Reading · Excuse My Whimsy

I love a good steak with the devotion of a woman whose budget has made other plans.

This is why I am not above being lured to a “complimentary dinner” about “financial opportunities.” I understand the exchange. I surrender ninety minutes of my life to a man with too much confidence and a slide deck, and in return, I receive a cut of meat I did not purchase. What this exchange lacks in dignity, it makes up for in dinner.

Unfortunately, I was handed the wrong script for the most recent “free meal for my future financial compliance.” It was not the larger gathering where we all dutifully sat in rows in a restaurant’s party room facing a slideshow. This was a more intimate gathering of about twenty people, where two financial gurus in matching purple suits tried to make nice with each potential client one at a time.

I am a public librarian. I pride myself on my exceptional conversational abilities. I can talk to eighty-year-old women about new crochet patterns, preschoolers about big feelings and walking feet, and even do reader’s advisory for the most sullen of teens. When it comes to conversing, I have no fear.

So when the bright-eyed man in the purple suit came to my table grinning, I wiped the drippings of the French food I was gorging myself on off my face and matched his smile. He started with the universal break-the-ice American question of asking what I did for a living. I suppose he hoped I would answer that I was a fabulously wealthy socialite with simply no idea how to manage my large fortune, but I live to disappoint.

I started with the safe answer of librarian. He asked me what college I worked for, and I corrected that I was actually a children’s librarian at a public library. In an instant, I saw his future financial dreams for me vanish, and something akin to horror filled his eyes, as if I had admitted my favorite thing to do with cash was burn it.

“Wait,” he said, as if his mind could not process who had let me into this carefully organized room, “people actually get paid for that? I thought libraries were like all volunteers.”

He received my kindest and fakest customer-service smile.

“Oh, no,” I said. “We’re professionals. It’s actually a competitive field. Most of us have a master’s degree.”

He made a small comment about learning something new. Then he quietly reaffirmed that the library was not run by kind women who wandered in the door and asked to work with children and books. At the first opportunity, he extracted himself from the conversation for more financially promising ground.

I finished my steak tartare and left, but the conversation stayed with me.

The man obviously wanted my business. That was fine and acknowledged going into the meal. It is a weird social custom for a free steak. But he was not an uneducated man. A man who picks a purple suit to wear must have been exposed to some kind of arts and culture at some point, I presume.

But why in the world did he think my job, the thing I put my full heart, soul, and mind into, was some form of casual volunteer position?

The easy answer is sexism. The more uncomfortable answer is sexism built around the presumption that women just love to give.

Library work is overwhelmingly women’s work. According to the Department for Professional Employees, women accounted for 89.2 percent of librarians and 84.2 percent of library assistants in 2024. Women also made up 82.5 percent of Master of Library Science graduates in the 2021–2022 academic year. This is not incidental. The field is feminized at the point of training, hiring, public perception, and daily labor.

And feminized work has a funny way of disappearing as work.

The cruelest trick of feminized work is that it makes exploitation sound like a virtue.

It tells women that patience is natural to them, service is instinctive, and care is not a skill but a temperament. It suggests that if the work involves children, books, art, memory, community, or culture, then love should be compensation enough. And if a worker admits she wants more than meaning, she risks being treated as if she has failed the moral test of the work itself.

I am speaking first from library work because that is where I work now, but libraries are not alone in this. Museums, archives, and other cultural institutions occupy the same strange part of public imagination. They are beloved, underfunded, feminized, and treated as if devotion were part of the job description. The public sees the softness of the materials and mistakes it for the softness of the labor. Picture books, puppets, storytime scarves, summer reading logs, archival boxes, exhibit labels, and museum gift shops all create the impression of a gentle world staffed by gentle women who simply wandered in one day and began helping.

But public libraries are not staffed by volunteers who like books. Museums are not staffed by dreamy people who like old things. These are professional fields, and they are often remarkably competitive ones.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics lists a master’s degree as the typical entry-level education for librarians and library media specialists. It also reports that the median annual wage for librarians and library media specialists was $64,320 in May 2024. Librarian employment is projected to grow only 2 percent from 2024 to 2034, slower than the average for all occupations.

That is where the competitiveness enters.

My own path into this work was not evidence that the field is easy to enter. It was evidence of how narrow the doorway can be. I got my first library experience at my college library, which gave me the practical background to be taken seriously later. Then I secured a highly competitive, front-facing museum job because my local museum was restaffing after COVID. That timing mattered. I did not enter cultural work because libraries and museums were desperate to hand paid positions to anyone who loved books, history, or art. I entered because I had already found one small opening, then another, and then a once-in-a-century disruption gave me a rare opportunity.

This is often how feminized cultural work functions. From the outside it looks soft and accessible. The inside of feminized work is often a maze of credentials, timing, prior experience, and just plain luck.

People outside the field often misunderstand library work in two opposite directions at once. They think it is easy enough to be done by a nice volunteer, and yet desirable enough that actual professionals should feel grateful to do it. The result is a strange little trap. The job is undervalued because people do not understand it, but the field is competitive because enough people do understand it and still want in.

Museums live in the same contradiction. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says archivists, curators, and conservators typically need a master’s degree in a field related to their position. Museum technicians typically need a bachelor’s degree, and experience gained through internships or volunteering is considered helpful. Yet the median annual wage for archivists, curators, and museum workers was $57,100 in May 2024. Museum technicians and conservators had a median annual wage of $47,460.

That is a lot of education, experience, polish, and devotion for wages that do not always match the requirements of the field.

The American Alliance of Museums has named this problem with unusual bluntness. In an essay called “The Museum Sacrifice Measure,” Elizabeth Merritt writes that museum wages are depressed because there is “an oversupply of highly qualified people willing to underbid each other” in exchange for the non-financial benefits of museum work.

That phrase should make everyone in a cultural field sit up a little straighter.

That is the quiet arrangement holding the whole thing together. The job is meaningful. The work is beautiful. The mission is real. And because the mission is real, workers are expected to accept less.

Less money. Less security. Less authority. Less staffing. Less protection from burnout. Less permission to want what workers in other fields are allowed to want without shame.

In male-coded competitive fields, ambition is often allowed to call itself ambition. In female-dominated fields, ambition has to present itself as helpfulness. Competition does not always look like sharp elbows and corner offices. Sometimes it looks like who can stay late without complaining. Who can run the most programs on the smallest budget. Who can be most cheerful through understaffing. Who can make the institution look warm, competent, and magical while quietly absorbing the cost in their body.

Who loves the work enough to do more for less?

That kind of competition is harder to name because it does not always look like competition. It looks like dedication. It looks like being a team player. It looks like loving the work enough to absorb the shortage yourself. The problem is not women. The problem is what happens when fields dominated by women are built around scarcity and then moralized until nobody is supposed to admit they are competing for work that is skilled, necessary, and worthy of real compensation.

When there are too few full-time positions, too many credentialed applicants, too many part-time jobs, too many “opportunities” that require unpaid experience, and too much rhetoric about passion, ordinary professional desires become threatening. Wanting a raise feels ungrateful. Wanting a promotion feels selfish. Wanting manageable workloads feels like not caring enough about the mission.

The mission becomes a muzzle.

This is especially strange because libraries and museums are civic institutions built around value. We exist to say that books matter. Children matter. History matters. Art matters. Memory matters. Public access matters. Community matters. The past matters. The future matters.

And yet the people doing that work are often asked, implicitly or explicitly, to prove that they believe in those values by accepting less than the work is worth.

That is the part that stayed with me after the purple-suited financial man walked away. Not just that he did not understand what I did. People misunderstand jobs all the time. I do not understand hedge funds, but I remain confident someone is getting paid too much to do them.

What stayed with me was the assumption underneath his question.

“People actually get paid for that?”

As if work associated with books and children and women and public good naturally belonged outside the economy. As if a library could be run on niceness. As if professional skill became less professional the moment it was attached to care.

But niceness does not build a collection. Love does not catalog a database. Good intentions do not plan a storytime, manage a budget, preserve an archive, answer a reference question, calm an angry patron, design an exhibit, teach information literacy, run summer reading, troubleshoot the printer, evaluate sources, or help a child believe the library is a place where they belong.

Those things are work.

Beautiful work, yes. Meaningful work, yes. Sometimes even sacred work.

But still work.

And the measure of work is not whether someone loves it enough to endure being underpaid. Love may explain why people stay. It should not be the reason they are asked to accept less.

Underpaid, Overqualified, and Smiling

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