 Good evening, good afternoon, good evening, good morning, depending on where you are. I wanted to welcome all of you. My name is Dr. Anthony Chow. I'm the director of the San Jose State University School of Information. And thank you for joining us and in our celebration and recognition of Women's Heritage Month. The theme of our symposium is Women in Information. And this is part of our new EDI series sponsored by the by the iSchool in our commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion. I'm sincerely grateful to our distinguished guests that are here with us today. So let me hand it over to our co-host, Dr. Tonya San Nicolas Roca. Hi, everyone. It is great to be here. Thank you so much for joining us today, wherever you're located. We're so excited that you are here as Anthony mentioned, we have a lot of fantastic speakers today. And again, we're just excited that you are here. We would like to introduce Shirley Liu. She is the present dean of the School of Arts and Science at Vancouver Community College and editor of Feminist Among Us, Resistance and Advocacy in Library Leadership. In 2017, she edited Feminist Among Us, Resistance and Advocacy in Library Leadership to make explicit the ways in which a grounding in feminist theory and practice impacts the work of library administrators who identify as feminist. We would like to welcome you. Thanks so much, Tonya. I am going to... Thanks for having me, everyone, and good morning. I'm going to screen share not because I got a long slideshow, but just so that I'm not a talking head. Okay, good morning, everyone. And thank you so much for that introduction. Again, my name is Shirley Liu. And as mentioned, I'm currently the dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Vancouver Community College in Vancouver, Canada. I did want to take a moment to acknowledge that I'm joining you from the unceded and traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples. The Musqueam, the Squamish, and Slavictooth First Nations and what we now call Vancouver, British Columbia. I'm really so privileged and grateful to be able to work, live, and play on these lands. So understanding this topic of women and information, when Deborah first contacted me about speaking about women and information, I thought about what this topic meant. I thought about what information means to women. I wondered how do women interact with information? How is information mediated to women? How do women find information that's important to them and retain them, retain it? And what is the relationship with information in the context of libraries and labor? I don't have answers to any of these questions, but I was struck by the topic as I've never really explored these questions posed in these ways when thinking about my own experience. I took this invitation as an opportunity to reflect on my own role, on thinking about my own experience. And the role information has had in my personal and professional life. I took the opportunity to think about what information means to me in all my intersections. As a woman, a person of color, a child of immigrant parents, and also as a person of considerable privilege as a cisgender straight in able-bodied person with emotional and financial security. When reflecting on information as a connecting thread in my life, the elements that act as key markers start with my position as a child of immigrants and the experience of cultural and linguistic dislocation. I experienced information as a student in Western educational systems from K to 12 to undergraduate and now postgraduate studies. I experienced information as a professional in the knowledge sector versus a librarian and later as a library administrator in a leadership role. I experienced information as a creator through writing and research and in the compilation of the book, as mentioned, feminist among us, resistance and advocacy in library leadership. And finally, I'm experiencing information as a doctoral student conducting research on library cooperatives and I'll talk a little bit more about that later. But through the point of all this is through this reflection, what I recognize was a lifelong dualistic relationship with information. As a student and a reader, I experienced information mediated through external systems of power and authority. For example, as a young reader, I found stories in libraries that both fueled my imagination of what was possible in life, but were also stories written by and for Western society. And I recognize that even as a young reader. Sorry, and I learned about the world through these stories but did not see myself in any of them. These stories were further mediated by the dominant language of English, whereas the language of my family was a rural dialect of Chinese only spoken behind the closed doors of our home. In other parts of my life, I experienced information mediated and created through my own intellectual, imaginative and political autonomy and agency. For example, in the writing of my chapter for Feminists Among Us, I am critical of libraries and I grapple with my relationship with power and attempt to define a different kind of leadership from the margins. So there is a dichotomous nature to this relationship or my relationship with information where information has been both essential to giving me a way forward in life and oppressive in the way information is presented to reinforce existing systems of power and control. And in Canada, we're experiencing the consequences of an educational system that suppresses the truth of our colonial past as the mass unmarked graves of thousands of indigenous children are being discovered on the grounds of residential schools. So what is my relationship to libraries in relation to my relationship with information? I think what I recognize as libraries are for me also dichotomous spaces. They can be sites that can support exploration, imagination and possibilities. And in these ways, change or save a life as they did mine. Yet libraries also exist as we know to support those dominant systems of power and control. And I'll share a quick story. A few years ago, I was president of British Columbia's Provincial Library Association. I attended a national meeting with other presidents and executive directors of library associations from across the country. The first half of the day long meeting was focused on how to improve equity, diversity and inclusion in association boards and staff. Of the 22 people in the room, I was the only person of color. During this meeting when there was a round table discussion, I was the only person who spoke from and was expected to speak from personal experience. The irony in the story is, I think apparent and even amusing in the blunt manner it points to the disconnect between good intentions and reality. But as with all good intentions, it doesn't take away from the harm and oppressiveness of these moments sort of minor as this moment was relatively speaking. And it doesn't take away from the experiences of those marginalized by any system. So on the one hand, I was president of a large library association based on my reputation. And during that time, I initiated changes that challenged and disrupted the status quo. And on the other hand, in the same capacity I experienced this hot mix of anger, shame and self-consciousness by being in a situation where I visibly did not belong and felt reduced to being a token presence. So I share this story because variations of this story of both being included and excluded, both welcome and not welcome, both liberated and oppressed began as a young user of libraries and have played out in my 20 plus years as a librarian regardless of the role or position of power I held. So while I have the ability to navigate and be successful in the library world, I am not given the authority to claim my place in it. At the same time, I do deeply believe in what libraries represent and what we try to do and can do and what we still yet can still become. Which brings us back to my current activity as a doctoral student. And I wanted to share the topic of my dissertation research and the main question that I'm working with, which is how could a library cooperative model help develop a framework to transform library practice in BC? That is anti-colonial, anti-capitalist and a capitalist society and consistent with professions stated values. So this experience that I've shared with you with information and in libraries is I now realize directly connected to what compelled me to begin my doctorate to explore this research topic. In this question, I recognize that I'm really trying to reconcile the dichotomous and contradictory experience I've had with information and with libraries. I'm trying to understand how it could be that libraries both saved my life and reinforced and yet reinforced feelings of exclusion. While libraries decoded the world around me and opened up the way I could live in this society, libraries did not fail and are not designed to fail the experience of immigrant loss for me and my family, that my family and me experience. And that's the loss of language and of stories and knowledge that connects one's life to another place, time and the way of being. So through this research, I hope to understand if a different and better type of library can exist that is consistent with our stated values. And so why I care about this research as stated in a more formal way and I'll just read them out is a desire to understand the contradiction of libraries as both inclusive yet oppressive spaces, equitable yet hierarchical, democratic yet capitalist, anti-racist yet very colonial. I have an interest in exploring alternative models for libraries that is both resistant to the status quo and sustainable. And I'm interested in that sustainability through this cooperative governance model. And again, I'm doing this because I just can't walk away from libraries. Unfortunately, I just believe in what we do, what we are, what we say we are, what we think we are. And I believe in stories as a basic element to the quality of life and their ability to connect all of us to ourselves and to each other. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Shirley, for that presentation. I greatly appreciate it. And I appreciate your passion within the library system and how meaningful it is to you. And I also appreciate your presentation to your research and your dissertation topic. And I think it's great that you found a topic that's both personal and meaningful to you, but also very important and meaningful to the library profession and women. And I just think that's fantastic. So I sincerely appreciate that. Fubazi Itar, she is a trained academic librarian, PhD candidate at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign author of Vocational Law, The Lies We Tell Ourselves. She coined the term in 2018 and since sparked meaningful disclosure about our professional path. Her seasoned experience as a school librarian and subsequently an academic librarian informs her critical pedagogy and library advocacy. We welcome her to this event and look forward to listening to all the wonderful things that she has to say. Welcome. Thank you again for being patient with everything and being here. I'm really excited to be a participant and of this conference, it's always great to talk about librarianship and information and the feminized profession, basically. And so as my talk says, my, the title is Vocational Law and the Feminized Profession. I know that I had a lovely introduction, but hello again. My name is Fubazi Ittar. Here are some of the places that you can find me. I'm pretty much always on Twitter. It's one of the fastest ways to reach me, honestly. Please feel free to tweet during the presentation. If you'd like to see some of my more long form work, you can go to my blog and website. And finally, you can always email me if you have any questions, comments, or just thoughts about the presentation or anything I've spoken about today. It may take me a little longer to get back to you, but I try my best to answer every email. And so librarianship and womanhood. How has gender informed libraries? Well, looking at some of the facts and figures, right? Libraries comprise 81% of enrollment in graduate library science programs. They are 82.8% of all librarians and they are 75.9% of all library workers. And so what does this mean? Right, we know that with many feminized professions, things like lower pay, gender inequality and other problems are rampant. But I find librarianship specifically interesting because it was a purposely feminized field. So for example, Dewey, when we were talking about the first libraries, specifically the first public libraries, but the tradition continued onward from there. Dewey, also known as Melvin Dewey and the Dewey Decimal System, he and other library directors purposefully recruited women so that they wouldn't have to pay them as much as they would the men. They were excited about the fact that women would not only take a lower pay, but that they happily in their eyes took the lower pay. Another way that another reason that librarianship is purposefully feminized was the civilizing influence that library directors and library leaders believed that women had on the profession. They believed that when it came to the dissemination of information that it should have a moralizing influence, a moralizing touch, in the same ways that missionaries were seen as a civilizing influence, library leadership believed that women could be that civilizing influence for their patrons. This was especially seen as the case because early library patrons were those who came from a high class and as it moved on into the lower classes, children and other races, you know, because libraries were segregated for a long time, they were seen as a way to keep the enlightening presence that libraries stand for to the masses as it were. And finally, as a service profession, libraries were seen as a way that women could be better suited to a service profession. Women were seen as more nurturing, more caring, more naturally able to reach their patrons and reach their stakeholders, the community, whatever it might be. And so it was for this reason that again, women were very much targeted as the main representation of workers within libraries. And so I always like to ask this question when I talk about vocational law and especially when I talk about it in a gendered sense. Is librarianship an occupation or a vocation? While these two words are technically synonyms, they have very different connotations. An occupation is a career or workplace, something that you clock in and clock out whereas a vocation is defined more as a strong drive or inclination to a purpose or mission. In its earliest definitions, it was seen as the ways in which one responded to God's call. And so while vocation, again, technically is a synonym for an occupation, it has a very different sense of the word. I'm a preacher's kid or a pastor's kid. Shout out to any who might be in the audience. There usually is at least one. And so as my fellow PKs might know, while you may leave church, church never really leaves you. There's Sunday school, there's Bible studies, there are women's retreats and even during the summer, there are things like vacation Bible school. While it's like libraries is both a place and a field, you never really leave it as it were. And so knowing all of these things and knowing what we've learned so far about the profession and why it was purposely feminized, I ask again, is librarianship an occupation or a vocation? And so as you might have guessed, librarianship is more often treated as vocation than it is an occupation. And so vocational awe describes a set of ideas, values and assumptions that librarians have about themselves and the profession that result in notions that libraries as institutions are inherently good and sacred and therefore beyond critique. And so what does this mean? How does this break down? Well, libraries are inherently good. I mean, they provide access to all. They have diverse collections, champion truth and free speech, unless of course those people are undesirable or those materials are undesirable. As I mentioned before, librarianship tends to gloss over the fact that it was segregated for the longest time and not only was it segregated, but many libraries both in the public and academic sphere closed rather than integrate or in reminiscent of some of the early COVID-19 precautions, what libraries would do was they would take all the tables and chairs out of the room if they were forced to integrate, to try and send the message that staying and mixing wasn't allowed or wasn't seen as acceptable. And as we see currently in the sociopolitical climate, the same as seeing of materials. LGBTQ materials, materials that promote CRT, which in this case means anything written by any person of color, but especially black and brown people are seen as unacceptable materials. They're seen as either pornographic or as dismantling democracy when it comes to LGBTQ and people of color materials, respectively, libraries are inherently sacred, right? They're often seen as holy, safe spaces, sanctuaries. Right now a lot of discussion is talked about Ukraine and the Ukrainian libraries and how they have opened their doors to give out not just books, but clothing and medical supplies and all sorts of things for their community. And we as a field love to talk about how the information sciences are in fact open to all and that safe space. But again, we rarely talk about how it's, for those who are privileged, for those whom we deem worthy. Again, currently, while we currently may not be segregated right and allow all races and genders, excuse me, and gender expressions to enter the library, many communities still have de facto segregated libraries. And if they are integrated, there are many other policies and practices that show that depending on the population or the person, you may not in fact be welcome here. It may not be a safe space for you. For example, many libraries have the practice that allows outside groups to meet within the library and don't have any specific policies barring hate groups for meeting or even speaking within the library. And I am a strong believer that if you are a space that is open to Nazis and TERFs and other hate groups, you're not in fact a safe space for everyone. You're only a safe space for the Nazis and TERFs and other people who believe in the ideology of the hate groups or those who don't trip any signals or wires, those who aren't a person of color, those who pass as their assigned gender at birth, those who don't have unnatural gender representations and so on, right? The only place that is safe for everyone are places where hatred and fascism and other hateful ideologies are not allowed. And even when we think about other populations such as the homeless or the mentally ill, many libraries have practices such as requiring IDs, state IDs, my hometown library, public library requires not only a state ID, but also an address that matches the community, usually a bank statement or something to that extent. So again, these policies show that we prioritize certain people, people who have houses, people who have bank accounts, people who may be able to get access to the information elsewhere, as opposed to the neediest of our communities. And finally, libraries are beyond critique. They're seen as the last bastions of democracy, the soul of the community, but oftentimes libraries still uphold white supremacy or other more valid critiques such as, again, low pay, gender inequality, inequitable labor practices. And so why is it that when we think of other institutions such as the justice system or the police, we can see that the ideals such as protect and serve don't necessarily match up with the realities of policing, with the realities of the justice system. But when it comes to the institution of our brand ship, those critiques are seen as taking away from libraries somehow as disparaging a field that is the stand-in for democracy. And truth, a true democratic institution would not only acknowledge the critiques, but welcome them so that we could, as a field, be better for our patrons and live up to the ideals that we say that we have, the ideals of open access, of being welcome for everybody. And it is, in fact, undemocratic to suppress these critiques that would make our field better. A true democratic institution would never suppress such large populations within the field, whether it be the staff, the library workers, library workers, people of color, the LGBTQ people within the field, so often in our race to uphold the values that we espouse, we suppress and smother anything that would potentially take away from the value of libraries. And so we see some commonalities with the purposely feminized profession and especially in librarianship and vocational law, right? Both talk about associations with love and passion, this idea that it is through the love of the profession or through the love that women inherently have that we can be better workers, right? We also see this conflation of the building and the workers themselves. When we talk about libraries and all the good it does, we say, oh, this library is really good at community organizing or this library is really good at public programming and by doing that, we diminish or erase the fact that it's the workers who are doing all of these amazing things and not necessarily the building itself. So is when it comes to the ways that women interact with their patrons and the societal mores attached to women and womanhood, right? The natural caring, the institution of motherhood, how the amount of work that it takes to be a mother, it takes to be a woman to do all of this emotional labor is erased and seen as invisible. Another way is the fact that love and passion are seen as worth or efficacy. It's not the hard skills that we bring, rather it's the soft skills that are seen as almost more important than the actual duties of librarianship. Doing things isn't just good enough, it has to be done with a smile, with a cheery and happy attitude. And again, this downplaying and erasing of the critiques and labor that is involved in making sure that everything runs smoothly. Like motherhood, like caring fields, the labor is seen as invisible. At its best, you don't necessarily notice because that is what is prioritized, right? Being seen as helpful without complaining, without advocating for yourself, because that then shows how much work it is and therefore is seen as ungrateful. And so how does this play out in the workplace? Well, a big one is work-life separation. The pressure to come into the library, rain, shine, sickness, health, again, it's almost like a marriage as it were. There is very, we haven't even gotten to work-life balance. The idea of work-life separation is still seen in many cases as a radical idea, a radical thought. There's guilt when taking vacation days or asking for more staff to alleviate the pressure and overwork, right? This idea that you can contact me anytime, I'm always on my email, I'm always checking my phone on nights and weekends and holidays, whatever it might be. And then moving on to white savior ship and job creep, right? This idea, again, from the very beginning that women were seen as a moralizing influence and specifically white women were seen as that influence. The way to not only help the community, but again, play almost a missionary role to these communities. This is especially stark in communities such as urban communities where the library workers very much do not match the communities that they are working in. This of course is not to say that only people of color should work with communities of color, just that there has been a lot of research showing how white womanhood and white feminism has brought white supremacy culture into libraries. The idea that libraries solve all social ills as it were, or that it's everything to everyone. And of course, it's not just white savior, the tendency to be a white savior that causes this, but also job creep. Libraries have been doing more with less for generations now. Those other duties as assigned very rarely stay other duties and in fact become a regular part of our day-to-day responsibilities, whether it's being a social worker or an accountant for those who might work in public libraries or know of public libraries, tax forms are a huge part of this time of the year. To things even farther outside of librarianship, such as being an EMT, we saw this during the pandemic where many library workers were asked not only to make masks and other PPE, but were asked to be caretakers for children of essential workers or asked to man phone lines for vaccine and COVID information. Oftentimes the library becomes the catch-all for all of the unfunded and or underfunded social services that are lacking within the communities. This of course leads to burnout, the state of exhaustion in which one is cynical about the value of one's occupation and doubtful of one's capacity to perform. When there is no acknowledgement of the emotional labor that is asked of library workers, of the invisible labor that is asked of library workers, the job creep, the heavy workloads, the lack of institutional support, whether that support be more staffing or more financial support or whatever it might be. All it leads to is this idea that we aren't as important as the field itself. The workers can be replaced, but the field is forever. And so how do we reclaim our time? How do we gain power and move forward? Right now the standard of librarianship looks like this. We recruit a passionate worker, again usually a woman into the library. Then the worker goes through all sorts of abuses as I have stated previously, whether it be the again lack of pay, the fact that there's a disproportionate amount of men in leadership roles, the gender pay gap, the overwork, the lack of institutional support. Katrina Davis Kendrick talks a lot about low morale experiences and how all of these again lead to the inevitable burnouts. The worker either leaves, goes to another library or retires or perhaps leaves the field altogether. We are seeing the great resignation as it's being called not just in fields such as nursing and education and corporate, but also in the fields of libraries and information. And so when this happens, when the people leave instead of learning from the mistakes, we either recruit another person and start the cycle all over again or perhaps worse, we don't recruit another person and all of the remaining work is shuffled onto the people who are left, therefore increasing their workload and lack of institutional support. Until again, burnout occurs. And so how do we change this cycle of exploitation? How do we move forward? Please quote by Audre Lorde is one that I try and keep in my own daily life. Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare. As women and as library workers, it can be especially hard to advocate for ourselves, especially with vocational awe saying that libraries are beyond critique. It can be hard to think about your own life, your own children when libraries are seen as the soul of the community, as the bastion of democracy. But it's always important to remember that your own well-being is important too. Your communities are of course important, but if you burn out and leave, that is a way that doesn't serve your community. And so it is in fact political warfare. It is radical to care for yourself. It isn't self-indulgence. And so how do we do this? Start by setting boundaries. As important as those job duties might seem, they can wait. There are very rarely things that can classify as a true library emergency. It can wait until Monday morning. It can wait until the next day at eight o'clock or nine o'clock or whenever your day starts. Setting aside time for your life, your loved ones, your hobbies, whatever they may be is a great way to, again, start reclaiming your time and power. Moving on to working collectively. It can be really hard to set a new habit and stick to it consistently. But when you work collectively, it makes it that much easier. Whether you're in a unionized workplace or not, gathering with your coworkers and acting as a de facto union can help set and maintain those boundaries. It is a lot easier to, you know, hammer the one nail out of place than it is to do so when everyone is united. And so that is all I have for my presentation. Thank you so much. Again, here are the places that you can find me. I will take questions now. Thank you. Oh, sorry, go ahead, please. I was just gonna, yeah, I was just gonna say, if anyone has questions, feel free to do it in the Q&A form that you find on the Zoom navigation menu, and then you can see them from there, all yours, Tonya. Okay, I thank you, Alfredo. I just wanted to say thank you so much for that presentation. You know, it was very informative. And, you know, I appreciate you sharing some of the, you know, just women's role in the library and the challenges and the opportunities and that they face and, you know, of course, identifying these challenges and hoping to find opportunities to, you know, to help manage, you know, work and life and, you know, and making the library a better place for everybody, whether it's the patrons or the employees. And so I appreciate your presentation. It was definitely interesting. So thank you for that. Thank you. Okay. It's Deborah Hicks, I'm just gonna quickly jump in with my lack of a voice and thank you as well. I also really wanted to thank you for pointing out the systemic challenges that come with being a woman who works in libraries. So this isn't simply like it's this long historical, complex system that we work and live in for a large part and that it's not as simple as an easy fix or anything like that. It really requires really critical attention to the world that we live in. So I thank you for not only bringing it up in this particular presentation, but your work in general. So thank you very much. Now I can see that there's some questions coming in. So I'll leave it to our students, but I just wanted to take this opportunity. Thank you. Thank you. So I'll start to answer these questions live. So Karla asks, is there a good way to break the library abuse cycle? Yeah, so the good thing is to just start honestly to depending on where you are in the library organizational chart, right? If you are a worker, start talking about the ways that you are starting to set boundaries. You can be something as simple as deleting your email app off your phone, by refusing to answer emails when you're not working. I have multiple friends and both professional friends and personal friends who put in their signature. Like I do not answer emails outside of my work hours. Please feel free to ask questions. Do not answer emails outside of my work hours. Please feel free to answer only within your own work hours. And so setting that standard for yourself to say, no, my outside time is important. And then again, we're starting to work collectively, talk to your other coworkers, make it a community thing. We talk about how best to serve our patrons. And that's always a great conversation. And what we neglect to remember when we're doing all of this overwork is that we're not the best library worker we could be if we are tired, if we're exhausted, if we are hungry for working through our lunches and our meal times, if we are extremely stressed because we are not managing things at home or outside as well because we are spending so much time focusing on work. And so thinking about it in that sense, the best person for our patrons is the best version of ourselves, the most healthy version of ourselves, both physically and mentally and emotionally. And so that's one way to break it. And to start to answer Christina's question as well, if you are library management or one of the administrators or leaders, setting a good example, making it so that you too set those boundaries for outside of work and model that for your library workers when they try and say like, oh, I can work, I'll be on vacation, but I'll still be on email, correcting them and saying, no, your vacation time is your time. Please don't feel the need to do that. We'll make it easier too, because we all I'm sure in this room have had managers and leaders and workplaces where it's seen as a badge of honor to spend 24-7 thinking about libraries, right? And so by changing that culture to one where not just focusing on the library is paramount, you'll see that not only will your workers feel healthier, but they'll bring that energy into their workplace, right? They'll bring it into, they'll start talking about their hobbies and their expertise outside of work. And you'd be amazed to see how all of that knowledge and all of those things that they do outside of work in fact can help be more representative of the community, more representative of the work that we're trying to do for our patrons. Other ways is to, again, just acknowledge the amount of labor that we all do every day, you know, COVID, these past almost three years have been extremely difficult. And in our rush to get back to normal, not only are we dismissing all of the amazing accommodations that came about during COVID, but we are almost overcompensating in our strictness to make sure everyone's in the building and do being busy. And we have to prove to our stakeholders that we are still relevant and we're still here. And of course that's important. But again, if everyone, if you're so focused on being busy and showing your value without any acknowledgement of the amount of work that's being done, all you're going to do is have burnout happen more quickly and if there are no workers, there's no library. So these are just some of the ways that you can break the cycle and start. Thank you so much for those great questions and your response. I appreciate them. I would like to introduce Shauna Higgins. Shauna Higgins is the director of the Library and Learning Commons and a doctoral candidate in the Leadership for Educational Justice Program at University of Redlands. Research interests include critical information, literacy, teaching and learning, social justice issues in librarianship, educational justice and feminist leadership practices in higher education. Author and co-author of book chapters and articles on these subjects, including the chapter Embracing the Feminism or The Feminization of Librarianship published in Shirley Liu and Barak Yosefi's Feminist Among Us, Resistance and Advocacy and Library Leadership. Welcome, Shauna. So you are going to hear some familiar themes in what I have to say. So in 2016, I had the great good fortune to work on a chapter for Shirley Liu and Barak Yosefi's Feminist Among Us book. In that chapter, I tried to both critique the ways in which library work has been feminized, which Fobazi has outlined that feminization and to revalue aspects of the feminine characteristics assigned to work gendered as feminine or as women's work. The catalyst at that time for thinking about library work as gendered and with a feminist lens was my response to an article regarding the American Library Association's Core Values of Librarianship. The article was written by a white male leader in academic libraries, and in that article, he defined some of the core values as questionable or incongruous. These included commitments to democracy, social responsibility, and the public good. So my argument in that article was that we cannot responsibly focus on access and service as core values in library work without building from the foundation of serving the public good and providing access in socially responsible ways toward a vision of a more democratic or more socially just society. I also tried to argue that this was a gendered understanding of ALA's core values. From a dominant worldview, that is a white male cisgendered heterosexual, et cetera view, one can think about access and service as central to library missions without actually connecting it to the context of providing access and service. So I'm gonna retread a little bit of what Favasi has already said, from the early professionalization of librarianship in North America, from the first educational programs for training librarians. Melville Dewey has been mentioned, the founder of the first school of library economy in 1887. White middle-class women were recruited as exemplifying the so-called feminine qualities necessary for library work, that is attention to detail, having organizational skills, think housekeeping and helpful service and care-oriented demeanors. That employing women in trained library work enabled pain lower wages was also a part of the considerations of Dewey and his counterparts. Thus, librarianship was feminized through characterizing the work as well-suited to women's natural abilities and natural in quotes. And because of this, not of equivalent value to men's labor. Librarianship and library work in general has remained predominantly female and predominantly white. And for many, especially outside of librarianship, it retains its women's work image. So we see with these conditions that we have a flourishing of what Fobazi has so astutely and beautifully defined as vocational awe and the perception of library work as sacred calling. Likewise, the suppression of critique of power structures within librarianship means we are particularly susceptible to maintaining the status quo, such as claiming neutrality when we clearly see inequities and injustices and maintaining systems of oppression. We are a group of nice white ladies maintaining white supremacy built into systems, policies and practices. So here it's like, okay, so what would I want to embrace about the feminization of librarianship? For me, it was going back and thinking about or reading and learning some really significant foundational feminist theorizing that was published and started circulating in the 1980s and 1990s. And this work began to inform a generation of scholars and researchers and community activists. And of course, they were building on others before them as well. These feminist scholars moved beyond thinking in terms of representation, though that's still important, to analyzing how power works and intersects with class, gender, race, sexuality and other identities and lived experiences. And is embedded in everything that we do. So we have Barbara Smith, Patricia Hill Collins and Kimberly Crenshaw, theorizing intersectionality. Collins wrote of Crenshaw's development of the term intersectionality, quote, the idea of intersectionality worked in multiple registers of recognizing the significance of social structural arrangements of power, how individual and group experiences reflect those structural intersections and how political marginality might engender new subjectivities and agency. And I know that's a lot to chew on without like seeing the words in front of you, or at least it is for me. During the same periods, other feminist scholars such as Carol Gilligan, Virginia Held, Nell Noddings and Joan Toronto were theorizing a feminist ethics of care developed in distinction from the theories of justice that centered the individual homogenous culture and presumably a masculine subject or citizen. Both intersectionality and feminist ethics of care were and are strategies to bring to the center the experiences or those who have experienced oppression, exclusion and marginalization. Both frameworks help us critique those social structural arrangements of power and to find solidarity across and through individual and group experiences of structural oppression, gendered, raced, class, et cetera. One of the critical points I take from theorizing feminist ethics of care and intersectionality is that those who experience oppression are uniquely positioned to understand how sexism or racism and other oppressions operate and through that experience have a greater capacity for empathy. So this isn't predetermined. I'm not saying that just because I identify as a woman and my lived embodied experience has been gendered as feminine, that doesn't mean that I have empathy for others who experience sexism or racism or other oppressive isms, nor does it mean that I take the time to pay attention to the effect of policies on individual patrons or students with consideration for the context of their lives. However, it does mean that I may have a greater capacity because of my lived experience for critical awareness and analyses to examine our services and service models from a perspective of gendered and raced and otherwise othered library workers and library users. Also in the 1990s, we see some feminist theorizing in librarianship and calls to embrace what Roma Harris called a brand of female professionalism. This so-called female professionalism would resist privatization of resources and it would embrace cooperativeness and our understanding that everything is interdependent, our work, our lives and an understanding of contextuality. And the concept of care has reemerged more recently in library and information science scholarship. In their book chapter, Essentialism and Care in a Female Intensive Profession, Pope Olson and Melody Fox wrote, quote, an ethic of care seems logical and right given library's social mission. An ethic of care includes willingness to hear another perspective, deeper delving to get a context and bending of rules to endeavor to satisfy users' needs. Engaging in library work with a feminist lens and intersectional feminist lens means that we recognize that care and critique are intimately connected as necessary mechanisms toward a more just workplace and a more equitable society. An ethic of critique encourages questioning power relations and structures and an ethic of care enables imagining possible just futures. Therefore, as a librarian, I try to incorporate critique and care into all aspects of my work, including teaching, collection development and public services. This means valuing the lived experiences and situatedness of my colleagues and students in part by trying to de-center my own experience as a white cisgendered woman in a predominantly white middle class and female intensive profession. And also my ability to critique and care comes from my own experience as a woman from a working class background, first generation and so forth. This means critically examining and consulting on policies and processes to uncover and revise oppressive social norms built into these. This means valuing relational and maintenance work that is often denigrated in feminized professions. And this is, you know, what Fabazza was talking about in her talk. This means trying to align budget decisions with supporting equitable access to educational opportunities locally while also honoring broader social responsibilities for more actual futures for the public good. So as some examples, we heard examples of using this critique and care from Fabazza. I am currently taking a library juice class on recruitment and retention practices for my minority groups. And this requires critique of our practices and then thinking about how we care for and support those that we bring into our organizations. And along the lines that Fabazza mentioned, I think in my local world, the Claremont College's library workers just formed a union, voted to form a union. And this is to me a result of critique and care in process or practice. And I will stop talking there. Or I will add, thank you Shirley and Fabazza for really informing my practices as a librarian. Thank you so much for your presentation. And I think it's also very, very interesting. And obviously it looks like there's, you know, there's a lot of challenges and a lot of work to be done. And, but for the purpose of time, if you all don't mind, we'll save questions for a little bit later. If you all don't mind, we'll go ahead and listen to Dr. Janine Spears. And I'll go ahead and introduce Dr. Spears. She is an associate professor in information systems. She is on the faculty at Cleveland State University in the College of Business where she teaches cybersecurity courses. She holds a PhD from Penn State University. Her research interests include IS security risk assessment, security workforce development, consumer privacy and digital media literacy. Dr. Spears previously served on the faculty of DePaul University in Chicago. And prior to an academic career, she worked at IT at two major motion picture studios in Los Angeles. And before Dr. Spears gets started, I would like to say that the iSchool is definitely a great school. We have students who are focusing on library science and we also have students who are, not only interested in library science, but they're also interested in cybersecurity and health informatics. And so Dr. Spears is going to talk to us about cybersecurity and introduce us to that particular type of career field and the challenges and hopes for women and opportunities for women in that particular area. So welcome, Dr. Spears. Hi, everybody. Thanks for having me, I appreciate it. Well, when Tanya and I talked about this, she just gave me a couple of questions and so I'm gonna get started with those and then from there, please feel free to chime in and ask me any additional questions. So given that this talk is really, or this discussion today is really about women in the informatics field, I'm gonna start off talking about women in cybersecurity. So right now, I would say roughly, depends on how it's counted, women represent roughly anywhere from 10 to 25% of the workforce in cybersecurity. If you were looking at more technical workers, so that who are doing like network security, penetration testing, things like that, the percentage would lean more toward the 10%, but if you include things like recruitment of cybersecurity women or cybersecurity workers or things like risk management, risk assessment, compliance, audits, things like that that are also part of security, then the number might actually increase to closer to 25% of the workforce. So we do represent a smaller proportion within the workforce as traditionally has been of course, a male dominated field. And so with that, there are some challenges. How do we get more women into the security field? At the moment, actually for the past several years now, there's been a shortage in cybersecurity workers and as we hear on the news, there's always things going on. We have increased risk, increased threats, there's more cyber attacks and yet we have fewer workers and so that's been a problem. So how do we increase the workforce in general? And then how do we increase more women and minorities in the field? So there's been a pretty big initiative in various fronts to try to increase those numbers. There are things like for high school students and also even college students, there are cybersecurity camps, for example, where a traditional, a typical setup would be like a one week camp where students get introduced to the field and they do some sort of hacking type of exercises. We do actually teach students, I mean, it's pretty common now to teach students how to do, well, instead of hacking, another word is penetration testing where that involves simulated attacks, trying to use different security tools to find the vulnerabilities and weaknesses and systems. So it's kind of fun. So that's one way to get people engaged and interested in the field. And it's also, importantly, it's also a way for people to be able to learn the weaknesses in our systems. And then once we understand those weaknesses, we're in a better position to try to avoid them or to plug them. So there are summer camps that come up. Certainly, I hear that the most for high school students just to get them introduced to the field. And then there's also different support groups. So there may be some student groups, there may also be groups that are national where they have members from across the country. So for example, we just had a women in cybersecurity conference here last week, but this conference is national. It goes to different places each year and they have student groups. This organization is called WESIS, which is short for women in cybersecurity. They have student groups, but even if you're not part of a student group, you can become a student member. And then from there, you get plugged into this network and there's all different types of resources that are available. They are for students who are interested. There's another group called Cyber. And that's also a group that's for both high school as well as college students who are interested in security. So these groups provide like a support network. So you meet other young women who are also interested in joining the field. You kind of get some training, you get information, you get inspired because there's other people to talk to because when there's just 10 to 24 roughly percent of women in the field, I mean, I can tell you, I attend a lot of security industry events. And oftentimes I would say you see about 10% women representation, so it can be lonely in that way. So these support groups, they offer support and they offer like training and a network and it can really help women to feel more inclusive, included and to find out about jobs and opportunities and things like that. Another thing that's going on is that the federal government as well as state governments are offering various state scholarships. They realize that there's a need to increase the workforce in general and cybersecurity and certainly to increase women in the field. So there are different programs related to that various programs. So if you are interested in joining cybersecurity or wanted to know more about it and you could actually like search on federal programs and the state of California also has a pretty big initiative for increasing the cybersecurity workforce. I'm here in Ohio and the state of Ohio also has a similar initiative. So there's summer training programs and most of this stuff is all free because it's for students and they're trying to increase interest and into the field. There is federal grants, states, yep, that's pretty much it. So that's how we're trying to increase the field. Now, there might be some misconceptions about what do we mean by cybersecurity? It's actually a huge field. It's not just hacking and incidents response and that kind of thing. Cybersecurity really involves everything related to security. So if you think about the smartphone devices that you're using, if you think about the smart home devices people have in their homes, if they're using Alexa, for example, or different, they've got thermostat, a smart thermostat or they're using a vacuum cleaner that's going around, things like that. All of these things, typically they're connected in some kind of way, either to the network or they're connected using Bluetooth and there's different cyber vulnerabilities that are related to some of those technologies. It also, cybersecurity also includes, of course, network security, web application security. If you were a project manager of a development project that it would impact you as well in the sense that we wanna know, we wanna make sure we include security as part of our development projects. It also includes things like physical security, be surprised, how are we securing our paper files? How are we securing the locks on the doors? Because now, for example, some organizations are using electronic or digital locks and there are definitely security weaknesses even with those. So there's that, there's also non-technical things such as risk management, risk assessment, there's compliance audits. There's also even like from a library sciences perspective, what are the critical records in an organization? How would we actually plan for business continuity or disaster preparedness if there was, for example, an earthquake or a hurricane or something? What are the most critical records that an organization needs in order to continue its mission if there's some type of major outage? How should we secure those critical records? What are the regulations around most records in terms of retention, archival, even things like privacy, things like that? So all of this really falls under security. And so it's a pretty big field. Oh, there's one other area that's really important that also merges with security and that is data science. So there's a lot of times when security professionals are monitoring security in an organization, they may look at system logs, for example, but if you've ever seen a system log, it's really detailed. I mean, there could be thousands and thousands and thousands of lines of log data. Like it will literally show, for example, every log in into a network or into a web application. So it'll show something like the user ID, the time that they logged in, the time that they logged out, what things did they access? So when you have this very granular data, how do you actually make sense of it to know if there's any issues? And that's where data science comes in. So now there's various systems that where log data is collected and there's graphs and visualization and things like that to be able to identify quickly where there may be problem spots. So security actually is merging with so many different areas that if you are interested in security as a field, there's not just a one monolithic, like you'd be sitting doing network security per se, although you could if that's what you were interested in. There's also this idea of offensive security versus defensive security. So offensive security would be like cases where we do the penetration test where we're trying to find out where the vulnerabilities are. We're going on offense, right? Trying to break in. And then there's defensive security where you have internal IT workers who are trying to defend against potential attacks on your systems. So like I said, it's a pretty broad field. And so if you are interested, then you could I'm sure talk to Dr. Tanya and I'm also available as well. And then there's also, like I mentioned, groups like leases and cyber is C-Y-B-E, capital H-E-R. Yeah, so that's one misconception maybe that some people may have is that it's a monolithic field but actually it's a very broad, diverse field and the technical skills that are needed really vary depending on which job and security a person gets. Another second important misconception could be that there's an IT, the IT department takes care of security. And so I can give you an example. One time I received some very sensitive documents through email that were, I mean, it contained social security number, financial information, pretty detailed information. And I asked the person like when I received the email with all this information, I was kind of shocked and I asked this person, no, I mean, this data doesn't appear to be encrypted. Is this encrypted? And she said, well, actually, I don't know, our IT department takes care of all that. Well, no, no, no, that's not the case. I mean, that data was not encrypted and she'd been doing this as part of her normal work routine for a while, you know, sending out these packets of information that contains very sensitive data. So I would say that, and it's commonly said among security folks that we all play a role in trying to secure data and systems in our organizations and even in our homes. So it starts with things like, how are we actually transmitting data? Are we transmitting it securely or not, if it contains sensitive information, we should know for sure that that data is encrypted before we email it or text it or use some of these non-secure communication mediums. The other thing is that the passwords that we choose, how often we, you know, our password hygiene is super important because so many breaches right now are happening from cracked passwords or stolen passwords. And then also there's one other thing is that sometimes security professionals will try to get organizations to implement certain security measures and there's some resistance because it's a little, you know, inconvenient. So for example, a big thing right now is what we call two factor authentication or sometimes I'll refer to it as multi factor authentication. So instead of us just using a password to log in, maybe for example, we use our smartphone and then, you know, when we go to log in, we get a code sent to our phone and then we have to use that code in order to complete the login process. That's an example of two factor authentication. And right now with so much stealing of login credentials and so many attacks going on, it's important. Now, you know, two factor authentication is being considered a must have. And so, but there's still some resistance in some organizations because it is more inconvenient because now you've got two steps instead of one step to log in. So we all play a role in the sense that, you know, trying to be good citizens of data citizens and if there's in some cases, as long as it's not too crazy, I'm trying to support the IT group or the IT security group that comes up with recommended security policies to try to help protect our data and our systems because that ultimately protects us too. So those are some key. In terms of women in the field, some of the things that they do experience, I hear from the previous speakers, you know, about some of the biases that are sort of institutionalized. I can say for women in cybersecurity, there's a couple of things that I hear quite often and I've observed myself. And that is sometimes technical skills are overlooked or discount it. People aren't, their technical skills aren't necessarily another sort of in question. Sometimes it's thought that the guy would be more technical or he may be more technically competent. I've heard of women say that they, even their own end users within the organization would sometimes prefer to speak to the guy if they have a problem because they think that he will be able to help them better. So there's some of that. And then in some cases, some women may feel like they're overlooked in certain meetings or in certain routine work tasks because, you know, again, they're a woman their technical skills may be in question. But there's also a lot of women who, you know, because I interview security workers and I've been asking them a lot about their experience in the field. I have also heard of some women who say that they have not experienced that. So it, you know, so there's, you hear kind of both sides. But one of the ways that we're trying to get around some of these biases that women do face in the field is through these support networks, through professional associations. So it's really important I always advocate to my students to consider being part of a professional association because now you're part of a network, you know, if it was isolated and then you're also learning more about the skills you're learning more about career development. And so that helps women, I think, to kind of overcome some of those barriers and to also uplift other women. I would also point out that there also is the issue of how do women treat each other? So if there's two women working in, you know, in a profession, like let's say there's, you know, 20 guys and two women, how are those two women treating each other? I think it's important that we also uplift each other. Sometimes those two women, or at least one of the women, as explained to me can be more of a bully toward the, you know, sort of more junior woman. I've seen that even in PhD programs, I've seen stuff like that. So I think that's a real issue that women also, when we talk about biases, gender related biases, we also have to think about not only how is the system, you know, biased in some ways, but how are we treating each other? And that's something that I think that women, we should talk about it more. I really don't hear it discussed that much, but yet I do hear it behind the scenes discussed, but not so much on a stage discussed. And I think that this is something that we should also think about and continue to work on as women in our various professions. Okay, so those are kind of my remarks so far. So are there any questions that I may be able to help with? Thank you so much for Ginny. Thank you so much, Ginny, sorry, excuse me, for the information you shared with us. And if you don't mind, we'll wait for questions. For later, if you don't mind. But I appreciate the information that you shared, the resources that you shared, and the importance of developing those relationships, not just in the field, but with other people that you work with within, you know, your place of work or in projects and things like that. So very motivating, inspirational. And so I definitely appreciate that. And if you don't mind, I'm gonna go ahead and introduce our closing keynote speaker. Our closing keynote speaker is Dr. Sue Feldman. She is an RN. She has a number of different credentials, but she is an RN. She's a doctor, she currently serves as director of graduate programs in health and dramatics in the School of Health Professions at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She is also a senior scientist in the Informatics Institute at the Heer Sink School of Medicine. I'm hoping I'm saying that correctly. Her research focuses on health information systems for social good from development to evaluation. Most recently, Dr. Feldman led a team developing COVID symptom assessment and exposure notification tools for the state of Alabama. Her current work in parallel to her COVID work involves leading the development of substance use abuse and recovery data collection systems for the state of Alabama. She has recently been awarded with 2021 Faculty Innovator of the Year at UAB, HEMS Global 2021 Changemaker and Health Award. And most recently for 2022 Mentoring Award at UAB, Dr. Feldman has a master's degree in education and a PhD in education and also in information systems and technology from Claremont Graduate University. Welcome, Dr. Feldman. Thank you, thanks for having me. You know, I was intrigued as I was listening to the incredible speakers that came before me by some of the common threads that could be gleamed across all of the presentations. And I made some notes and it was also interesting to me how a lot of what was said by the previous presenters really provided a good foundation for my closing remarks. And so I'm gonna start with Shirley's discussion. And she was talking about the relationship between information and women. And I'm sure that there's research on this. This is not my area of research, but it made me wonder if women process information differently and if so, and I'm kind of assuming that they do, how does that change the impact of the way the information is received and then the ensuing actions? And so that was just kind of a thought that I had after listening to her. And then of course, listening to Favazie, my ears perked up when she started talking about how library science is a purposefully female dominated environment. And then she listed these three things about libraries being inherently good, inherently sacred and beyond critique. Now I'm not nor have I ever been a librarian, but everything she said, you could take out library and you could put in teacher or nurse. And I have been and am both of those. And so there's a lot of similarities there between these purposefully female dominated environments. I will say that at least in the K-12 environment, when males started to come into the K-12 environment where I talked for almost seven years, that it did start to change things a little bit. But where I really saw the change is when males started to become nurses. So my nursing career was always in ICU and transport, emergency department. And that's where a lot of the male nurses tended to go and start their careers. And so we did see a lot of change in terms of equity. This is back 20, 25 years ago. So I was very intrigued by that. So she also asked, how do we change this? And somebody even put in the Q and A, like how do we break this cycle? And she talked about working collectively. And although she talked about it a little bit differently than how I'm going to talk about it, it does provide a good entree into what I'm going to talk about. And then in listening to Shayna about the ethic of care, so that really resonated with me and the value of lived experiences of colleagues and students. And I think that that's given a lot of credibility, probably in a male dominated world, not so much in a female dominated world. And so I've been on the other side of that in a not so good way. And so we owe it to ourselves to support each other and break through that. And then lastly, with Dr. Spears talking about, amongst other things, how women treat each other. And so I saw this a lot in nursing. I saw it a lot in the K-12 environment and I see it a lot in my job as professor here at UAB. In nursing, they say that nurses eat their young. And I don't know if it's still that way. I've been out of bedside nursing for quite some time, but I also see that in the academy as well. And not just female to female, but I don't think it's quite as gender specific, but I do think it exists. And so when I was asked to speak today, I started thinking about my own journey and how many times I was the only female at the table, the only female in the room or the only female on the agenda. And in the last two years specifically, the only female in this kind of Hollywood squares environment that we call Zoom. And so a little bit of background, I'm gonna keep this really brief, but a little bit of background on some of the things that Tanya started with in my introduction. So in mid-March 2020, like everyone else, there were multiple opportunities that came about because of COVID. And so my opportunity was to contribute to spread mitigation and keep students and employees on campus. And so I led the development of some applications that were used not only on our campus, but all campuses in the state of Alabama with the exception of two private institutions of higher ed kind of smaller schools. Most of the K-12 districts and many, many private schools and even some schools outside of Alabama. And so there were some interesting observations from that project, which is still going on, but we're not quite in the thick of things like we were in March 2020 through up until the end of last year. And the thing that was interesting was that when males were on the call, which was most of the time, questions were directed to them, regardless of the fact that I was the one who was PI on the project, I was the one who was leading the project and I was the one who got over $7 million of funding for the project. And even emails were sent to the males who then had to forward them to me because they couldn't answer the questions. And so I kind of thought that this had ended until Monday when somebody asked a male who has not been on the project for 18 months sent an email to him asking him a question that of course he couldn't answer. And so it was forwarded to me. That's always very intriguing to me. Why do people do that? Why is that assumption made? It's kind of like when I go out to dinner with my husband, the bill is always given to him. He doesn't carry credit cards. I'm the one who carries them. And so that's just always intriguing to me. I think that many metrics have shown an increase in females in certain areas, such as the workforce in general, consumer spending and other areas. But one of the things I think that the data do not get at is how many of these are at the leadership level. I think that level is still male dominated and the expectations are different. Even in some of the statistics that Dr. Spears gave, if 25% of the security workforce is indeed women, how many of those are at leadership levels? My gut would tell me not very many, especially since two years ago, I gave a keynote on cybersecurity and I was the only female in the room amongst probably about 70 or 72 males. And so when I think about this, I think an important factor to changing this paradigm is through mentoring. And a couple of the speakers who came before me talked about this, not so much in the direct way of using the word mentoring, but they all talked about it in a certain way. And so in our department here at UAB, we provided a mentoring manual to alums who are mentoring students. We have a formal mentoring program. And so in it, we give some background on mentoring that I thought was really useful for my discussion today. And so it was Homer's epic tale, The Odyssey, that formally introduced us to the concept of mentoring. Mentor was a friend of Odysseus, who placed mentor in charge of his son when Odysseus left for the Trojan War. Today, Miriam Webster defines mentoring as a wise entrusted counselor or teacher and influential senior sponsor or supporter. So this is a good definition, but it's merely a starting point for the journey of understanding mentoring and really what goes into mentoring. We see mentoring as the relationship between two individuals. And it's not necessarily a one-to-one relationship and it's not necessarily an elder to younger relationship. But it's more one of experience where the experienced individual or the mentor serves as a coach, a cheerleader, a confidant, a role model, somebody understanding the opposition advocate, being a counselor and when possible, a door opener for the mentee. It's a relationship that's built on trust and on mutual respect in which both partners, the mentor and the mentee, have responsibilities and should benefit from the relationship. So mentoring is all about learning and growing. And at a professional level, both partners in the relationship are adults. So it's important to consider how we learn as adults. Malcolm Knowles, a noted practitioner and theorist of adult education, laid out the basic principles of adult learning in the 1970s. And he said that critical to effective adult learning is one's own involvement in diagnosing, planning, implementing and evaluating their learning. So in essence, adults like to be self-directed learners and they should be self-directed learners. And this should be a relief to anybody who's a mentor because what it signals is that you don't need to do all the work. In fact, you should not be doing all of the work. The mentee is the one who really is responsible for doing the actual doing of the work. It's important to understand that mentoring and managing are not the same. In both roles, you might serve as a combination of a coach, a confidant, a sounding board to someone. However, as a mentor, you have to be prepared to take on the broader, more personal relationship. And sometimes this can get uncomfortable or awkward because as I said earlier, this is a trusted relationship. And so there frequently are not hard lines around personal and professional discussions. The main difference between managing and mentoring though is mostly a matter of intensity and direction. And so just as all of our relationships change over time, what we need in a mentor also changes over time. And it changes as we grow. The role of the mentor is primarily one of facilitating learning and development and creating and maintaining a supportive environment so that that relationship can flourish and that person can flourish. At different points in the relationship, the role of the mentor may take that of a coach giving advice and guidance, sharing ideas and providing feedback. At other times, the mentor is a source of encouragement and support for the mentee. Acting as a sounding board for ideas and concerns or providing insights into possible opportunities. Frequently, a mentor will see something as an opportunity where the mentee sees it as a roadblock. And so the mentor can help the mentee kind of see a different perspective of things. The mentor may also need to play the opposition advocate to help the mentee critically think about important decisions. It's important to understand what role you need to be playing at a particular time to facilitate learning and growth of the mentor-mentee relationship. And so as Tanya mentioned, I was recently awarded a mentoring award here at UAB from the Dean of our graduate school. And I was asked, what does mentoring mean to me? And you'll see in my statement that it's a little bit different than some of the things that we've been discussing today. In academia, mentors often take the form of an academic advisor and are measured on the accomplishments of the mentee. You know, like how many papers did you help them get out? How many book chapters did you help them get out? How many conferences did they present at? And in personal lives, mentors often take the form of an elder who helps you see the road you're about to travel. It's very difficult for me to separate the two of these and to adhere to the constraints of how society defines mentorship. My style of mentoring is to build a mutually trusted relationship where I have more confidence in the person than they have in themselves, to pass long opportunities to them that come my way and that are often meant for me and help them see distal and broader options when all they see in front of them is roadblocks. Frequently, I'll finish a conversation with someone who I may or may not have known that I was mentoring and they will say that they feel inspired, more confident or confident. This is absolutely critical to me. First, because mentoring is not necessarily a formal relationship. I mean, we've set it up here at UAB to be a formal relationship, but it doesn't need to be. And secondly, because I want people with whom I come in contact to have confidence and trust in their abilities and solace in their thought. I believe that the unmeasurable intangibles that come from mentorship can be life changing, build trust and instill courage and confidence. And so I think when we think about, how do we break this cycle? How do we elevate women? How do we band together? Some of the things that came about in some of the previous discussions, I think if we can mentor those around us, it would be a great start. And that doesn't always mean mentoring females. It could mean mentoring males to think differently about females. And so I don't look at the mentoring thing as a male-female thing. I look at the mentoring thing as a way to lift individuals up. And as we lift individuals up, we lift everyone up, including our profession, whatever profession we're in, whether it's library science, cybersecurity, or in my case, health informatics. And so with that, I would like to thank everybody for making such very thoughtful remarks today. And I'd like to thank Dr. Chow and everyone else who's been involved in this for supporting such an important initiative and for having us all here today. So thank you very much. Thank you so much, Sue, for an excellent presentation. And I thank you all for joining us. And obviously, and from what everyone, all the speakers have talked about is just the challenges, the challenges of, you know, in the work environment and maybe creating opportunities for women, minorities, and so much in between, right? So there's so many challenges that we are faced with on a daily basis in our work environment and our home environment and managing both work and family to be successful in all areas of our lives. And the speakers all mentioned something to that effect. And I think what's important is to recognize and understand that we all come from different backgrounds, we all have different experiences. And we have to plan for what we can contribute as a group of people who work for an organization and of course, us as an individual. What can we bring to the table? What can we do to support one another? What can we do to mentor others? And I think Sue did a great job at explaining the importance of mentorship and how not only can we support other women, but how can we support men as well? And how can we, you know, if it's a real big challenge to get them and to show them maybe a different way of viewing or changing their view of how they see women and the important contributions they bring to the table, right? And so, you know, I think it's very important to, again, as I mentioned, to recognize those challenges, understand what we can do to support each other and how we can make a positive contribution to change and to change for the better. So I'm going to pass it on to Anthony. I don't know if he has a few remarks as well. And of course, we want to take questions if anybody has any extra, or if anybody has any questions from us. So Anthony. Thank you, Tonya, special thank you to you and Deborah. And Deborah, do you have any final remarks? If you can get them out there or feel free to use texts if your voice won't allow. I just wanted to thank everybody for the really lovely comments that they all made. I think that there were some really beautiful through lines through all of the presentations. And I want to thank everybody for their flexibility with the technical issues. That's always one of the fun aspects of working and learning online. And so thank you to everyone for being so flexible and for coming today. It was really wonderful, thank you. Yeah, I want to thank everyone for your time and attention and willingness to give us your wisdom and your experience. Thanks again to Tonya and Deborah. And final thoughts. So as a son of immigrants, I was the chair of the faculty senate when the George Floyd murder occurred. And George Floyd is actually from North Carolina. And being in that position, I had the privilege of working very closely for a provost in Chancellor Frank Gilliam who is an African-American male and just a wonderful role model in his own right. One of the things he challenged all of us to do given the challenges, given the increased tension there in North Carolina nationally was to do something. And so I wanted to leave on this note that certainly as the new chair, a new director of the high school, seven months in this here, all of you here, all of the comments you've made is my small attempt to try to do something. And so, and I think by taking those small bites, being up to the challenge to try to help when we can is the right way to approach what otherwise can seem to be insurmountable challenges. So I wanna thank all of you again for you doing that on behalf of women in celebration of Women's Heritage Month. So final thoughts, please note that these proceedings will, it had been recorded and will be fully transcribed and provided on our website and also put on our YouTube channel. Also, please join us for our future symposium. So our next symposium will be Deaf Culture and Community and the majority of that proceeding will be fully in ASL. And that will be April 21st from one to 3 p.m. Pacific time. Also, we have a wonderful lineup for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month featuring Patty Wong, ALA president and also Michael Lambert, the director of the Symposcope Public Library. So again, thank you so much for your contribution today. It was a pleasure meeting many of you for the first time. And for those of you in attendance, thank you for joining us.