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Another library with a "boys only" program is getting attention thanks to a tweet from Shannon Hale; the same day, a library student working on a research project asked me my opinion on programs only for boys.
I understand getting anxious about boys not coming to library programs! I understand being concerned when boys have lower rates of pleasure reading and lower grades in school! (Although to be fair a lot of that reading discrepancy goes away when you look at all kinds of reading, including nonfiction, comics, and web content, and not just things like novels.) It does sometimes happen that a specific clique comes to dominate library programming and anyone on the outside feels unwelcome, and it's conceivable that programs like this one were created to disrupt that dynamic. BUT. Once you are literally saying "no girls allowed" you have crossed over to the dark side. You need to figure out some solutions that do not depend on excluding people who often already feel excluded from STEM-related stuff.
And you really have to think about what message you're sending to trans kids, non-gender-conforming kids, everybody who gets marginalized just by the fact that there's this barrier between 'girl things' and 'boy things.'
Sometimes librarianship is frustrating because you can't fix THE WHOLE CULTURE but it feels awful to just submit to it: not just this heinous divide between 'girl books' and 'boy books,' but also things like this past weekend's "Star Wars Reads Day," when I am all curmudgeonly and no matter how much I like Star Wars I feel really weird about corporate synergy with a giant media conglomerate. At some point you have to make the case that part of librarianship SHOULD be standing up against what's broken in the culture instead of just going along with it because it makes your attendance numbers look better.
I understand getting anxious about boys not coming to library programs! I understand being concerned when boys have lower rates of pleasure reading and lower grades in school! (Although to be fair a lot of that reading discrepancy goes away when you look at all kinds of reading, including nonfiction, comics, and web content, and not just things like novels.) It does sometimes happen that a specific clique comes to dominate library programming and anyone on the outside feels unwelcome, and it's conceivable that programs like this one were created to disrupt that dynamic. BUT. Once you are literally saying "no girls allowed" you have crossed over to the dark side. You need to figure out some solutions that do not depend on excluding people who often already feel excluded from STEM-related stuff.
And you really have to think about what message you're sending to trans kids, non-gender-conforming kids, everybody who gets marginalized just by the fact that there's this barrier between 'girl things' and 'boy things.'
Sometimes librarianship is frustrating because you can't fix THE WHOLE CULTURE but it feels awful to just submit to it: not just this heinous divide between 'girl books' and 'boy books,' but also things like this past weekend's "Star Wars Reads Day," when I am all curmudgeonly and no matter how much I like Star Wars I feel really weird about corporate synergy with a giant media conglomerate. At some point you have to make the case that part of librarianship SHOULD be standing up against what's broken in the culture instead of just going along with it because it makes your attendance numbers look better.