But as for the larger issue, I’m concerned about women shortchanging themselves when it comes to their careers, talents, and overall self-worth. The only thing that I can see as any sort of solution is to empower female colleagues and proteges by working collaboratively with them and valuing the things they bring to the campus environment. I work with a lot of powerful, intelligent, and capable women at UNLV, so this is not a problem amongst my colleagues, but I do worry about the female students I see in the library who speak intelligently with their friends but dumb themselves down in front of males (including when they ask me questions at the reference desk).

isn’t always the easiest thing to do. It is fairly easy to read something like Michael Noer’s recent article in Forbes magazine, be highly offended and feel the need to speak out. It was overtly sexist, since the author tried to make reader…

And now for gross generalization #2: Women tend to be better at social interaction. Perhaps that’s why tech-minded women don’t stay as solely IT types as they are needed elsewhere in their job function. In past jobs, as well as my present one, the women developers and programmers were usually the ones who ended up handling training, vendor negotiation, web/intranet management and the like. They could talk to people and not just snort and say “I mean, you don’t know J2EE?”.

These are very broad swipes, I know, but I think it may hold some merit. People who can handle other things aside from one topic tend to move out of that topic. People who can ONLY do one topic…stay there.

In MPOW, the library used to be run by a pretty famous physicist librarian who was very well respected. I think she must have broken down a lot of barriers. I really have no problems here.

In the public library, the males all learned to ask me for help for car repair or science questions — even though they were always approached first

Here is a reply I wrote to the following post on a Librarian blog I frequent. The last paragraph of her post:As you can see, I have very mixed feelings on this whole gender issue thing and I don’t quite…

I haven’t commented in a while but something about this topic caught my attention and pulled me out of my RSS reader and into the real site to leave my thoughts.

I am a tall white male. According to most sociological finding I am darn near the most likely demographic to be taken seriously. I am tall – people turn to tall people first. I am a man – historically we have been in charge. I am white – enough said. On the other hand I grew up relatively poor and overweight and without a strong family history of college. I didn’t have a computer I had regular access to until after high school. Compared to some I am the poster-child for privilege to others I am behind the curve.

I think the milieu of possible sexism (or with a slightly larger view; racism, agism, or any other -ism) you are highlighting the difference between equal opportunity and equal outcome. It seem to me that the latter cannot exist without the former; but also will not equal the former without time passing. Even then, natural predispositions and other soft factors will affect the equality of outcome.

What I mean is this: Years ago women, blacks, the poor, and other marginalized groups had a much harder road to hoe if they were to try to open a business, go to college, or pursue a degree in a field dominated by the majority. This is simply not the case today. I work for a black man, a woman dean, a chaldean; I employ every ethnic group it seems, EXCEPT white. In my capacity as a grant writer, I see the grants that are available in education and a LARGE portion of them are formed to benefit exclusively (or at least predominantly) minority groups.

I think that as much of the world turns to the net to arbitrate relationships – academic, social, business, avocational – the physical indicators of status (height, weight, race etc.) will prove to be a lot less accessible and a lot less important. Who wrote the wikipedia article on diodes? Were they black? Who manages msn.com? Is it a woman? Who knows. Who cares. Meredith, you are the only librarian I have in my RSS reader – not because you are “cute” or white or tall or have good teeth (I have no idea apart from what you divulge); but rather, because you know a hell of a lot more about social software and the writing industry than I do and you write with such authority and lucidity. This is true now and will only become more true with time.

What I am describing is admittedly a macro view – and as such will not stand up to every individual instance of sexism that I am sure still occur here and there; but overall, I think that things are improving quickly and at a quickening pace.

Like lots of women who are tech-savvy, I want to spend my time helping others who aren\’t there yet to gently accrete their skills. This involves informal, day-to-day contact based on building relationships at the same time as tech skills. \”Oh, you\’re interested in doing this with the first years, well I know that so-and-so-in-a-different-department was also interested in that..how about you talk to her, and maybe you could use tool x to do what you wanted to do?\”

My brother was given lego, meccano and old TV sets to pull apart. I was given Hobbytex (this is kind of colouring-in on cloth with ball point paint). It affected me by making me more determined to learn this techie type of stuff – and to do the girly stuff at the same time and to do it as well. That way, I\’d show them that I could do both – which my brother couldn\’t.

Lack of sleep, long term breastfeeding, the constant visceral demands of having kids (they were always on my body) actually did turn my brain to mush for a few years. Nice mush that I wanted, but certainly advanced coding was totally out of the question for that period. Everyone\’s mileage varies according to who they are and what type of kids pop out.

Here in Australia seven of us worked to set up a collaborative blog for Australian libraries (http://librariesinteract.info). Four of us in the team are women. For gender balance, this either is a good statistic (this is the type of project that is often male dominated), or a bad statistic (men are more represented in our group than in the profession). Take your pick!

Thanks for your wide ranging post.

This is my internal logic for why I wouldn’t write about technology (for an article) and why I tend to avoid tech sessions at conferences. Most conferences do still run on a model of having the call for papers well over a year or more in advance of the event. If a technology is going to stick around for a while, I’d rather pick up the papers later, read an article. For the cutting-edge stuff, I go to blogs.

At any rate, I was fortunate to grow up with a dad who is a computer engineer, who didn’t get angry every time I messed up our computer by ‘experimenting’, let me borrow science books on his library card, and taught me to solder circuits, lightbulbs etc. And mum always let me play in the mud with Tonka Trucks. But I also learnt to sew and knit.

I don’t think it’s necessarily about whether you were comfortable with a particular technology, or about gender inherantly, but whether you grew up in a supportive atmosphere that encouraged experimentation with anything – paper, scissors, mud or computers.

Sexism (and racism) are so much harder these days, because it’s mostly, as you say, on the subtle side of the scale. My brother has told me about young women who say they feel equal to men because they can get any job they want. “Maybe,” my brother argues, “but as long as your paid less for the same amount of work, and on average this is still true for women, you’re not really equal.”

I don’t really have any answers. I think it’s just a matter of always being conscious of what’s going on and speaking up about it–in this post, in Roy’s great column, wherever we can. Being conscious of it, speaking out about it, and doing what we can to fight it.