You know when you’ve scraped up or burned a big enough patch of your arm to put gauze plus medical tape on it, and eventually the time comes to remove the bandage, but no matter whether you peel the tape off slowly or just yank, it hurts like you wouldn’t believe, and you honestly wonder whether you wouldn’t have done yourself less damage by just leaving your arm alone in the first place?
That’s what the grunchy-stuff blogging of late has been like. Not asking for sympathy, just sayin’. I knew I was torching some bridges. I knew those bridges were important and valuable and I’d feel their loss. I knew some people would feel targeted who didn’t really deserve to be. I knew some people would think me a whiner; that comes with the territory.
(Honestly, though, whiners don’t pull what I just pulled. Sympathy and support are not exactly the majority reactions to it, you know what I’m saying?)
Still and all… I think I did the right thing in mostly the right way. Raw public anger has definite drawbacks, but it does force awareness of the seriousness of the case. In the situation that touched off this series of posts, I’d already tried the polite, subtle change-from-within route, and it accomplished really nothing at all.
Rolling my eyes and putting up with it was a serious temptation, as it is for most women in IT. For a few, going on in spite of the garbage becomes a badge of honor, a sign of strength; certainly it’s true that prospering in spite of it all takes amazing fortitude! One commenter over at Bess’s openly despised the withdraw-and-protest approach Bess and I have taken.
To me, though, group-membership is not enough to recommend acceptance of unacceptable behavior. If I’d kept on biting my tongue, I’d have silently bled to death. Nor is it reasonable that women take on an extra burden of vituperation and casual disdain that men needn’t deal with. Not like there’s not enough vituperation and casual disdain among programmers to begin with!
IT and librarianship diverge somewhat at this point. In IT, there’s hardly anywhere for a woman to go to escape misogyny, and she can’t progress in her profession unless she’s willing to put up with it. (Exceptions, I know—but not many.) This means that the cost to IT when she departs is far less than the cost to her. She has no power. Even as a group, female developers have insufficient power in IT (and especially in open source development) to upset the apple-cart and win decent treatment. “Who says we want women?” an open-source developer can yell at Bess Sadler (except he’d probably yell “girls”), and he can perfectly well mean it.
That doesn’t fly in librarianship. Women run libraries (especially, it appears, academic libraries, link via Ed Corrado on unalog). Women work in them at all levels. When women leave a venue, or are underrepresented there, it gets noticed. Anyone who casually torques off women is begging and pleading to be marginalized by the larger library world, which is (it has correctly been noted) a rather small and internally-communicative world.
More importantly, female librarians have real choices about what to do with their professional energy. I’m a geek, sure, but I am also an open-access advocate. If I get tired of open access (unlikely, I grant, but humor me a moment), I can probably make a niche for myself in information literacy or Spanish-language bibliography without too much anguish. (The first job would be the hardest, but it always is.)
That’s power. We don’t have to put up with misogyny; we have places to go where it won’t be there. We don’t have to be silent about it, if the worst that happens when we speak up is what’s happened to me; I’m damaged, but I’m still standing. We don’t have to accept thankless etiquette-coach work; we can and should expect acceptable behavior from our colleagues. If we don’t get it, we can leave, secure in the knowledge that we are not the only losers thereby.
Not a bad field to be in, all told.
I very much value the bloggers who have stepped up to tell their own stories and vent their own frustration in partial response to my opening this can of worms. Feeling hopelessly alone is nasty, and I’m glad I haven’t had to. Karen, Rachel, Karen, Bess, Deborah, my best gratitude to you. (All links but the last go to blogs rather than individual posts, because I’ve linked individual posts already—all but the last one, which anyone who hasn’t read should read, if nothing else because Deborah does a way better rant than I do.) And also to Alisa, for reminding me why I’ve said what I’ve said—it’s more than mere venting—and for offering some end-of-tunnel illumination.
And also thanks to the men who braved a lot of pent-up ire to engage honestly and thoughtfully with us in public and in private: Dan, Art, Jeremy, David among others. I know it’s like tiptoeing through minefields, and I know that I myself have not made it easy or pleasant. It’s still the wise and honorable thing to do, and I surely do respect wisdom and honor.
A commenter over at Rachel’s who wants to be a systems librarian worried that he was in a catch-22, that whatever he did, he’d inevitably be associated with locker-room denizens and thoughtless excluders. I don’t think that’s so; I truly don’t. A base level of awareness that these problems exist—such as might be garnered from this cross-blog conversation—and enough common sense to avoid the most egregious social errors goes a very long way. Problems of representation aren’t something a beginning librarian can typically tackle.
For my part, I am gradually returning to equanimity, so the barrage of spitting fury that’s been CavLec of late can be expected to simmer down. (Heck, I’m even grudgingly starting to like CVS.) I assure you, nobody’s happier about that than I am.
