By Michele Leber

The gender-based wage gap is real. And it continues to hit library workers in the pocketbook.

Women, Work, and Wages, a 1981 report from the National Research Council, noted: “Not only do women do different work than men, but... the more an occupation is dominated by women the less it pays.” Recent studies have shown that this is still true.

In a profession that is approximately 80 per cent female, salaries are lower than they should be despite problems of recruitment and retention in the field. But discrimination was built into library pay scales in the latter part of the 19th century, when library leaders including Melvil Dewey recruited women as a cheap source of literate labor and the Librarian of Congress recommended filling vacancies with women because “the resulting economy to the government would be great.” Add the societal view that men work to support a family while women work for pin money, and you have a predominantly female field with low salaries.

Other factors—notably education, experience, and time in the work force—play a part in women’s median salaries being 77 per cent of men’s in 2002. But a gap remains even accounting for these factors, indicating that jobs held by women (and people of color) are paid less simply because of the people who hold those jobs. The solution to closing that gap is implementing pay equity: compensating each employer’s workers on the basis of the skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions required for their jobs.

ALA has been on record supporting pay equity since 1978, when Council adopted a resolution stating that ALA “fully supports the concept of comparable wages for comparable work, and supports all legal and legislative efforts to achieve commensurate wages for library workers...” ALA also was a charter member of the National Committee on Pay Equity (www.feminist.com/fairpay), a coalition formed in 1979 to close the wage gap.

There are arguments against pay equity:

• that the market should set salaries (yet government intervenes for the good of society, as in passing child labor and minimum wage laws and keeping Amtrak and Chrysler afloat).

• that supply and demand should set salaries (yet employers have imported nurses to meet demand and not lowered salaries of highway patrol officers when the supply of applicants was high).

• that it costs too much (yet Minnesota phased in pay equity for state employees in the 1980s over a period of four years at a cost of 3.7 per cent of its total payroll).

• that comparing different jobs is like comparing apples and oranges, an argument that HR professionals particularly should reject.

Different jobs can be compared, and library jobs need to be compared not just with those of adjoining or similar libraries—because all library salaries are depressed—but with other jobs paid by the same employer. Library job descriptions need to be carefully written to take out library jargon, to describe the purpose of the work and not just the process (for instance, “providing pre-literacy training, “ not just “presenting a story hour “), and to stress that library workers are knowledge workers dealing with an increasing number of formats.

In 2001 David Orenstein, Manager of Libraries at Montgomery College, MD, began working closely with the college’s Office of Human Resources to do three major edits of his staff’s Job Information Questionnaires, the administrative tool in use to evaluate and classify all college staff in terms of work and pay. He stressed that library workers used their expertise to promote access to information in multiple formats to provide students and other users with the best resources, services, and assistance - and a year later HR recommended increasing both the salary and classification of most of the library staff. While he is still working to raise the salaries of the rest of his staff, his experience is a model for library administrators and HR professionals alike.

The issue of library salaries was raised to a new height by ALA Past President Mitch Freedman, whose Task Force on Better Salaries and Pay Equity for Library Workers produced a valuable toolkit (available online at www.ala.org/Content/NavigationMenu/Our_Association/Offices/Human_Resource_Development_and_Recruitment/Library_Employment_Resources/toolkit.pdf and whose work is being continued by an APA committee chaired by Freedman.

Other actions are being taken to close the wage gap. State legislatures have acted on this issue; by mid-July, 23 states introduced 50 bills this year regarding equal pay. Federal legislation has been introduced: the Paycheck Fairness Act, which strengthens and clarifies the Equal Pay Act, and the Fair Pay Act, which parallels the Equal Pay Act but requires equal pay for work of equal value. The National Committee on Pay Equity originated Equal Pay Day, an annual event in April that symbolizes how far into the year a woman must work to make what a man earned the previous year. (Both Equal Pay Day and National Library Workers’ Day will be on April 20, 2004.)

All library workers are urged to support pay equity efforts, but HR professionals are in a unique position to help raise library salaries now. Keep in mind the words of the late Father Timothy Healey, president of New York Public Library: “The most important asset of any library goes home at night—the library staff.” And much as everyone loves libraries, library workers can’t live on love alone.