The Girl Who Cried She-Wolf

I'm sure I'm not going to make any friends with this post, but here it goes anyway. I'm tired of reading articles that try to make excuses out of women vs. men in the job market. Roma Harris's "Information technology and the de-skilling of librarians; or the erosion of a woman's profession" is just one such article, that makes a few valid arguments about library jobs, or the "de-skilling" of such jobs, as she establishes in her title. The title of this article itself has implications regarding the content of the article: she had to use two titles in one, just as she wrote two articles in one! One of the articles dealt with the de-skilling of library jobs and another one that actually detracted from her main article, railing against men who choose to work in tech jobs and as such happen to take jobs in libraries.

Now, I chose the title for this blog post for a reason: as a student in a private liberal arts college for undergrad with a plurality of feminist professor, I frequently had to read similar articles about women earning less than men and holding lower positions than men. We even "fondly" dubbed our Foundations of Liberal Arts (freshmen writing) course "Hate yourself for being a straight, white, middle-classed male 101", because we could easily split the course into four units, one featuring articles about men oppressing women, another about gays not having the same rights as straights, a third about middle-class privilege, and a fourth about whites' oppression of blacks. We read SO many of those articles that I began to get information overload and ultimately have become almost completely desensitized to the arguments. It's a classic case of the boy who cried wolf, or in this case, a girl crying she-wolf.

Don't get me wrong, I fully understand the fact that women do indeed earn less money than men. That men tend to hold higher positions than women. But the journals are absolutely flooded with articles about it! They begin to lose their oomph! Journal articles in general don't get published unless they have some new viewpoint to bring to the table or new information to publish. Therein, to me, appears to be the reason Harris managed to get this article published: she did indeed draw together some good information about the "de-skilling" of the librarian profession, but she unfortunately didn't bother to give complete or even, sometimes, good arguments as to why these positions are becoming de-skilled or why men are holding some of the better positions.

I think my best example of a case in which she gives a complete lack of argument is in her section on "New Labels for Library Work". In her sixth paragraph, she cites Cimbala (1987), who claimed that one of the impediments to uniting university libraries and computing centers was the resistance of male computing staff members "to be labelled [as] librarians". REALLY?!? The whole reason something can't happen is that people are resisting a job title!?!? I highly doubt that any good dean or university president would be willing to let "resistance" to a job title be a reason not to combine two sectors. I am highly skeptical of Cimbala's research, and would really love to read the article to see if Cimbala indeed made these assertions, or whether Harris was extracting just a tiny bit of information out of a much more comprehensive study.

I have a few other reasons I dislike this article, which I'd be more than happy to share if anyone cares to listen. The article did have a few good points, which I would also be happy to share, but I feel like the good points were overwhelmingly drowned in the irrelevant points about men and how they claim all the good jobs.

Now, for your entertainment, a video to complement my title:
She Wolf