Here’s another piece of research that addresses something commonly held to be true, and in this case provides support for what we “know”: Women are underrepresented in library leadership positions. I’m pleased to be able to share with you statistical analysis by Daniel McGeeney. He uses a large sample size and discusses this trend across library types.
I think you will find the following post very interesting, and if you’d like to read more, see the following citation:
McGeeney, J. D. (2025). The Current State of Female Representation in Library Leadership: A Comprehensive Analysis of Over 13,000 Open U.S. Libraries by Library Type, Collection Size, and State. Journal of Library Administration, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2025.2518008
A preprint is available here: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/3jauw_v1
Women made up 82.5% of librarians as of 2023 according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (U.S. Census Bureau, 2024a), but they are underrepresented in leadership positions (McGeeney, 2025). This issue has received a lot of research attention, leading to extremely informative studies like “Leveling Up: Women Academic Librarians’ Career Progression in Management Positions” by Lorelei Rutledge (2020). Unequal pay, gendered expectations, and lack of mentorship are some of the underlying causes. Rutledge heard from female librarians who described instances when their male bosses excluded them from social events, when male employees were groomed for director positions, and when their decisions and errors were subjected to a higher level of scrutiny (2020). Women who try to overcome the stereotype of men as natural leaders often violate gender norms, which they may be penalized for (Heilman, Wallen, Fuchs, & Tamkins, 2004). This aligns with the experiences of women who reported being told to be friendlier, to smile more often, or to be less assertive (Rutledge, 2020).
Controlled psychological experiments show evidence of unequal standards in hiring practices. Player, de Moura, Leite, Abrams, & Tresh (2019) conducted a hiring simulation and found that participants placed more value on leadership potential than performance when evaluating male candidates. Women, on the other hand, were expected to demonstrate their competency rather than simply showing potential. This reluctance to view women as possessing leadership potential has been observed in other studies. In a large retrospective study of 29,809 management-track employees, women consistently received lower ratings for their leadership potential than men—even when they had received higher job performance ratings (Benson, Li, & Shue, 2024).
Goals and Methods
Other studies have measured the gender gap in library leadership, but they often rely on samples with limited size or representativeness. In my recent study (McGeeney, 2025), I set out to estimate the gender gap from a very large sample spanning all 50 states and library types. Using publicly available data on Library Technology Guides, I identified 13,891 library directors working at 13,870 distinct U.S. libraries that were still open at the time of analysis (Breeding, 2024). Each library director was assigned their most likely sex based on their first name. Specifically, I calculated the probability that each director’s name was assigned to male versus female at birth using (a) first name frequencies on birth certificates by age and sex, (b) survival rates by age and sex, and (c) job distributions by age and sex. The input data for this work included first name frequency files (U.S. Social Security Administration, n.d.-a), survival rates (U.S. Social Security Administration, n.d.-b), and U.S. Census data on employment (U.S. Census Bureau, 2024b).
Results
I found that women are underrepresented in leadership positions at four of the five library types (McGeeney, 2025). At academic libraries, women make up 76% of librarians but only 68% of directors. At school libraries, women make up 93% of librarians but only 82% of directors. At special libraries, women make up 70% of librarians but only 65% of directors. At government libraries, women make up 82% of librarians but only 68% of directors. The gender gap is the difference between these two values.
| Library Type | % of Library Directors that are Women | % of Librarians that are Women | Gender Gap | Male-to-Female Director Probability |
| Academic | 67.7% (65.9%, 69.4%) | 75.9% | -8.2% | 150.6% |
| Public | 83.8% (83.0%, 84.5%) | 81.1% | +2.7% | 83.3% |
| School | 82.3% (79.7%, 84.7%) | 93.0% | -10.7% | 285.5% |
| Special | 64.5% (61.6%, 67.4%) | 70.1% | -5.5% | 128.6% |
| Government | 67.5% (58.3%, 75.8%) | 82.2% | -14.7% | 221.8% |
As the table shows, women are slightly overrepresented in public library leadership by 2.7 percentage points, but this may not be true at larger libraries. The study reports that the female director percentage decreases exponentially with size (McGeeney, 2025). The smallest libraries in the sample have over 90% of director positions held by women. At the largest libraries, that figure is less than two-thirds. The exponential decay trend persists when restricting the analysis to public libraries only or academic libraries only.
The last column in the table converts the overall gender gap into a person-level metric. It answers the question: how much more likely is an individual male librarian than an individual female librarian to be director? In a school library, a male librarian’s chances of being director are almost three times that of a female librarian. In a public library (at the other end of the spectrum), an individual male librarian’s chances of being director are 83.3% that of a female librarian (McGeeney, 2025).
One way to dig deeper into these results is to ask, “who hires the library director?” For public libraries, local government typically appoints an external board (e.g., a board of trustees, advisory board, or oversight board), which has the primary responsibility of hiring a library director. On average, these boards are more male dominated than public libraries themselves (Jonason, Green, Kinard, Cruz-Solano, & Rathnavel, 2024). An even larger imbalance may exist in colleges and universities, which tend to have male-dominated upper leadership. For instance, a 2023 report found that only 32.8% of college and university presidents are female (Melidona, Cecil, Cassell, & Chessman, 2023). If female candidates for leadership roles are evaluated disproportionately by men, then this could contribute to their underrepresentation as directors (McGeeney, 2025).
My hope for this study is that it supports ongoing research into the patterns behind and causes of these gender gaps. To that end, there are many other areas to explore. Future research could dedicate more effort into investigating which Census datasets provide the best comparison, assessing trends over time, inspecting how well the Census industries map to library types, quantifying the uncertainty of Census-based estimates, and looking at geographic variation. It would also be interesting to develop methods for capturing non-binary genders, and I suggest one idea in the main paper. Libraries are unique in how female dominated the workforce is, but lessons in how to work toward gender parity extend to many other professions and industries. Paramount is the experiences of women, and studies like Rutledge’s (2020) and many others I cite in the article are critical contributions to the literature, which make the data and statistics I present meaningful.
References
Benson, A., Li, D., & Shue, K. (2024, April 19). “Potential” and the Gender Promotions Gap. SSRN. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4747175
Breeding, M. (2024). Retrieved December 2024, from Library Technology Guides: https://librarytechnology.org/
Heilman, M., Wallen, A., Fuchs, D., & Tamkins, M. (2004). Penalties for Success: Reactions to Women Who Succeed at Male Gender-Typed Tasks. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89(3), 416-427. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.89.3.416
Jonason, A., Green, T., Kinard, P., Cruz-Solano, V., & Rathnavel, S. (2024). Out of Balance: A National Assessment of Women’s Representation on Local Appointed Boards. Retrieved December 2024, from https://hiringlibrarians.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/811d5-nationalappointmentsstudy.pdf
McGeeney, J. D. (2025). The Current State of Female Representation in Library Leadership: A Comprehensive Analysis of Over 13,000 Open U.S. Libraries by Library Type, Collection Size, and State. Journal of Library Administration, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2025.2518008
Melidona, D., Cecil, B., Cassell, A., & Chessman, H. (2023). The American College President: 2023 Edition. American Council on Education, Washington, D.C. Retrieved from https://www.acenet.edu/Documents/American-College-President-IX-2023.pdf
Player, A., de Moura, G., Leite, A., Abrams, D., & Tresh, F. (2019). Overlooked Leadership Potential: The Preference for Leadership Potential in Job Candidates Who Are Men vs. Women. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00755
Rutledge, L. (2020). Leveling Up: Women Academic Librarians’ Career Progression in Management Positions. College & Research Libraries, 81(7). https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.81.7.1143
U.S. Census Bureau. (2024a, January 26). Employed persons by detailed occupation, sex, race, and Hispanic or Latino ethnicity. Retrieved December 2024, from https://www.bls.gov/cps/data/aa2023/cpsaat11.htm
U.S. Census Bureau. (2024b, September 12). American Community Survey 1-Year Data (2005-2023). Retrieved December 2024, from https://www.census.gov/data/developers/data-sets/acs-1year.html
U.S. Social Security Administration. (n.d.-a). Popular Baby Names. Retrieved December 2024, from https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/limits.html
U.S. Social Security Administration. (n.d.-b). Actuarial Life Table. Retrieved December 2024, from https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
Daniel McGeeney is an unaffiliated independent researcher who spent nine years working in secondary education before becoming a statistician and social scientist.