Dismantling the Old Boys’ Club

The #MeToo Movement of the late 2010s spurred public conversation about the prevalence of sexual harassment across the for-profit, nonprofit, and public sectors, including by public historians.1 In response, the National Council on Public History (NCPH) and the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) formed a joint committee to address issues of gender discrimination and sexual harassment (GDSH). Our committee conducted a national survey of the field in 2020–21, which gathered stories describing a range of disturbing incidents.2 Primarily women, but also trans and nonbinary people and gay men, reported being sexually assaulted or touched without consent by colleagues and visitors, some of whom demanded sexual favors and stalked them.3 Microaggressions—from misgendering transgender people to inappropriate comments about appearance—were repeatedly described. Many respondents noted more subtle but no less harmful examples of gender discrimination, including women being passed over for promotions in favor of less-qualified men or having their ideas ignored. With varying language, the 440 respondents suggested that their museums, historic sites, educational institutions, and government and nonprofit agencies were hierarchical environments where upper management protected board members, donors, visitors, and volunteers. When staff brought inappropriate conduct to their superiors’ attention, it was often excused away or swept under the rug, regardless of any policies in place. Remarkably, one phrase came up several times by different respondents as an easy shorthand descriptor: old boys’ club. As one wrote, “The administration was an old boys club and I knew my complaint would lead to my being let go or labeled as a troublemaker.” A “troublemaker” employee can easily be replaced, helping to ensure that many instances of gender discrimination and sexual harassment are never reported. This sense of futility permeated the responses.In using “old boys’ club,” the respondents made visible the power dynamics of public history workplaces from their perspective. An old boys’ club is a place where older men who are in positions of leadership have a chummy relationship and protect each other over outsiders. When a workplace is run by an old boys’ club some lower-ranking employees may be included, but usually they number among the outsiders, powerless and unprotected. While some respondents emphasized the seniority or gender of leadership as the problem that needed to be altered, I argue that the most relevant term in the phrase is “club.” If we simply replace one set of insider elites with another—swapping out the old boys for young women, for instance—our workplaces may improve in some ways, but we will not have eliminated the structural power that, the survey showed, allows gender discrimination and sexual harassment to continue.In this article, I utilize the survey results to offer a structural analysis of GDSH in public history by identifying who holds power and why before offering suggestions on what we can do about it. More than horrifying stories of harassment and discrimination (horrifying because of their quotidian nature, but also, too often, because of their extremity), the survey reveals that board members, donors, volunteers, and visitors act as what I call “public history power brokers,” who have significant unacknowledged influence over our public history institutions of all sizes. Although too many public history sites do not have human resources (HR) policies about gender discrimination and sexual harassment at all, even those that exist are likely to fail when one of these groups is the perpetuator because of their power within the organization.4The power of public history power brokers has grown due to rising precarity, which has weakened both institutions and workers while increasing the brokers’ importance. Workers compete for poorly paid jobs with little security, making it difficult for victims of GDSH to report incidents out of fear of retribution and unemployment. Historical institutions, hurt by the decades-long retrenchment of public funding for history and culture and the upheaval of COVID-19 closures, have been particularly embattled since January 2025 as the Trump administration reneges on grants and threatens institutions that do not promote a unilaterally patriotic and whitewashed narrative about the past.5 Sites do more with less, competing over private and philanthropic funding and fighting to regain visitors. In this context, public history power brokers, who connect institutions with capital and other essential resources, become more influential.Employing a feminist analysis, I suggest that our field must embrace unionization and political organizing against precarity to ensure equitable workplaces in the future. Since the survey was conducted, AASLH and NCPH have both incorporated its findings in ways that reflect differing perspectives on how professional associations should intervene in this issue. AASLH has focused on policy by training leaders of small museums and historic sites about GDSH through publications, programs, and workshops. NCPH has mobilized around a mutual aid-influenced community care model to develop and share resources among public historians and revised codes of conduct for members. More robust HR policies, guidelines, and codes are critical in the near-term. However, structural changes in our field must also be made, including unionization to address the precarity that makes workers afraid to speak out against abuse, campaigns at local, state, and federal levels for increased public funding for our institutions as a common good, and a cultural shift towards understanding public history as work and public historians as workers.One of the most surprising findings of the survey concerned the rate of gender discrimination and sexual harassment by size of institution. The team creating the survey assumed, wrongly, that smaller institutions without HR departments or policies would be more likely sites where GDSH occurred. As I know from my own experiences in the field, in a workplace with only a handful of employees it becomes extremely difficult to call out inappropriate behavior. However, the survey results suggested that “larger institutions are no better at preventing, addressing, or resolving these issues than small institutions.” The final report interpreted this result accurately to mean that “more policies and human resource structures are not necessarily interventions that will influence the greatest change.”6 But this does not answer the question of why the rates are so similar among different size institutions.To answer that question, we must look at the data about who was most likely to engage in GDSH to gain a more nuanced view of how power works within the public history ecosystem. 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