“I’ve never seen so many middle-aged white women in one place!”
OK, that probably got your attention… The title of this post was something a friend overheard yesterday, and it leads me to a few quick observations about the crowd at PLA:
- Basically, the quote above is kinda true. I’m kinda shocked at how overwhelmingly white the attendees are. I’ve only seen a handful of Asians, and very few African-Americans. Maybe the Midwestern conference location has something to do with that? I dunno. I work in a city that’s majority black, but based on my unscientific sampling, the majority of librarians in the system are white, so maybe it’s reflective of a larger imbalance.
- The crowd is also somewhat older than I expected. There are “young” librarians here, but less than I expected based on going to ALA last year.
- In terms of gender, as I sit in a session writing this, in my line of sight are 4 men and 43 women. I took a similar “line of sight” poll in a session yesterday and counted 6 men and 57 women. Which helps to explain the bathroom shortage problem I mentioned in a previous post.
- Finally, I have yet to see campaign or political button of any stripe. That also kinda of shocks me, since at ALA last year, the ground was thick with young hipster librarians whose bags and lapels were full of little badges and slogans. The closest I’ve seen was a young woman carrying a bag with a keychain attached: it was red and shaped like a stop sign, and said “End Discrimination.” Fighting hate one keychain at a time…
There are 5 Comments to "“I’ve never seen so many middle-aged white women in one place!”"
You are so right about both the age and gender issues. The diversity issue is an upper Midwest issue. The Cities are the most diverse in the area. My community, 80 miles away, is the 6th most diverse city in Wisconsin and is 94% white! The next largest group are the Hmong at 4%. The other 2% are black and Hispanic in that order
Whoa, the demographics of PLA are driven overwhelmingly by the demographics of public librarians. It doesn’t improve much outside the midwest.
Inteesting, and certianly food for thought. I think part of the problem might be “competition” with other library conferences, and probably ALA in particular. I know for our system it’s hard to send lots of people to all of the conferences (for us that would be ALA, PLA, TLA, and all the other specialty conferences that provide so much great info), and so those who go tend to be those who’ve been around awhilte or in higher positions. I work in the largest department in my system, Reference, and while not as diverse as our population, it’s still a pretty diverse group. yes, the female dominance is still there, but even that is changing, and I will say that at 45, i’m starting to feel like the old man of the group. Thankfully my boss is positivitly ancient, so until he retires I’m safe.
The politics part. Hmmmmm…interesting. Maybe it’s my age, but I personally don’t feel like PLA is the place to strut my political stuff; it’s too easy to become a devisive issue and that’s not what I want out of this experience. Of course it could just be the result of the extended Democratic race.
“Maybe it’s my age, but I personally don’t feel like PLA is the place to strut my political stuff;”
I tend to agree, I just wanted to point out the stark contrast between last year’s ALA (where there were tons of political badges) and the stereotype of the radical public librarian.
My system supports PLA attendance (for which I am very grateful) but not ALA attendance, which makes sense to me. This is my fifth PLA conference, and I frankly enjoy the practicality and lack of “politics”, especially as I’m turned off by ALA’s politicking at the expense of getting things done. My coworkers and I are intensely political, even partisan, but at work our job is to channel the “political” into becoming a community “go-to” institution (and we’re succeeding).
I’m female, white, and middle-age (whoa, when did THAT happen?) but am more engaged than ever in learning new things. It’s a question of opportunity and attitude. There are rules and exceptions to everything, and the library profession is no exception!