On Nerdy Girls' Night and Equity vs. Equality

As mentioned in a previous post, I've got a bit of an imbalance with the teens who frequent my library.

In a month, I might have three girls come to a program. Like...the entire month. Three girls. Every once in a while, a new one will pop up, but inevitably being alone in a room full of loud, rowdy dudes scares her away. The two lone girls on my teen council asked if we could have a girls-only program to try and draw a new crowd of ladies into the library, and I thought to myself, "what the hell, let's give it a try."

The Plan:

Have a Nerdy Girls' Night!

1. Start off with an ice breaker, 90-second sales pitches of your favorite fandoms to try and sway others to the cause, while we had some pizza

2. Fandom trivia using Kahoot.com

3. Make scented candles and candy sushi

4. Hang out, eat our sushi, and enjoy some fandom-themed coloring while we waited for rides to come

The Execution:

1. Everyone loved the idea of 90-second sales pitches, and after a suggestion from one of our younger attendees we actually kicked this up a notch. Instead of pitching our favorite fandom, we each wrote a fandom on a slip of paper and put them into a cup. Then everyone drew a fandom and had a few minutes to research said fandom using our branch iPads before pitching the fandom they drew to the group. We had fandom suggestions ranging from book series to popular ships to which pet is the best. It was hilarious, and they were way more into it than I expected them to be, given how shy some of the girls were.

2. Fandom trivia! As mentioned, I used Kahoot, and if anyone is interested in trying their hand at our Nerdy Girls' Night trivia challenge, you can find it here. I wasn't sure which fandom the girls would be into, so I tried to do a bunch of different ones with just a few questions about each one. That way, even if they weren't into one of the chosen fandoms, at least they would only have to sit through three questions before hopefully getting to one that was more interesting. Trivia was a huge hit, and as it turned out they even had fun trying to guess answers for the fandoms they didn't care about. Also, I learned that some teens are hugely into Pinterest! I had no idea...but that's kind of awesome.

3. Scentedcandlessushiandcoloringpages! Yeah, all smooshed together like that. I had only expected one or two girls to show up, so I planned conservatively. I didn't want to get through everything really quickly and then end up with a bunch of sitting around bored while we waited for rides, so I kept the program pretty short. When I ended up with five girls instead (not a huge number, but a pretty big deal at my library!), and when they ended up being way more into the icebreaker activity than I anticipated, we spent a lot more time on the icebreaker and trivia than I expected. Fortunately, this program was held in the evening and no one had the room reserved after us, so we were able to extend the program. Still, we had about an hour until library staff needed to start working on closing duties, so we decided to try and hustle through both of those. Everyone stuck around to make some candy sushi and try out making a candle, and it was awesome to see how enthusiastic they were and how creative they got with dying their candles.

The consensus: I wish I had been a little more confident and planned to allow more time so we didn't feel so rushed at the end, but overall I thought the program was a huge success. The girls all loved it, asking when we were going to do the next one and suggesting that we make these a regular occurrence at the library.

I agree that I need to offer more programming that girls can feel comfortable attending, but I am a little conflicted about the idea of gender-centric program planning. Several of the boys who regularly visit the library said that if I was going to hold a girls-only program, I also needed to hold a boys-only program. On the one hand, would that be providing equal programming? Yes. On the other, given that 98% of our programs are either attended only by or taken over by boys, would that be equitable? Probably not. At the end of the day, I'm not terribly worried about offering a boys' night to appease my male teens...the Nerdy Girls' Night program is over, and they've probably already moved on from this and forgotten all about it. My bigger concern about offering the program was using a binary gendered term and potentially excluding non-binary teens who would have liked to be there.

Looking back, I wish I had thought of a better, more inclusive name for the program. Also, rather than focusing on programs for "girls" versus programs for "boys" going forward, because gross, I do not want to be someone enforcing stupid gender roles, I need to do a better job of enforcing a standard of behavior. Behavior didn't used to be a huge issue for me with the teens at my branch, but recently I've had some pretty bad issues in my programs. Doing a better job of saying "this is how you need to behave if you want to be in the program" and then sticking to that standard will likely do more to help make programs more comfortable for everyone than trying to offer stratified programs based on "feminine" or "masculine" activities will. So, I've got a plan, and I'm moving forward. Our first, last, and only Nerdy Girls' Night was a huge success...and from now on, I'm going to make every program that big of a success.