its sliding wages and hyper-competitive employment situation is the one in which academic librarians work and are compensated. Another further tension within academic librarianship that can exacerbate pay gendered pay gaps is the one that differentiates between the effort value of those who are seen as innovators (often gendered as: masculine) and those that are seen as maintainers (often gendered as: feminine). Popowhich explores this tension, 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 when you're really working in 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. (Popowich, 2019)
This scarcity scenario is playing out at Universities worldwide, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic situation which can drive counter-intuitive decision making.
For example, some Libraries unnecessarily delayed closing during the COVID-19 pandemic, as other academic libraries closed to protect their patrons and their staff (Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe and Christine Wolff-Eisenberg, 2020). The rationale for those that remained opened was that somehow that the librarians were up for the risk, and that their sacrifice was worth it.
- Were library administrators able to just say "No" and Refuse to send their people to work without PPE during a pandemic situation?
- Were librarians able to say "No PPE? Then I'm not coming in to work/I'm not working around [these co-workers who wont practice social distancing or, that maskless patron] ? "
- Were librarians able to refuse to work when they found themselves denied surveillance or diagnostic testing offered to other members of the campus community like students living in dormitories, or professors doing classroom instruction?
- Were librarians able to say "if you want us to "Stay open/Re-open without COVID-19 testing available, I'm not coming in to work?"
Amidst all these decision points, most libraries eventually closed til mitigations were sufficient to provide a modicum of safety. Among closed libraries the majority were circumspect in how they announced it. Hundreds of libraries were closed, yet text mining their closure websites revealed that only eleven actually came right out and said "We are Closed" (Meyers et al, 2020) Instead, libraries and librarians that closed their doors to patrons emphasized what they could still "do" seeming to avoid at all costs using the phrase "We are closed" even thought that's probably what most patrons were coming to their websites to find out.
