003. The Ladies Coalition

Our daughters' daughters will adore us!

Triggered by one of the discussion questions in Libr559 (“is there a participatory ‘gender divide’?”), I recently set out to explore questions of gender in the use of social media (both quality and quantity). It surprises me that I never considered gender through this lens before, since I think about feminist issues 50% of the day and engage with social media the other 50%: surely there would have been a head-on collision at some point? I’ve used social media as a platform for gender debates (oh, countless times!) but I’ve ignored it as an explicit vehicle for gender issues, in and of itself. All that, though, is about to change, ladies and gents … !

I didn’t find as much material on this topic as I thought it would, which makes me suspect I’m not the only overlooking the gender side of this zeitgeist (perhaps a commentary in and of itself?).  There is this Bloomberg Businessweek article from 2008, which goes pretty in-depth prophesying that women will continue to use social media more avidly than men, which will result in social media platforms geared right towards the fairer sex, and so the snowball will keep growing. The arguments presented here may be based on statistics in some part, but also seem to draw on the same winky, essentialist bon-mots that your aunt loves forwarding to your inbox. I.e., young men don’t enjoy social media as much because they’re playing video games, while women enjoy nothing more than being friendly and decorating their profiles with adorbs photos of baby animals. Another hypothesis is that young men use social networking socially only when it involves sex, which means that they typically stop using social networking once they’re married (or at least you HOPE they do, amirite, ladies? … ugh).

The following block of text is particularly revealing:

‘… We expect men to keep gravitating to transactional sites, such as those that make gaining access to news, sports, and financial information easier.

Women’s behavior online, on the other hand, is less transactional and more relationship-driven. They spend more time on social networks building relationships, communicating with friends, and making new friends. … And because they use social networks to be social, a dollar spent marketing to acquire a female user goes a lot further than on a male user.’

I advise taking this article with a grain of salt. It has some compelling points, but even those are hindered by a lack of awareness. For instance, the article does point out, in wide-eyed earnestness, that there aren’t many female execs behind the social media world, disproportionate to the high numbers of female users. Ya think?! In my feminism & librarianship course this summer, we’ve discussed how Melvil Dewey initially established the field as a female-intensive one because of certain “feminine” traits: i.e., sociability, gentility, organization, helpfulness. And, just as much, their presumed willingness to work without much pay. To this day, librarianship is haunted by a potent mix of being cast as a “feminine” profession and that very femininity being seen as less worthwhile than other professions. Librarians tend to receive lower pay than other careers with similar education requirements, for example, and the refrain of “You had to go to school for that?!” is a scourge on librarians everywhere.

My fear is that a similar mindset will take place here. Already, we are assuming that women are more likely to use social media because of their “friendlier” natures: they want to build networks while men want to gain access and perform transactions.  If social media and librarianship are both undervalued by society, due to their “feminine” qualities, then maybe their partnership will suffer the same downfalls: not being taken seriously, not receiving the same amount of funding, or perhaps seen as superfluous or embarrassing by male patrons, creating an inequality in patron use. Since libraries are intended to be democratic and accessible, it would be a disadvantage for everyone if male patrons excluded themselves from a growing aspect of library services.

But the cloud has – wait for it! – a silver lining. Perhaps social media as used in libraries is, ideally, a blend of all these activities, the “masculine” and the “feminine” : access to knowledge, practical transactions, and also creating a strong sense of community and trust. Social media is a merger of technology and community, a blend of “masculine” and “feminine.” Hopefully, by using social media effectively, the gender boundaries will begin to blur, to show the value in “feminine” aspects of social media as well as encouraging male patrons to participate regardless of gender. One of the beautiful things about an online environment is its sense of a new frontier, of reassembling our identities, and whether or not we want to take old gender binaries into this new world is an important question. Social media in libraries can’t answer the question on its own, but it can provide a safe, useful, respectful, and pragmatic environment for these skills to unfold (as a supplement to the more informal spaces on the web).