Elizabeth Sparrow

Early on in my career I realised that I was being labelled. As an undergraduate in the 1970s I studied Maths at Southampton University and took a module in computing but wanted to pursue something different in my career.

I’d always been fascinated by information, how it’s accumulated, managed, retrieved and stored, and decided to take a Masters at Sheffield University in information science, an interdisciplinary field primarily concerned with the analysis, collection, classification, manipulation, storage, retrieval, movement and dissemination of information.

Little is heard of this term today, but the principles of information science underpin many aspects of today’s information society, especially the World Wide Web and search engines. We studied pioneers such as Karen Spärck Jones whose main research interests were natural language processing and information retrieval.

After graduation I started work at the British Library, indexing newly published materials and then moved on to project manage a major database conversion exercise. I later worked in customer support for some of the earliest adopters of computerised library systems and also managed an online information retrieval system. I regularly worked with IT practitioners but it was clear to me that I was labelled as a librarian.

Wanting to expand my horizons, in the 1980s I moved to a government business that provided furniture, furnishings and a transport operation for the public sector. We served civil servants, local authority staff, ambassadors and spies! I was recruited as a member of the finance division, acting as the liaison with a project developing IT systems for sales, purchasing and warehousing. I was intrigued to find that no one saw me as a librarian any more. I was labelled now as a finance person.

As my career progressed I became more involved in the world of IT, specialising in project management, business analysis and leadership rather than software engineering. For many years now I have been labelled as an IT person, but I have never forgotten those days when I was viewed as someone quite different. My expertise may have grown but it hasn’t changed that radically - just the label people put on me. I have not, of course, even mentioned the label I have always carried, that of being a woman. I’ve never experienced losing that label!

Labels can constrain our views of what we and others are capable of achieving. I saw for myself how meaningless labels can be and how quickly I changed labels in moving from one job to another. Labelling someone as an IT person can be linked to all sorts of negative connotations and stereotypes which are completely misleading about a field that offers such a wide range of possible career options and the opportunity to tackle issues that are crucial for the future of our society.

Whatever labels other people may attach to you, do not let them (or the labels you give yourself) restrain you as your career progresses. As Michelangelo said “The greater danger for most of us lies in not setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low and achieving our mark.”