The bulk of the more than 10,000 librarians attending the midwinter conference of the American Library Association in Philadelphia over the past four days have packed up and gone home. But some committed ALA members were still around this morning. About half a dozen of them—on the Committee on Status of Women in Librarianship—gathered to discuss gender-equity and other issues affecting librarians. One issue the librarians discussed was pay. They want the ALA to allow job advertisements in the group’s American Libraries magazine and other publications only if the postings include minimum and maximum pay offered. The librarians said it’s difficult for their colleagues to negotiate with employers for higher salaries without this information.
But many employers, particularly academic institutions, refuse to include this information in their job postings. Some of the librarians said the ALA is reluctant to force colleges to include salary ranges for fear they will pull their ads, thus reducing the library association’s advertising revenue. The women’s group wants to push the ALA’s governing body, though, not to be cowed by higher-education institutions on this issue.
The women’s group also is concerned that speakers at ALA conferences are more often men than women. The group wants to gather data for the past several years on the gender of conference speakers and see if its suspicion is true. —Andrea L. Foster
2 Responses to Librarians Push for Pay Data in Job Postings
gasstationwithoutpumps - September 12, 2011 at 12:01 pm
“Inistigation” is a high-risk activity. There is a reason that fewer than 1 in 20 start-ups lasts 5 years. As a society,we may need more “instigation” in higher ed, but who pays for the risk?
Community colleges are popular because they are cheap, not because they are good (though a few of them are). The “higher-education bubble” has to do with the pricing of education, more than with the product. In California, the cheapness of community college is going away, as the state funding for higher education has been repeatedly slashed over the past decade. It remains to be seen whether the traditional sources of reducing the cost of education (not paying teachers a living wage and increasing class sizes) will bring down the community-college system.
Robert Talbert - September 12, 2011 at 2:15 pm
Thanks for the comment. I would say that pricing always has something to do with the quality of the product. If the general public (or the private sector) had a widespread feeling that a typical university education provided a high quality relative to its price, then I doubt there would be a “higher ed bubble”. Indeed, I think that feeling was fairly widespread until just recently. People don’t mind paying a high price for something that is a proven commodity. But when the quality comes into question, so does the price and so does the willingness of the consumer to pay for it.
I get the sense that community colleges are expanding not only because they are cheaper — which they are — but because the perceived quality of CC education is equal to or even greater than that of a traditional university education, at least in the first year or two of study. Note I say “perceived”.