“I’ve never seen so many middle-aged white women in one place!”
Friday, March 28th, 2008OK, 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…
