[WEB4LIB] Re: "Imagining the Internet" predictions database

[Karen Coyle]

On Tue, 2005-01-11 at 13:54, Lars Aronsson wrote:

> 
> If you were to look for the real Internet pioneers (in the 1970s and
> 1980s), I'm afraid it would be hard to find as many as 10 % who are
> not white men.  How many IETF RFC authors are women, for example?  Or
> colored?  Has anybody counted?  When did ARPA/DARPA or the NSF start
> to require that funded projects are equal opportunity employers?

There have actually been many studies of the position of women and
minorities in science and engineering, and a good round-up of them can
be found at:
  http://www.mills.edu/ACAD_INFO/MCS/SPERTUS/Gender/wom_and_min.html

It's not just that there are few of them, but that they tend not to be
in the lists of "who's who" when one's pre-conception is that engineers
and scientists are white men. They also tend to get less recognition in
their own time. 

I shocked many audiences by describing the University of California's
MELVYL system, considered one of the most advanced in the early and
mid-eighties, as having been created by women. The majority of our staff
was always female -- about 75%. But people had a hard time seeing it as
something that women did, partly because at the time it was a real feat
of engineering. Yet if the statistics had been reversed, if the Director
was a woman but most of the staff was male, it would still have been
seen as "made by men." 

I would really like for us the library field to find a way to make it
clear that women are creating a lot of the technology used by libraries.
I don't know how we make that visible to users, but unless we do the
assumption will continue to be that men do technology and women show
people where the bathroom is.

(Note: the majority of novels in the 19th century US were written by
women, but the lists of "best books" are primarily of male authors. So
either women are incompetent as novelists, though best-sellers in their
time, or there is an issue of recognition on the part of those who
construct the lists. There are similar issues in science.)

kc

> 
> Go to www.ietf.org and click "gender issues".  Haha, just kidding.
> 
> Do indexing services like OCLC, Engineering Index or CiteSeer analyze
> the gender or racial profiles of various branches of science?  Could
> they?  Should they?
> 
> I'm painfully aware that when I'm digitizing engineering journals from
> the 1870s ( http://runeberg.org/tektid/ ), I'm perpetuating the
> historic male dominance in that field.  Should I just stop, and do
> something else instead?  Should I limit myself to fashion magazines?
> Or perhaps I make it easier for young women to cultivate an interest
> in engineering by making these old journals more easily available?
> 
> As I deal in public domain works, I look for writers who died more
> than 70 years ago.  Of the 97 Nordic Authors listed who died in 1934,
> only 21 are women.  That's more than 10 percent, but it's far from
> equal.  http://runeberg.org/search.pl?dead=1934
-- 
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Karen Coyle
Digital Library Specialist
http://www.kcoyle.net
Ph: 510-540-7596 Fax: 510-848-3913
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