Note: This post was a request from a few other posters from another thread on Ovarit.

I work as a librarian. I finished my graduate degree almost 10 years ago. I've compiled a list of stories that I've loosely gathered into sections. I'm looking to leave the field because of genderwoo nonsense, misogyny, and exploitation in this field. I have tons of stories I could tell but I tried to keep this as brief as possible.

Thank you for reading.

WOMEN SHOULD BE HAPPY TO TAKE ON THE ROLE OF CAREGIVER...

While in graduate school, librarians usually choose to focus on a particular area of expertise: children, special collections, public librarianship, etc. I remember definitely not wanting to work in public librarianship after most of an intro course discussion was about how to administer narcan to (mostly male) drug addicts, how we needed to monitor bathrooms and what to do about (mostly male, homeless) sleeping patrons. Did I sign up to be a librarian or a social worker? Librarianship is a female-dominated field. We need master’s degrees to do our jobs. Most of us got into this field because of our love of literature/information and yet somehow, we've been reduced to tending to the care of dangerous men.

So, I decided I would focus on children's librarianship because adult men without children would not be allowed in the children's area so I wouldn't need to deal with them. Through pure luck, I ended up specializing in special collections and have mostly worked in universities HOWEVER, I wonder what kind of hell I would be in if I did go the children's route and had to deal with drag queen story hour, transgender children’s books, etc. I definitely dodged a bullet there.

But it just occurred to me the other day, that no one seems to care that mostly female librarians are left to deal with mentally unstable patrons and drug addicted patrons, the vast majority of which are male.

The female leaders in this field seem to see it as a given that we should look to our new role as caregivers as a positive thing. When I expressed concerns to them about the vulnerability of female librarians in these situations, I was looked at by one female colleague like I was crazy.

To many of my female colleagues I was a cold-hearted bitch because I didn't want to learn how to administer Narcan.

I was overreacting about the dangers of having to be in an enclosed space like a single-user bathroom with an overdosing man.

One time at our annual conference, one of the female bathrooms had a piece of copy paper over the woman in the skirt icon and someone had written with a marker: all genders welcome. A female librarian did this. And only for the female bathroom.

I'm not a librarian, I'm a hostess to low-value men: Welcome into my home, can I get you anything? Some drugs? Access to hardcore porn? Welcome into my bathroom, please take one of my used tampons to masturbate with! It's okay, I don't mind, I'm not a regular girl, I'm a cool girl.

FEMALE-DOMINATED...BUT NOT AT THE TOP!

The higher you go up in this field, the less female dominated it is.

I have worked for men that did not have a required MLS; I have never worked for a woman who didn't have an MLS.

Story time: At one point, I worked for a small university where we had a director (male), a head librarian (female), and one full-time librarian (me). The head librarian was someone who I wanted to emulate my career after, she was fantastic, and the place couldn't run without her. The director was a loser slacker. He didn't even have an MLS. Then there were budget cuts for us, but not him. Her job was given a pay cut, mine was reduced to part-time. The head librarian ended up leaving because she found a better paying job and I remember saying to him, "Anna handled a lot around here, I'm sure you're sad to see her go." And he said, "Yeah, but I'll just get another Anna. Anna was just the new Julie and Julie was just the new Sarah. I'm not worried." My mouth was agape. All these hard-working women were just interchangeable to him.

LOW SALARIES

Like most female-dominated fields, librarians are overworked and underpaid. However, unlike most female-dominated fields, the bare minimum here is you have at least one master’s degree. And we're basically told in school to be prepared to live in a state of perpetual underemployment with occasional bouts of borderline poverty unless you have a spouse or parents to support you. And we were all supposed to be okay with it. No one is fighting it, it's never the topic of discussion during our annual conferences, internal news articles, etc. The "pride" of being able to help a skeevy man access porn or rescue another one from overdosing in the bathroom was supposed to pay our rent? To speak of salaries is considered crass.

We're constantly told to do more with less, and no one seems to object. They just take on the job of three people with no salary increase. So many women in this field accept peanuts because they worry about disrupting the overall organizational budget if they ask for a raise or for more help to be hired. Another example of women sacrificing for the comfort of everyone else. And many do it with a smile, which drives me nuts.

FREE LABOR

As if the shitty salaries are not enough, there is the free labor disguised as "volunteering". Our professional associations have tons of committees and special groups to volunteer your time. And they're mostly all full of women. Even though there are less men in the field they are proportionally underrepresented in this area by their own doing. Anyway, these are volunteer positions, so you don't get paid but when the volunteer work you are doing is to help secure speakers and moderate workshops for the annual conference (which brings in lots of revenue), yet they don't even give you a one-day ticket to the conference as compensation? You must pay your own way to a conference you helped organize? That's exploitation. And I truly think you would never see this type of exploitation in this field if it were full of men.

**CONCLUSION **

I wanted to become a librarian because I love information. To me, access to information equals access to freedom. And I wanted to give people the tools to create a fulfilling life. I never wanted to be a caretaker for drug-addicted men, I never wanted to be a defender of pornography and woman face, and I feel lonely as hell over here on this side of the line.