I’d like to work with more male RNs. I don’t know how greatly improved it’d be, but I’d like it.
You might try visiting a few more libraries. As stated above, most libraries (both college and public) are pretty modernized. On top of that, what do you mean by “ridiculously”? My sense is that libraries have probably about 70% women employees. Is that really ridiculous?
What exactly do you expect men to do that women don’t already do in libraries? The OP just seems funny to me, especially because I worked at the main library of a big university (workers were mostly students, about 50/50 men/women) and took advantage of that to direct a pseudo-documentary film about “how to use the library.” The reporter confidently starts off trying to do a bland, “see-how-easy-this-is,” job and ends up completely baffled and entangled by a complex computer information retrieval system and dozens of departments which give him conflicting advice on how to retrieve a particular book he chooses at random. (At one point, they send him to “Cooperative Services”–an office which has a sign outside its door that says, “This door to remain locked at all times.” At another point, he stumbles upon negative call numbers, where he says: “I think this means we’ve gone too far.”) He persists to get into the stacks (nine floors of books), by deception, and then gets lost in the labyrinth.
In the end of the film, he accidentally runs into a library employee wearing all black, who works for a special branch of the library and who assumes that he is a “training film maker.” He fakes it to get the employee to explain what kind of training film. The employee explains that the film is to train library employees who work for a special branch that wears all black and essentially burglarizes professors’ offices to get overdue books.
The employee’s sex?: Female.
It makes my head hurt that a “librarian currently in library school” thinks “there is more to life than books”. Of course there’s more to life than books - but the LIBRARY is the *part of life that is books! I’m just the old fuddy duddy, I suppose, as I owned in the last post. I don’t WANT to wait a week or four for a book through inter-library loan. I mean, that’s great for making really old or obscure stuff more available, but nowadays I have to wait for a book that was printed two years ago. What’s up with that? The library (when I was growing up) was a place you could browse for books, find things you’d never heard of, grab a few on impulse and take them home and start reading while the iron was hot. Not having the books there for me to look at means I won’t find out about some incredible books, and that sucks.
*Now, yes, get off my lawn.
NFL quarterbacks.
More female train drivers!
It’s a woman’s right to choo-choos
More female pilots please. Because they smell nicer.
My experience as a female engineer indicates that there actually are more female engineers out there than one would think - but we rarely get the more “engineery” jobs. This is more true in some countries than in others.
Looking at gender distribution in different jobs makes me think of some sort of huge transitory, with the pendulum swinging this way and that but less and less violently every time… “secretary” used to be 100% a male job, later it became 100% female in much of the world. Nurses used to be mostly (male) monks in much of Europe; the profession became heavily feminized at about the same time it got separated from religious roots; my GP’s nurse is called Juan (but the sign on his door still says “enfermera”, she-nurse; the government has been changing the signs to “enfermería”, nursing, whenever they renovate different locations).
I think that, rather than any particular field needing more people of a given gender/race/religion/whatever, we need less people who ask my SiL’s cousin “when’s the doctor going to come in, honey?” Euuh, that blonde, blue-eyed, 5’2" doll is your trauma surgeon, buddy.
No, libraries are about providing access to information - whether that information is in the form of fiction books or internet access or magazines or whatever. Each library has to take into consideration the needs and wants of the majority of their users. Libraries are not just about book. Not all of us are librarians because we “Love books” but because we love information or people, or whatever. Sure, I read, and I enjoy reading. I love the way this field is changing - and it is not a men v women thing as VCO3 implies, but a generational thing in many (though not all) cases.
Unfortunately, you’re not the only user of your library. There are any number of other users out there - how are your desires more important than theirs? Or theirs more important than yours? It comes down to numbers. How many want X and how many want Y? And honestly, this whole debate is one reason why I am not a public librarian. I like my ivory tower and academia, thank you.
And since this is not the topic of this thread, I need to slide from this hijack. I’m in transit, so while I’ll check in, it won’t be until late this evening.
And the second I lobby my city legislature to remove all the AV equipment* from libraries, you’ll have an excellent point. In the meantime, I don’t think you have any evidence that my desires are more important than anyone else’s.
*Which isn’t what I want anyway - I don’t mourn the inclusion of new information technology, I mourn the loss of the books. Two different issues.
More women in the engineering field would be good. And more guys taking up nursing too.
I read the whole back-and-forth discussion and you can add me to WhyNot’s viewpoint. I am not legislating any changes, either, and I also mourn the loss of books. I don’t like all the computers and DVDs and modern crap all over my library. Maybe it’s necessary, maybe it’s what the people want, but I’m still sad about it.
The heirarchy of the Catholic Church. The sex abuse scandal would have been crushed in its infancy if more women had known what was going on.
(By “scandal” I mean the actual abuse, not the coverup of it.)
Do people respond to these sign changes with “Oh, Gawd, cut it with the politically correct b…s… already!?!” like they do when signs and vocabulary are updated to be inclusive of women? Thanks for sharing this example.
I agree with nursing, early education, and mechanics. Also, senior levels of faculty are still surprisingly segregated by traditional sex roles, IME.
Elementary education. There are so many boys and girls who desperately need positive male role models, since they don’t have them at home.
That’s part of it, but I’d argue that the larger problem is that working with young children, whether as an elementary school teacher or child care provider, is a low-pay, low-status occupation. At the same time, because it’s such a feminized profession, teaching is one of the few careers I can think of where women aren’t penalized for taking time off to stay home with their own children, which I think makes it a more appealing option for many women.
The “namby-pamby, outdated state of modern libraries” couldn’t have anything to do with public libraries being underfunded, now could it?.. Nah, it’s just 'cause there’s too many stoopid girls working there.
Right, because females in the Catholic Church have never done anything to be ashamed of.
Agreeing with nursing. I think it’s improving, though. I see more and more guys in my classes. I always see a female NP for my “women’s health appointments,” and I think it should be an option for men to see a male nurse if they prefer, too.
Anyone want to take a stab at why females have successfully integrated into MD programs, but male nurses are still such a minority?
I have never understood the “loss of the books” argument. The books are still there and the books still dominate the materials budget and all shelving considerations.
There are somewhere on the order of 80,000 - 100,000 books, a full encyclopedia set updated every year and subscriptions to about 100 magazines. All very traditional library stuff.
Then you look at the AV racks. We have around 2,000 videos, 4,500 music CDs, 3,000 DVDs and 200 PS2 games. The “footprint” of the shelving required for these items is also less than 10% relative to the size of the shelving given to the books.
Books on Tape/CD, which obviously straddle this line, come in at about 500 - 1,000 items total.
So tell me, where did all of the books go if they dominate EVERYTHING?
Gaming. Sometimes when I am playing a PC or video game or reading a gaming mag or visiting a gaming website/message board, I feel like I stepped back in time to about 1962.
It’s like the last bastion of sexism. Seriously, if I think about it too much, it ruins the hobby for me.
This does not describe my local libraries at all. My local libraries are the only ones I’m bitching about.
Now I understand. I’m sorry.
My library is small, but we have a lot of bright people who know how to create a great library with little money. And then they let a young guy like me go crazy with some of the more “modern” touches and it seems like everybody is happy. Happy about the materials anyway, the building is another story.
My current ambition is to add an AIM Reference Desk to our homepage. Slow going so far.