Museums, the Gender Question and You

Connecticut League of History Organizations (CLHO) annual meeting. In November, Anne and I, along with our friend Marieke Van Damme, go to the New England Museum Association's (NEMA) annual meeting. According to the Bureau of Labor statistics if we could put everyone who works for a museum in one place, there would be 353,000 of us. If given a binary choice--46.7-percent of us--would identify as women. At meetings and conferences like CLHO, NEMA and huge events like AAM, there are a lot of women, and that visual makes many people believe our gender issues are solved. Done. Finished. There are so many women, what's to complain about? We've arrived. Life is good. We don't believe that's true, and before we say why, indulge us. We're going to digress. Every week new readers find this blog. As its writers and designers, our focus is on what we've written most recently, but readers troll the archives looking for topic headings that interest them. Sometimes they comment. This week we received a comment from a women in response to the post "Can Museum Women Have It All?" It's a heart breaker. If you're inclined, you can scroll the 21 other comments for that post, some funny, some angry, some hoping for change. And if you've read it, you're probably thinking, this woman's problems are her own and don't have anything to do with her job, whether it's in museums or not. Yes. Sort of. Yet a field with notoriously poor salaries, especially for women, and more particularly, weak benefit packages, can leave anyone with family responsibilities (and I don't just mean children) on the ropes. Here's what we believe about the gender question. A growth in population in a particular field doesn't mean a problem is solved. Open doors don't mean as much as we want them to--just think about museums and race. Fine to say we hire everyone, but oh, guess what? You need a graduate degree? How hard is that? Very, depending on your circumstances, and whether it's intended to or not, it acts as a sifting mechanism. But back to gender. A surfeit of women simply means more women in the late twentieth century invested in graduate school and found the museum field, but it doesn't guarantee job equity, no siree. Think things are good where you work? Maybe they are. But ask yourself if your museum has the following:

An organizational values statement.
A board that has ever discussed any aspect of gender for any reason--organization, staff, exhibitions, board composition.
An open salary scale, committed to avoiding bias and to equitable pay.
Vacation and personal time off that allow staff to care for families and themselves when they are ill.
Paid maternity and paternity leaves that allow parents to compete more equally in the job market.
A private space for nursing mothers that's not a bathroom stall.
Flex time for staff. After reading that list is the thought bubble over your head full of --but we have no money for paid leave, and my board would never discuss gender; it wouldn't know how, and how can you have an open salary scale when your staff is tiny, and, and, and? Stop. Is it so radical to think about making museum human resources the center of a conversation? How might your workplace change if staff were less stressed about family and more focused on work? Think about the time lost when staff (or young directors) leave and the organization needs to re-group, re-hire, re-train. Grapple with the idea that your organization may require a master's degree to apply, but pay less than a for-profit administrative job where a college degree isn't required. Understand that your organization will never have a diverse staff if your job advertisements and subsequent job descriptions are best suited to someone with little graduate school debt and a well-off partner who provides benefits. These are not problems you or your board will take care of in a day, a week or a month. But a willingness to acknowledge a problem and start down the path toward change will make the field better for everyone. Don't wait for business to solve this problem. Let's make museums the place that addressed the gender issue first and worked to solve it. What are you doing to make museums better, more equitable ,workplaces? Joan Baldwin