Friday was the deadline for proposals from content creators for Five Weeks to a Social Library. At the beginning of the week, some of the planning committee was beginning to sweat because we only had 8 proposals total. After having planned HigherEd BlogCon, I knew that most would come in over that last week (and mostly the last 2 days). However, I hadn’t expected our numbers to more than triple in the last week. We ended up with an amazing 27 proposals, and a few more were promised, but we haven’t received them yet.
I feel so incredibly fortunate to have received these inspiring proposals from some of the true movers and shakers in the field. These people are blazing trails and making great things happen in their libraries and in the profession and I’m honored that they would consider being a part of this groundbreaking course. The hardest part will be deciding which proposals we can’t accept because there is too much overlap in content. đ
The content from this course (Webcasts, screencasts, podcasts, etc.) will not only benefit the students in the course, but will benefit anyone who wishes to watch/listen to these materials. We are essentially creating an amazing repository of instructional content on social software that can benefit many, many people in the profession. Perhaps in the future, people can create free online courses like this and will already have ready-made content to plug into it. Just think of how many people we can reach!
The most interesting thing I noticed about these proposals was how many came from women:
- 17 Proposals from females only
- 3 proposals from male/female teams
- 7 proposals from males only
Why is this? I know people can say that it’s because it’s an online course and is run by women, other women feel more comfortable and able to take part (since they don’t have to leave family and travel). But the thing is, this is not the first all-online free educational opportunity I have planned. Michelle and I pulled off planning HigherEd BlogCon’s library track and we definitely got different gender distribution stats:
- 10 proposals from males
- 5 proposals from females
And that program didn’t even have any synchronous elements like this one will.
I honestly don’t have any answers to why more men went for it last time and this time more women did. Maybe you do?
To all who submitted proposals, thank you so much! I have read all of them and can honestly say that there isn’t a single one there that I wouldn’t learn something from. You all are helping to make this crazy dream I had of accessible online education a reality. đ
Look for the application for participants in the course to come out by the first week in October. I’ll definitely be making announcements about it here and all over the place.
As a male proposal submitter, I’m not really qualified to answer why more women applied this time around. But being unqualified to offer an opinion has never stopped me before…
I’d like to think that lots of women were energized by the posts this summer by Dorothea and many others, and decided to jump at this opportunity.
This is a guess. This is only a guess. But here’s my guess…
HEBC was fairly easy to read as tech for tech’s sake. It was a conference, yay, we already have conferences, the only thing kewl and leet about this conference is that it’s all-online. Based on behavior skew vis-a-vis technology as documented in Margolis and Fisher and elsewhere — that kind of thing is going to skew male.
What’s different about Five Weeks is that we explicitly added a societal benefit to the mix: we’re limiting participants to librarians on the wrong side of librarianship’s class divide, the ones who mostly don’t get financial support to go to conferences and workshops. Tech-for-good tends to pique female-techie interest in ways that tech-for-tech (“because we can”) doesn’t.
It might be worth constructing a survey of our proposal submitters. Why not let them tell us what they liked about Five Weeks? It’d be helpful for everyone trying to build online professional-development venues.
I must admit that I wasn’t sure initially whether proposals were actually being accepted from males for this project, and had to look really hard at the documentation to make sure that it wasn’t women-only. I suspect I may have read the fact that the organising committee was promoted as being all female, and mistakenly assumed what I did.
Nonetheless, my proposal is now in, and I look forward to seeing the outcomes of the project.
I think there probably several reasons for this split; it would be interesting to see if men are implementing these sorts of technologies in the same sort of ratio.
Still, I think the way this conference was advertised (or rather, how it was blogged by the organizers) certainly came across as a show of female solidarity, and regardless of the merits of the conference topic, is going to have an impact on who submits a proposal.
Although, “tech-for-good vs. tech-for-tech”? That seems unnecessarily loaded and divisive.
Interesting… I didn’t realize that we were giving off the idea that the course was female only. I didn’t even purposely organize it that way. I didn’t pick people based on gender. When I had written my original post about possibly doing a free online course or conference, these were the people who generously offered to help me organize it.
But it’s interesting that people saw it that way. I guess it’s unusual that you have an organizing committee comprised only of women, but if I saw an all-male organizing committee (which I often do) I would not think that the conference was not open to me. I just read all of my fellow organizer’s posts about the conference, and I saw nothing to indicate that the group was for women only (probably the most “inflamatory” statement was my own where I wrote “I asked five other amazing women to partner with me in creating Five Weeks to a Social Library”). But I’ll tell you, if Ross or anyone else had written “I asked five other amazing guys to partner with me to develop Code4Lib” I would not have thought the conference was not open to me. Where did the idea of “female solidarity” come from? I find that assumption very interesting.
I do agree with Ross that saying that women would be more likely to be involved in “tech-for-good” is making the same sort of unfair assumption as assuming that a planning committee made up of women would not want proposals from men. Though I do believe that we got more proposals on the whole for this (than HigherEd BlogCon) because of the whole altruism angle.
Shrug. I said it was a guess, and I backed it up with things I’ve read in the literature. Everyone should feel free to disprove it; Margolis and Fisher’s research is coming up on ten years old (they did it in 1998, though the book wasn’t published until 2002). Shall I come up with that survey? Do its statistics get wonky if we ask the HEBC folks as well as the Five Weeks folks?
I do think surveying presenters would be interesting, Dorothea. I just worry when we say things like “women are more likely to do things for altruistic reasons…” even if it is backed up by statistics.
Er, I’m not actually making any value judgement in what I commented on earlier. I don’t actually know (or necessarily think) it discouraged men from submitting; rather I was wondering if it /encouraged/ women.
Also (and this is the downside of blog comments — I’m sure this all comes out as weird) I’m not saying that the blog postings indicated that it was ‘by women, for women’ — I think the problem is that the immediate assumption when I use the term “female solidarity” is that I am using that negatively. Far from that.
I guess I look at this through the lens of the code4lib planet (since majority of the blogs I read are thankfully consolidated there), and in a span of a couple of days there was:
Your initial post followed by a post on your thoughts on the gender thread.
Karen’s mention in a posting about gender
and Dorothea’s mention falls on the tail end of a bunch of postings in her category Grunchy Stuff.
Again, (and I can’t stress this enough) I’m not claiming this is bad (or good or anything), I’m just saying that, contextually, it might have had something to do with your numbers.
Oh, I’m not thrilled about it either, Meredith; it makes me want to shoot copies of Anna Fels’s book out in all directions. It’s frustrating that some tactics seem to work for the wrong reasons.
For what it’s worth, I didn’t get involved in Five Weeks purely for altruism; I did it because I want to see low-cost online alternatives to what I view as too-expensive (in time, travel-stress, and money) training sessions and conferences. (Insert obligatory Christensen “disruptive innovation/underserved community” quote here.) Entirely selfish, I assure you; I want Five Weeks analogues that I can go to!
If my hypothesis is right, though — and as you and Ross and even Matthew point out, it’s not the only possible hypothesis! — it does suggest one (relatively simple to implement) way to break the current regrettable impasse for organizers of technology-related events who want to attract more female speakers and writers: explain not just what your event does for its participants, but for a larger world (be that the library world, the tech world, or the world world).
As you point out, Meredith, it’s quite possible that framing an event in this fashion simply attracts more participation from both genders, which is all good in my book.
I’ll partly second Matthew and Ross. I think it was partly timing: The invitation, coming from an explicitly all-female group, followed shortly on a sometimes-heated discussion of the lack of female speakers (and attendees) in tech-oriented conferences. I’d guess that, for some of us who paid attention to that discussion and the partial message that men being likely to offer to speak helped to keep women out of speaking situations, it certainly became easier to say “Well, they’re mostly looking for women, and that’s a good thing.”
I have no problem with the idea that women will respond to a situation where societal good/altruism is involved. I have a big problem if there’s an implied flipside, that is, that men (in the library field) are *less* likely to participate for altruistic reasons. But I’m not going to make that inference.
I didn’t think it was a “women only” conference, but I did sit back for a second and re-read something I wrote a while back about men having to “shut up and listen” for a while when it comes to technology conference-ish things.
I also hope that, in context of those recent discussions, a large number of female potential presenters were especially encouraged to submit.
That said, 17-7 is not a bad women-to-men ratio, considering the proportion of women-to-men in librarianship is probably even heavier than that.
I also assume this isn’t the last “Five Weeks to a Social Library,” so, as they say, “there’s always next fall.”
And let me know if you need any extra behind-the-scenes help or support. I think this is a great project and would be super-willing to help out in any way I can.
I sent in a proposal because I thought it was a cool idea and I had something to contribute. Yeah, I think it’s great that it was organized by women, and I’m always happy to see women representing in the world of library tech (which can sometimes be a bit of a “sausage party,” to use an uncouth yet amusing term), but I would have sent in a proposal if it was organized by five men. What mattered to me is that I had something to contribute.
Besides, when I think of libraries and technology, some of the first people I think of are women. I think it’s because there are so many articulate, intelligent women who are out there talking about social software and the intersection of libraries and technology, who are applying it in their workplaces, and who are helping others understand and use technology to better connect users to information.