Research Report Review

ABSTRACT

A Review of:  Lamont, M. (2009). Gender, Technology, and Libraries. Information Technology & Libraries, 28(3), 137-142.

Objective-  The author seeks to understand why women make up a smaller percentage of the Information Technology (IT) field within libraries and to use that information to repair the gender disparity.  

Design-  Analysis of statistics regarding the gender of the heads of library technology departments.  This is supplemented with discerning the gender of the authors of articles focused on library technology published between 2006 and 2007.

Setting-  N/A

Subjects-  N/A

Methods-   Statistics of technology department heads is from the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) (2004-2008).  Journal articles were taken from a cross-section of publications including Information Technology and Libraries, Journal of Information Science and Technology, D-Lib Magazine, Computers in Libraries, Library Hi Tech, as well as The Journal of Academic Librarianship, College and Research Libraries, and Children and Libraries. 

Main Results-  The ARL statistics show that in the field of computer and information science there were 1,360,000 men and only 519,700 women and women earned an average of $11,000 less than the men (2009, pg. 137).  Men are also more likely to be the heads of computer systems departments, thus securing higher salaries and with the exception of one year between 2004 and 2008, despite more years of experience, female department heads were paid less than the male department heads.  Looking at the publications, in the technology-focused journals, with the exception of one journal (Computers in Libraries), men published more articles than women, with men making up 65 percent.  In the comparison journals (College and Research Libraries and the Journal of Academic Librarianship), female authors outnumbered the men, with 63 percent of the authorship, but the fact that women make up 82 percent of the LIS field belies the fact that they are still publishing at a lower rate compared to men (2009, pg. 138). 

Conclusion-  With the relatively small number of women in the IT field, looking at the perceptions and issues surrounding the gender gap will assist in understanding and overcoming it.  Occupational segregation is one such issue and is even more pronounced because women often choose not to define their positions as being within the IT field.  Also, while women consistently test at a comparable level of technological ability as men, they underrate their abilities (2009, pg. 140). The IT field has become gendered and our society holds perceptions that it is a masculine field, so much so that “women are made to feel less competent and less comfortable with technology” (2009, pg. 141).  The author posits that because women are less directly employed in IT (though their work may involve the field, their occupations are not part of the field), “any contributions they make to IT will be devalued as a consequence of their positions within the library organization” (2009, pg. 139).  This is an interesting assumption to make and is not necessarily untrue.  Those who publish from within a field are more likely to be seen as a trustworthy source on the information, compare to someone from without of the field.    This article addresses a complex issue and suggests that in order to fix the disparity, men and women need to focus and rethinking the organizational, societal, and cultural perceptions that are at the root of it.  Instead of focusing solely on increasing the number of women in the IT field, there needs to be both a change in the organizational culture and a reevaluation of the definition of technology work, so that there will not be such a dichotomized workforce in the LIS field.