A Woman’s Work Is Never Done. or Valued Appropriately.

“Where’s my book?”

“On your bookcase.”

A pause. “Where on the bookcase?”

“The middle shelf.”

Another pause. “Where on the middle shelf?”

I let that hang for a second, my hands covered in the pie pastry I’d been rolling out. Maybe, if I just gave it some time, the book would reveal itself from its sophisticated hiding place of … the middle shelf of a tiny three-shelf bookcase.

It did not. So, I did what mothers do and retrieved the book.

I used to tell this story from my kid’s childhood for laughs, but it points to a deeper truth.

Mothers are expected to know where everything is, all the time. It’s part of women’s invisible labour. Planning. Organizing. Remembering. Making sure the books are found, even the ones sitting out in plain sight.

It’s invisible because people don’t see it as work, if they see it at all.

And this staunch refusal to see invisible labour is not restricted to the home. Women’s invisible labour permeates—and props up—work as well. Decades of research show that unbillable “office housework” disproportionately falls to women in the legal sector. For example, the seminal report “You Can’t Change What You Can’t See” notes that women, particularly women of colour, perform significantly more administrative tasks in law firms.

That gendering matters in how the work is valued.

There is a well-established finding in sociology that occupations dominated by women tend to be paid less and accorded lower status because of their association with women. As one body of research puts it, the “feminization” of an occupation is linked to its devaluation, both in wages and in prestige (see, for example, Statistical Horizons and Research Outreach).

Enter librarians.

Data from the 2021 Canadian Census shows that 84% of people with library science training are women. Virtually all of them have a post-secondary education, with 44% having earned a master’s degree. But when women do the work, the work itself is seen as worth less.

Librarians are often described in terms that diminish their role. They are caretakers of books, quiet custodians of space, helpful guides to a catalogue. After all, don’t they just find books for others?

But a truer description reveals a profession grounded in intellectual labour, building relationships, and the ongoing negotiation of knowledge itself. The work of forging a trail up a mountain of information, misinformation, and disinformation is essential. And unseen.

Legal work depends on good librarianship, but when it is done well—and done predominantly by women—it becomes invisible. Even when we shout its value from the rooftops in the form of statistics and “you saved my life” anecdotes.

It won’t always be like this. The world lurches toward equality, taking three steps forward and two and a half steps back. That half a step of hard-won progress is still progress.

My son, who once stood in front of a bookcase unable to find a book sitting in plain sight, is now in university.

He doesn’t ask me where things are anymore. He tells me when we are out of cat food or need to add coffee to the grocery order. And he won’t accept money for the campus bookstore. Instead, he tracks down used copies and online sources for his textbooks.

I’m proud of him. And I’m proud of me for teaching him that this too is work, and valuable work at that. It’s not invisible to him anymore.

And that’s what we need for librarians.

Their skill, their value, their work is right there, on the middle shelf.

See it.