Recently I mentioned to someone that the library speaker circuit is male-dominated, and she was surprised to hear it. It’s certainly a thing that feels overwhelming from the inside — I’ve been part of a 40% female speaker lineup in front of a 90% female audience — but maybe it’s not as much of a thing as I think?

Well. I counted speaker diversity at LITA Forum once; I can count keynote speakers at big library conferences too.

The takeaway: not as bad as I thought gender-wise but still pretty bad for a field that’s 80% female — except, oddly, library technology does better than the average. On the other hand, if you’re looking for non-white keynoters…it’s pretty bad.

In national-scale US/Canadian library conferences…

• 43% of speakers are female.
• 74% of speakers are white, 14% black, 7% Asian, 4% Hispanic.

In national-scale US/Canadian library technology conferences…

• 57% of speakers are female.
• 71% of speakers are white, 0% black, 21% Asian, 7% Hispanic.(Ouch. I did not want to type that zero.)

A nice surprise

I honestly didn’t expect library tech to do better than the average, gender-wise. This is partly a function of tiny little sample size – only 14 keynoters. But it’s also a reminder that a few people can have a lot of leverage. A big part of what you’re seeing here is that code4lib decided to care: code4lib members went out of their way to nominate female keynoters, and keynoters who can speak to feminist issues, and in the open vote that ensued, the two winners were female. LibTechConf organizers went out of their way to solicit diverse speakers, too. And either of them alone tips the scale to majority female keynoters in libtech.

Thanks, code4lib and LibTechConf. You’re awesome.

Details

I was looking specifically at keynote speakers — the ones who get invited, paid, and put on a stage in front of the full audience. The ones we showcase as representatives of our values and interests; the ones we value most, metaphorically and literally. The ones we ask.

Not everyone uses the term “keynote”; I also counted “opening/closing general session”, “plenary”, and (in the case of ALA Midwinter, which lacks all of those things) “auditorium speaker series”.

I looked at the most recent iteration of the following conferences:

AALL, AASL, Access, ACRL, ALA Annual, ALA Midwinter, ALSC national institute, ASIS&T, code4lib, DLF, LibTechConf, LITA Forum, MLA, OLA Super Conference, OLITA Digital Odyssey, PLA, and SLA. (YALSA’s Symposium doesn’t seem to have keynoters.)

That’s pretty much what I thought of off the top of my head, biased toward libtech since that’s where I have the most awareness. Happy to add more and update accordingly!

Reminder: why I do this

This is what I ask: when you walk into a room, count. Count the women. Count the people of color. Count by race. Look for who isn’t there. Look for class signs: the crooked teeth of childhoods without braces, worn-out shoes, someone else who is counting. Look for the queers, the older people, the overweight. Note them, see them, see yourself looking, see yourself reacting.

This is how we begin.

— Quinn Norton, Count

This is what I ask: when you walk into a room, count. Count the women. Count the people of color. Count by race. Look for who isn’t there. Look for class signs: the crooked teeth of childhoods without braces, worn-out shoes, someone else who is counting. Look for the queers, the older people, the overweight. Note them, see them, see yourself looking, see yourself reacting.

This is how we begin.

— Quinn Norton, Count

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I’m on the planning committee for LITA Forum 2013. And months ago I thought, I should count up my best guesses as to speaker race and sex and library type for the last few years of Forum, use it as a baseline, see where we are with diversity, and if we do better this year.

And then I counted up 2012 and it was too depressing for me to do 2011 and I couldn’t figure out how to even talk about it because this stuff is so inflammatory, so I wrote a draft I never posted and drank some whiskey. And then Twitter brought me Quinn Norton today. And so, I count.

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Method: the terribly error-prone, but what I’ve got, best guess. Names. LinkedIn and Twitter and staff directory photos. As you can see from numbers not adding up to 100 I did not always have a guess.

I took the race categories from ALA data for the sake of comparison. It counts Hispanic separately from other categories, which both makes sense and makes me feel this horrible gnawing stomach feeling at having erased a whole swath of experiences, not that I could have at all reliably guessed from people’s LinkedIn photos anyway. I bet I’ve both undercounted nonwhite speakers, and undercounted them in precisely the same way most people would if they were at Forum and saw a sea of white-looking faces.

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The thing is, we care. Then-LITA-president Zoe Stewart-Marshall, who’s ex officio on the Forum 2013 committee, specifically charged us with caring. Many of us have explicitly said we care about diversity. I know that I went out of my way to brainstorm speakers outside LITA’s usual white-academic bailiwick, to extend invitations outside it, to ask others to.

But the committee is also, when you get right down to it, overwhelmingly white and academic, and maybe replicating ourselves is what we know how to do, maybe that’s how homophily works, maybe caring isn’t good enough.

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I remain proud to represent this organization, but I am not proud of this part. I want to represent more of you, and better. If you are willing, I ask that you tell me how. Maybe even at Forum, in person. I’ll buy you drinks. And give you feedback on your talk proposals for next year.

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We care. But, for sure, caring isn’t good enough. Tomorrow I will want solutions. Today I’ve drained my whiskey counting up these numbers and I’m going to go get more.