Unlike other fields numerically dominated by women, librarianship¨ has been extremely slow in incorporating feminist values and approaches to work. It is a long way from being a feminist profession. Certainly, there are feminists among us but their critical efforts to resist have not yet led to a significant transformation of the profession. The ways in which work is recognized/rewarded/organized has remained largely unchanged since the early 20th century. Librarianship continues to overlook the importance of women as people who inhabit different spaces from men, who experience the world differently from men, and who face discrimination and obstacles that are different from men. Not only does this result in a perpetuation of values that privilege men’s worldview, it also prevents us from developing solutions to problems inside and outside of libraries. In other words, the ongoing invisibility of issues that specifically affect women undermine our broader efforts to tackle social justice problems as well as issues like inclusiveness, information access, and intellectual freedom.
To illustrate how this invisibility works, consider library design. Most libraries continue to be designed by men in coordination with community planners, a field also dominated by men.[1] Much of our built space assumes that “male needs are universal.”[2] To illustrate, consider bathrooms. While building codes and other standards require these spaces to be equally dedicated to men and women, women use them with more frequency and for longer periods. They are more likely to accompany children and others who have mobility issues, including the elderly. Women also require these spaces to change menstruation products, which requires more frequent visits and for longer periods of time. Because of the smaller footprint of urinals, more men can utilize public facilities at any given time than women who use stalls. So, how are library bathrooms constructed? Are they situated in ways that accommodate their physical needs, including their safety?
Feminist author Caroline Perez describes how men do not face “the extra mental hurdle”[3] that women must frequently overcome when moving in and through public spaces. Public transit, often assumed to be equitable, often fails to take into account women’s (statistically legitimate) fear for their safety when standing at bus shelters, waiting on empty train platforms, walking to transit stops, etc. Perez notes that changes like improving lighting, having more security people (not more technological surveillance), digital timetables, and improved visibility on paths to transit stops are easy ways to improve safety. Making such changes requires planners to turn their mind to the experiences of women.
Women’s fear and anxiety around public spaces are grounded in their everyday experience. For example, Holly Kearl’s study of street harassment reveals that women experience harassment early in life (87% of respondents were harassed by age 19 and 22% by age 12).[4] Her work highlights how women learn early in life that they are vulnerable in ways that men are generally not. Women must think about the ways they move through the world very differently than men and, when systems do not work for them, they are expected to change their behaviour. However, it is the poorly designed spaces that ignore women’s perspectives that is the problem. What consideration is made when thinking about accessing library spaces? For example, is there reserved parking for women at night? Because women are more likely to be pedestrians than men, are nearby transit stops and paths to buildings well lit and visible? When new libraries are constructed, what consideration is made for the lives of women and other groups who have been historically and systematically excluded from public decision-making?
In addition to safety, women’s health is also impacted by gender bias. Standard building temperatures, for instance, were established in the 1960s based on “the metabolic resting rate of the average forty-year-old, 70kg man”[5] – the “ideal” subject. Recent research reveals that women’s metabolic biology necessitates a different approach to building temperature.[6] Not only do colder office temperatures lead to productivity issues,[7] it exacerbates symptoms of chronic conditions like arthritis and elevates stress.
Even when women are in leadership roles, they must confront long-standing systems that are informed by men who do not face the same experiences. Men do not breastfeed, experience pregnancy or have periods. Women around the world continue to bear the lion’s share of caring and domestic labour, even when they do work full-time. Perez points out that fifty years of U.S. census data shows that
“when women join an industry in high numbers, that industry attracts lower pay and loses ‘prestige’, suggesting that low-paid work chooses women rather than the other way around.”[8]
This is contributing to women’s poverty, particularly in old age. This necessitates government policy that actively works towards improving women’s chances for financial success but also for greater participation in how the problems of the world are understood and addressed. Libraries have an important opportunity to assist but this is only possible if those who work in libraries adopt a feminist, even critical feminist, approach to their work.
Recently, Taryn Grant of the Toronto Star reported that “Halifax libraries [are] ‘making history’ with free menstrual products in every bathroom.”[9] The bigger question is why has it taken libraries so long to recognize this as an issue when 80% of the library workforce is intimately familiar with the struggles of menstruation? Indeed, why is this change only following the work that has already been done in many municipalities, unions, and school districts in Canada? Our slow uptake on such issues illustrates how difficult it has been for us to shake loose the gender bias that structures our workplaces and the very essence of how we perceive our work.
A feminist perspective that privileges the lived experiences of women disrupts how we think and this is imperative if we are going to survive the kinds of disruption that comes with technological, economic, social, and environmental change. It is how we can better interrogate what data we need, how we collect data, how we use data, how we build collections, design buildings, staff libraries, and support our communities (particularly as they experience more frequent and more complex forms of crisis). It can also assist us in confronting the social difference and problems of inclusivity we face within our own workplaces and the profession more broadly.
While I have not attended to intersectionality here, it is also an important extension of feminism in that it, too, allows us to shift our thinking by bringing our differences into the light where they can be thoughtfully examined. We have to constantly remind ourselves that libraries are colonial institutions that were designed by the world of men to systematically organize diverse cultural identities under a singular narrative of Western “progressive” thought. How different would libraries look today if they were structured around the experiences of women? Of people of diverse cultural backgrounds? How might we resist ongoing efforts to corporatize and bureaucratize our public spaces so that we might get to the real work of seeing people for who they are and serve them as they are, not who we wish them to be.
References
* I use “librarians” and “librarianship” to refer to all library workers because our communities could, largely, care less about our internal hierarchies.
[1] The American Institute of Architects documents significant issues with diversity of its members, including gender with women only 22% of their membership being women in 2014. https://www.architecturalrecord.com/ext/resources/news/2016/03-Mar/AIA-Diversity-Survey/AIA-Diversity-Architecture-Survey-02.pdf. Not only has urban planning also been male dominated, it has “assumed a male subject” (p. 3). Susan S. Fainstein and Lisa J. Servon, Eds. (2005). Gender and Planning: A Reader. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers.
[2] Perez, Caroline Criado. (2019). Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. New York, Abrams Press, p.86.
[3] Perez, p. 53.
[4] Kearl, Holly. (2010). Stop street harassment: Making public places safe and welcoming for women. E-book. Praeger, p. 16.
[5] Perez, p. 111.
[6] Kingma, Boris and Marken Lichtenbelt, Wouter van (2015), ‘Energy consumption in building and female thermal demand,’ Natre Cimate Change, 5, 1054-6.
[7] Khazan, Olga. (May 22, 2019). Frigid Offices Might Be Killing Women’s Productivity. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/05/warm-offices-women-productivity/589966/
[8] Perez, 77.
[9] Grant, Taryn. (June 8, 2019). “Halifax libraries ‘making history’ with free menstrual products in every bathroom.” Toronto Star. https://www.thestar.com/halifax/2019/06/08/halifax-libraries-making-history-with-free-menstrual-products-in-every-bathroom.html
Resistant Librarian 