What does ‘women’s leadership’ mean?

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It occurred to me today that the phrase ‘women’s leadership’ might be more challenging than I would have have thought of, in ways I would never have thought of. Put more specifically, to some people it apparently means ‘lead like a woman’, while to me it means ‘lead while being a woman’.

I don’t know how to have it mean anything else, because I don’t think there are things I do particularly well just because I’m a woman. I think I was acculturated to behave in particular ways, and that I’ve practiced certain skills more than others, and that some of that is because I’m a woman. But mostly I think I’m a person who wants to be a leader in my field and my institution. I’m also a woman, and women have certain culturally built disadvantages when it comes to leadership in professional arenas. (Consider today’s news stories about the 50th anniversary of the Equal Pay Act for some evidence, there.) So when I see things that are directly linked to or advertised as being for “women’s leadership”, I pay attention, because I always hope that they’ll be aimed at teaching and building skills that shore up some of the gaps most women have in presenting themselves as leaders. Some of the gaps that come from being a girl in our schools, from being a young woman in our universities, from being female in our culture. And sometimes they are. Sometimes they’re awesome.

And then sometimes I’m furious.

About 4 years ago, I attended a regional women’s leadership conference for higher education. I hadn’t seen the program in depth — it wasn’t available online — but it was within driving distance, it was affordable, and the blurb read well and seemed interesting. And then I got there, checked in, and sat down for the keynote. The keynote speaker sang us a song about empowerment. And then she wanted us all to stand and sing it with her.

To which I say, “Are you fucking kidding me?” After the keynote, I quietly got up and I left. No way in hell. Would any self-respecting keynote speaker at a generalized leadership conference, either for men or for a mixed gender group, or for higher education or for business, it’s not actually relevant other than “not exclusively for women”, ask the audience to sing? As an “empowerment” action? The answer is flatly “no”. No. That would not fly.

Today I got an email, double exclamation pointed in the “priority” column, calling for registrations to this year’s version of the same conference from past attendees. It was the third or fourth I’d gotten, but today it just set my teeth on edge. I looked at the program. My teeth started to grind. And rather than continuing to (politely, kindly) letting it slide, I responded to the organizer.

Please remove me from your mailing list. I did attend, once, but I am not interested in attending again. I dislike the focus of the programming; I don’t think women should be directed to focus on the “touchy feely” parts of leadership at a gendered conference: women should be building a well-rounded leadership skill set, and I don’t feel that the programming offered here does that. Instead, by focusing on “empowerment”, “harmony”, “rejuvenation”, “reflection”, “peace”, and “fear” (all from this year’s program!), this conference reinforces a stereotype of women’s roles and “how women lead” that I find extremely distasteful, and in fact, dangerous to gender equality in the workplace. Women lead by being effective leaders with a comprehensive tookit of leadership skills, and I don’t see this conference providing that.

There are days when I look at this blog and it seems to be a record of me communicating bluntly and in ways that will get me labeled as a bitch. And when I think that, I start to backpedal. I feel awkward and acutely aware that I’m violating society’s expectation that women be peacemakers and problem solvers and nurturers, kind and gentle and willing.

And that’s precisely the goddamned problem with the “leadership conference” I’m declining to attend. By framing the day’s events around “harmony”, “rejuvenation”, “reflection”, and “peace”, all they’re doing is reinforcing the idea that women are supposed to be harmonious and peaceful, and that our strengths lie in reflection, emotional smoothing, and internalizing. That we shouldn’t be forceful, that we shouldn’t be bitchy.

Fuck that noise.

Yes, many women have strengths of character that are gendered, that are learned behaviors that result from their experiences as a woman in our world. That’s true, and those things have value, as we all do. It’s fair to say that the men of our world could also benefit from learning those things, as well-rounded people.  But telling a conference full of women to focus on those things, without addressing other tangible, practical, and often male-focused skills and traits? That’s reprehensible. That’s not about success or equality. That’s about creating a leadership culture that remains unapologetic about being gendered. That’s saying “this is how to lead if you are a woman” rather than “this is how people lead, and here are ways women may succeed or be challenged by that”.

Am I unapologetic about being a woman? You bet. That picture right there? That’s me, today, in my office. I’m wearing cosmetics, I’ve manicured my nails, I’m wearing jewelry only socially accepted on women, and I’m dressed in gender-specific cuts and styles. Andromeda Yelton reflects on the choices we make around boundaries, gender, and persona in this piece, and like her, I present as feminine — very much so. It’s identity, and it’s personal. And that choice has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not I can run a meeting, draft a strategic plan, advocate for important issues, craft an argument, sell an idea, cultivate political support, or any of the other thousand small things that make up effective leadership, because gender has very little to do with effective leadership. Yes, my leadership style is informed by my personality traits, strengths, and weaknesses, and some of those are in turn informed by my gender and our culture around femininity. But my leadership style is not limited by my gender, and I am not limited to a particular path just because I paint my nails and wear lip gloss and often default to an emotionally empathetic place. So stop trying to sell me on “harmonious empowerment” as something that’s in the domain of “women’s leadership”. I’d be the leader I am, learning and practicing the skills I’ve chosen, whether I chose feminine, gender-neutral, or masculine presentation. Because I’m a person, not a gender.

Leadership. That’s what we should care about. You want to hold a conference around empowerment, harmony, and facilitation as leadership skills? Go for it. But own it: open it to everyone and call it what it is. It’s not “Women’s Leadership”. It’s a kind of leadership, and those skills should be available to anyone who’s interested in building them, just as other kinds of leadership skills should be available to everyone. And if we’re going to care about gender as a part of the leadership argument, then we should be caring about whether or not women and all other disenfranchised people have a place at the big table with the majority, not that they build their own table out of special harmonious materials so they can feel good about something we’re falsely declaring to be innately theirs.

Start where you stand

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I don’t know when I became Anti-Establishment Publishing Lass, but I seem to have done so. (I also think that all vaguely superheroish titles should come with logos and sidekicks. Gimme.) Today’s salvo in this ongoing and protracted war for the future of information distribution came courtesy of a libraryland publisher. An editor for the press had solicited me to write a book. I would like to write a book, but I want to be sure that any decisions I make about copyright for said work lines up with the decisions I advocate other scholars make, that I demand other publishers offer, that I am interested in fostering in my own institution’s financial choices. Essentially, I’m trying not to be either a hypocrite or an asshole about the things I pronounce publicly are Good and the things I choose to do.

So, I proposed, essentially, a one-year embargo on the title, followed by open-access after that time, which I had learned was something another libraryland publisher had recently agreed to. The editor said no.

Alas. Here’s my final reply:

I understand your position, but I’m going to stick firm to mine. I don’t think that we, as librarians, can argue that publishers aren’t sufficiently exploring robust new solutions for content distribution if we continue to move our own scholarship through the same old model that is failing so many of our institutions. Our arguments about sustainability for libraries and scholars only carry the weight of respect if we stand behind them with our own actions, so that’s what I need to do. And I have to pose the question: if our own libraryland publishers can’t find a sustainable digital-age model, or experiment with new solutions to get us all there, what hope do we as librarians have of convincing the rest of the information industry? I hope you at [your press] can find a way to stand with the profession — sustainably, for your ends and ours — as we all move into our new collections future.

Start as you mean to go on, and from whatever ground you happen to be standing on. May our publishing partners find themselves willing to explore new options when presented with them, and may we find the strength in ourselves to say “No. Not on those terms” when presented with the entrenched reality.

Some things never change, and still don’t work

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On Monday I got a call from a publisher asking me to check on the renewal status of several periodicals. This is an old tactic; we don’t work directly with publishers, we work with a subscription agent, and when we cancel, the publisher often calls the library asking if we’ll please go check to see if we really truly meant to cancel that because surely we meant to renew?

We never meant to renew.

But it’s a shaming tactic, and one that relies on librarians to be the kind of eager-to-please business “partner” who says, “Oh, dear, that must have been an accident.” I’m not that librarian. Also, I’m the Director, not Collection Development Coordinator, at least update your records before you call…

And then today I got this email:

Ms. Rogers,

You recently spoke to one of my colleagues asking for a list of [our] titles that might have been cancelled.  I wanted to email you back to let you know which titles we were calling about.  This way you can reach out to your representative at EBSCO and figure out the status of each title.  Here are the titles listed below:

·         American XXXXXX XXXXXXX
·         XXXXXXXXX
·         Journal of XXXXXXX Research

Please let me know the status of the above titles.  Thanks and if you have any questions please feel free to contact me.

-Carol

This tactic should never have worked, and it won’t work with me. And I’m tired of it. So I replied:

Carol,

Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough on the phone. I am the Director of Libraries. I am not responsible for the day to day operations of our serials office, up to and including whether or not we’ve chosen to cancel a title, and I did not ask for any information. Additionally, I have the utmost confidence in both my librarians and our representatives at EBSCO. If you did not receive a renewal, it is because we chose to cancel the title. Any errors will be caught by our processes in-house. I have no question about the status of these titles, and I will not be checking on the status of these titles, as I have faith in my staff and their work. If you have a legitimate billing concern about our business relationship, please send the appropriate documentation so I might follow up with the appropriate staff.

Generally speaking, I have always viewed calls from publisher sales staff asking about the status of a subscription as cold calls in which you are attempting to “encourage” me to renew a subscription we have cancelled. I see no reason to view this call differently, and would appreciate it if you never call me without details of a legitimate financial concern again.

Best,

Jenica

Carol replied promptly with an apology and revealed the best bit of the whole thing: She doesn’t actually work for the publisher. She works for an outsourced call center that is, it appears, cold calling all the people who canceled subscriptions, and assured me that while she will ensure I don’t get any more calls during this “campaign”, she can’t promise I won’t be called by the publisher after her company has done their part. I can only assume, then, that I’m correct: the purpose of their campaign is to “encourage” libraries who’ve cancelled titles to renew them.

If you still think that by and large the publishers are our partners, and that they have anything but their own best financial interests in mind, please think again. They are not. They are not our partners, and they are not acting in the best interests of library users. They are vendors with whom we have a business relationship based on money. In this case, just one more example of that, a publisher is paying an external company to make guilt and confusion-based sales calls to libraries in an attempt to overturn our collections decisions. If this was about internal bookkeeping of subscriptions and sales, the call to “clean up” the records would come from in-house. That’s not what’s happening: this is not an internal control or customer-relations exercise. This is sales, and it’s dirty sales, too, based in an assumption that we will question our cancellation decision when asked about it directly.

No. I won’t.

You shouldn’t either. Don’t honor these calls. Don’t listen to them. Don’t spend your time following up on a sales pitch you didn’t ask for, and which directly contravenes your reasoned and rational decisions about your subscriptions and collections. Don’t play their game. Don’t let them set the terms.

Note: Names have been changed to protect the innocent, and the vendor has been obscured because I’m not in the mood to fight about it.

friends and foes

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I have lots of thinks to write about, and no time in which to write them. So, instead, please go read what Kevin Smith has to say about the amicus briefs filed in the GSU copyright case. As always, he is readable and directly on point for academic libraries:

I was interested to see that one of the parties on the amicus brief filed by the Author’s Guild was a group called the “Text and Academic Authors Association,” of which I had never heard.  Was this really an group of academic authors opposed to fair use on campus?  Well, only sort of.  The website of this oddly named group (all authors write text; I think they mean “textbook”) shows that the majority of their leadership council is made up of non-academics or retired professors, who presumably no longer need to rely on fair use for good teaching.  And the strange perspective of the group can best be judged by this article arguing that textbook prices are justified and are not too high to interfere with quality education, a perspective thoroughly debunked by nearly every study as well as by day-to-day experiences on campus.  Indeed, the only sensible way to read the article is to recognize that every “myth” it undertakes to refute represents a demonstrable fact.

and

Note how clearly these friends of the court break down between those arguing for their own private gain versus those trying to uphold a public good.  Given all the rhetoric about copyright as primarily intended to benefit the public interest in hundreds of precedents, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals cannot help, one would think, but notice this disparity.

and

The ASERL brief develops this point a bit further, partly by pointing out that the licensing market touted so highly by publishers is already harming the ability of colleges and universities to teach students.  On every campus it is easy to find stories about how the inability to get permission, either because of the prohibitive cost of licensing or because no license for the particular work was available, forced a teacher to changed his or her plans and resort to “plan B” pedagogy.  Most librarians have had to assist such faculty to find other, less optimal, resources in those situations; it is something we do well, but wish we didn’t need to do.

Go forth. Read. Learn. Identify who our friends and allies are. Identify equally well who does not have our best interests at heart as we struggle to build better libraries and better institutions of higher education. And then take that knowledge about the state of our industry and make smarter choices as a result. Please.

 

Things academic library directors are asked to engage with

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Topics on which I have had conversations and/or email communications in the last week:

  1. Open access, the state of publishing, and what libraries are doing about it.
  2. Textbooks, the cost of textbooks, and the open textbook movement, and what libraries are doing about it.
  3. Why ebooks suck and what libraries are doing about it.
  4. 3-D printers and their role in innovation and research, and what libraries are doing about it.
  5. Library policies as re: student expectations of service (in this case, “you don’t have enough computers”), and where our boundaries are on those questions.
  6. Library policies as re: faculty expectations of service (in this case, “I am dissatisfied with your collecting polices and practices”), and where our boundaries are on those questions.
  7. Massive online education, the library support needed to facilitate it, the complexities of delivering consistent services to geographically distributed and inconsistently institutionally affiliated students, and what libraries might do about it.
  8. Research compliance issues, data management for open data initiatives, and what libraries might do about it.

This job is certainly never boring.