Thursday, February 22, 2007
Geek Grrls, Balance, and More
If I were a little more visually clever I'd enter this geek grrl photo contest. I think, though, that we need some librarian representation... if you enter, share here.
Picking up on previous discussions, I ran across "Why Are Women Exiting IT?" in InfoWorld recently, with more discussion and resources online. Apparently, not only are women still underrepresented in IT, but the numbers are actually declining -- "For example, women accounted for 16.6 percent of all network and computer systems administrator positions in 2006, down from 23.4 percent in 2000."
Beyond all the many, many other ways that we "lose our techie librarians," I think one way to lose people is to pay insufficient attention to the issue of work/life balance. IT work, whether in- or outside of librarianship, can easily chip away at that whole balance thing, especially when we don't fund it sufficiently and/or ask people to take on these responsibilities in addition to all their other librarian-ish duties.
On this note, it's interesting to look at the Engendering Balance section of the InfoWorld report. Of course, this is nothing that hasn't been said before, but is something that we should perhaps pay more attention to -- both as a female-dominated profession and as one that's so intimately intertwined with technology.
(edited a couple hours later to add... I forgot to link to this post about "all women's day" -- a call for postings by women on Web/Library 2.0 issues on March 8, which I meant to include here.)
Picking up on previous discussions, I ran across "Why Are Women Exiting IT?" in InfoWorld recently, with more discussion and resources online. Apparently, not only are women still underrepresented in IT, but the numbers are actually declining -- "For example, women accounted for 16.6 percent of all network and computer systems administrator positions in 2006, down from 23.4 percent in 2000."
Beyond all the many, many other ways that we "lose our techie librarians," I think one way to lose people is to pay insufficient attention to the issue of work/life balance. IT work, whether in- or outside of librarianship, can easily chip away at that whole balance thing, especially when we don't fund it sufficiently and/or ask people to take on these responsibilities in addition to all their other librarian-ish duties.
On this note, it's interesting to look at the Engendering Balance section of the InfoWorld report. Of course, this is nothing that hasn't been said before, but is something that we should perhaps pay more attention to -- both as a female-dominated profession and as one that's so intimately intertwined with technology.
(edited a couple hours later to add... I forgot to link to this post about "all women's day" -- a call for postings by women on Web/Library 2.0 issues on March 8, which I meant to include here.)
Labels: balance, geekgrrls, it, techies
