Women Administrators in Academic Libraries: Three Decades of Change

From the 1960s until the 1990s, gender equity was a topic of great interest in library workforce studies. In the almost forty years since affirmative action law was made applicable to institutions of higher education, efforts have been made to increase the number of women administrators in academic libraries, and it is now assumed that women have achieved parity. However, there is little hard evidence available about their representation in all types and levels of academic libraries. A follow-up study was done to two earlier studies of the status of women in academic libraries. Using the American Library Directory as a source, the gender of individuals holding the positions of director, associate or assistant director, or department head in ARL and Liberal Arts I libraries in 1972, 1982, 1994, and 2004 were studied. Although women have not yet achieved parity at all levels, the percentage of women administrators has increased significantly over the years. There is still a substantial gap at the director’s level in the Liberal Arts I and a smaller one at ARL libraries, however, the results show that since the 1970s, women have succeeded in almost erasing the gender gap in academic library administration. Introduction Librarianship was one of the earliest professions to be open to women. With the growth in the number of libraries at the end of the nineteenth century, educated women were needed to fill the increasing number of new positions being created; by 1900, almost 75 percent of all librarians in the United States were women. The percentage of female librarians continued to increase into the twentieth century, reaching its highest point in Women Administrators in Academic Libraries: Three Decades of Change Barbara B. Moran, Elisabeth Leonard, and Jessica Zellers LIBRARY TRENDS, Vol. 58, No. 2, Fall 2009 (“Workforce Issues in LIS.” edited by Joanne Gard Marshall, Paul Solomon, and Susan Rathbun-Grubb), pp. 215–228 © 2010 The Board of Trustees, University of Illinois 216 library trends/fall 2009 1930 when the profession was 91 percent female (Williams, 1995). Even today when opportunities are available for women to enter a wide variety of professions, librarianship is still predominately a women’s field: over 82 percent of professional librarians in the United States are female (Davis & Hall, 2007, p. 9). Although women have constituted the bulk of librarians for over a hundred years, they were an overlooked majority for a large portion of that time. It was not until 1974 that Anita Schiller (1974) published her seminal research on the status of female librarians, in which she noted a consistent pattern of discrimination against women in libraries that had resulted in a pay gap between the genders and an underrepresentation of women in upper-level positions, especially in larger and more prestigious libraries. Schiller’s work was published during a period of growing awareness of discrimination of all types in the United States. The Civil Rights movement and a renewed interest in feminism were reshaping most sectors of society. Wide-reaching legal remedies were being put into place in an attempt to improve inequities in the workplace. The Equal Pay Act of 1963 required all employers to provide equal pay to men and women who performed work similar in skill, effort, and responsibility, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in all employment practices. Affirmative action created in 1965 by Executive Order 11246 required government contractors to have a written plan to remedy the effects of past discrimination. In 1972, federal equal opportunity legislation was extended to institutions of higher education. Schiller’s work was the first that looked systematically at the status of women in librarianship, but it was certainly not the last. Since the mid1970s, there have been many attempts to gauge the place of women in the library profession and their success in gaining upper-level administrative positions. Although there has been research focusing on the status of women in public and special libraries, the majority of the research has looked at academic librarianship, the sector of the profession that has traditionally employed the lowest percentage of women. At present, approximately 70 percent of credentialed academic librarians in the United States are female (Davis & Hall, 2007, p. 20). In the largest research libraries, the percentage is even lower; slightly less than two thirds of Association of Research Libraries (ARL) professional staff is female (Association of Research Libraries, 2008, p. 10). In the almost forty years since affirmative action and EEO legislation were made applicable to academic libraries, there have been substantive efforts to increase the number of female administrators, and undoubtedly women have made great strides in obtaining administrative positions in academic libraries. These changes have been especially dramatic in the ARL libraries, the largest and most prestigious libraries in the United States