According to a 2016 Guardian article, 78% of staff working at 34 major book publishers and 8 peer-reviewed journals were female. Founded in 1979, the Women in Publishing group, based in London, works to build women’s careers and networking abilities, while also fostering personal development. The group determined that even though publishing jobs are dominated by women, there is still a desire to break through the glass ceiling.
The non-profit group Exceptional Women in Publishing was founded in the U.S. in 1998, and through their work with the annual Women’s Leadership Conference held in San Francisco, they have grown in recognition and made it a goal to globally support women of color, as well as non-traditional forms of publishing such as digital media, zines, blogs, and graphic novelists.
Despite the overwhelming number of women working in the publishing industry, a 2017 article questioned if things were getting worse for women. In this article, it was noted that senior positions held by women were all replaced by men: “…women such as Random House’s Gail Rebuck, Penguin’s Helen Fraser, Macmillan’s Annette Thomas and Little, Brown’s Ursula Mackenzie, who had all embodied the ideal that women publishers faced no glass ceiling, have in the last five years all been replaced by men.”
Novelist Kamila Shamsie, a British-Pakistani writer, known for her work Home Fire, challenged the book industry to publish no new titles by men for a year. Only And Other Stories rose to her challenge.
It is not only sexism and a lack of diversity that can be deterrents to women advancing in publishing, but also leaving the business to have children and then upon returning, having to juggle both a home life and work can be challenging. Huge corporate mergers do not seem advantageous to female employees either. Novels and creative writing thrive on entrepreneurial and exceptional ideas, but with the merging of big companies, jobs are cut and a seemingly male dominated hiring board will hire in their own image and advocate for more cookie cutter “best seller” books.
However, there are exciting advancements being made in smaller, independent publishing companies run by women. The April 2017 Publishers Weekly article “Women Rule in Indie Publishing” details the rise of women executives among independent publishers. A partial list of women-run, women-focused publishers are listed on the web site wordmothers.com.
Some of these women executives have weighed in on their experiences.
Amy King, a founding member of Vida, an organization that works to promote equality and diversity among women, people of color, and queer, trans, and non-gender conforming people, said that she feels “the big companies are a victim to profit margins where a smaller publisher can explore different voices that they believe in.”
Graywolf Publisher Fiona McCrae remembers when she started in the business and there were very smart female employees who were “put in charge of cookbooks and this was in the 90s.”
Rhonda Hughes, owner of Print Vision and Hawthorne Books, remembers being passed over for a promotion by a male colleague. She went to Oahu, sat on the beach, and “…came up with this business called Print Vision, which I still own. I left because I realized I wouldn’t get what I wanted unless I left and did it myself.”
C. Spike Trotman, founder of Chicago’s Iron Circus Comics, went into business for herself, saying, “I think a lot of people at the top especially are extremely resistant to change. They have to be dragged kicking and screaming to expand the scope of their publishing even slightly.”
The first ever “PublishHer’s Dinner” took place in London this past March. Some 30 women leaders in publishing met to discuss diversity and networking and to support one another in the business. Maria A. Pallante, president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) said, “I would like to share a quote from one of my heroes, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who sits on the Supreme Court in the United States. ‘Women belong in all places where decisions are being made … It shouldn’t be that women are the exception.’”
