Ready for Lunch?

There are two events taking place during the RBMS Conference’s lunch on Wednesday. Both require advance sign-up and the box lunch option for Wednesday.

The first event is the New Member Lunch Meetup, an event I have attended for the past three years and I highly recommend. This is an informal opportunity to chat with fellow new or newish members and sit down with members of the RBMS Executive Committee as well as chairs and members of many other RBMS committees. As a former committee chair and newish member (may I still call myself that?), I encourage those new to RBMS to take advantage of this opportunity.

In the second event, “No, I don’t want to take notes”: Managing Soft Sexism in the Workplace, small groups will discuss sexism in the workplace, especially as it manifests in “soft” forms that undermine women’s leadership ability, and generate ideas to support those facing challenges in their workplace. Over the past few months the co-facilitators (at this point, I should mention that I am co-facilitating this discussion with Melanie Meyers, Melissa Hubbard, Katharine Chandler, and Allison Jai O’Dell) have been collecting anonymous stories from the field to frame our group discussions. One of the contributors gave us permission to share the following,

“Soft sexism often graduates to full sexism/sexual and non-sexual harassment if there’s nothing to stop it or it’s not taken seriously. And the damages take years to recover from.”

Please feel free to share your stories – responses will remain anonymous – and we will use these to inform our discussion. We look forward to a candid, thought-provoking, and productive discussion on this topic.

You can sign-up for these Wednesday lunch events when you register OR if you have already registered and would like to attend one of these, contact the ACRL registration department at 800-545-2433 and press option #5 or email registration@ala.org.

–Katie Henningsen