Female chief in a women dominated field of work : A study with gender perspective on public libraries

The purpose of this master’s thesis is to see why there seem to be little interest in the management position at the public libraries. Since librarianship is a field that are proportionally dominated by women we chose to approach the study with a gender perspective. This study has excluded men and our main interest is the women’s point of view. It aims to see how librarians and chief librarians recognize management from bottom-up and what kind of restrictions we can find for women that make them unwilling to aspire for the position of management. Our theoretical choice fell upon Hirdman’s gender system and Westberg-Wohlgemuth’s theory of the sex marking process. The method used to collect the empirical facts consists of eight qualitative interviews executed on three different public libraries. The conclusions drawn are based upon literature and the empirical material gathered from the interviews. The result of this thesis is that the chief librarian position is marked as a male position from the women’s point of view. Additional findings are that women in the librarian profession don’t seem to be interested in becoming chief librarians for a number of reasons; the most prominent reason is the solitude of the position. The results also show that the women themselves tend to recognize the position as male and derive this view from a historical perspective. The conclusions reached in this thesis are that there seem to be too few incentives for women librarians to be interested in the management position.Uppsatsnivå: