Law Librarian Status as Gender Equity Issue
There's been much written about gender bias in legal writing and how legal writing instructors inhabit what is referred to as the " pink ghetto " of the legal academy (see, e.g., here , here , here , and here ). The pink ghetto of the legal academy refers to the lower status, lower paid positions that women often occupy. What's interesting is that law librarians are often left out of this discussion (though, not always ). Historically, law librarianship has been a field dominated by women. In the 1999-2000 academic year, for example, 52 percent of law school library directors were women (up from 44 percent in 1994-95). ' In 1999, 67 percent of all academic law librarians were women. If directors were subtracted from that figure, the female percentage of nondirector librarians would be substantially higher than 67 percent. Historical statistics on law library directors are instructive in another way. In 1950, 55 percent of the directors were women, but