It’s easy to feel that the debate about diversity in the publishing industry is all talk and little action. At Frankfurt Book Fair in October, a session in The Markets conference at the Business Club will feature female publishing executives discussing why breaking into the top ranks of the international industry remains so difficult, even as the majority of rank-and-file jobs in the publishing-industry workforce are held by women.
In the UK, however, publishers are making a firm commitment to improvement—and not just in gender inclusion in the upper echelons. Led by the Publishers Association (PA)—and calling it “socially and morally the right thing to do”—the industry is embracing a new 10-point action plan to change the makeup of the country’s overall publishing workforce.
The goal statement they start with: “PA members have agreed to set industry-wide targets to seek to employ at least 50 percent of women in both senior leadership positions and executive-level roles and ensure that 15 percent of employees are black, Asian, and minority ethnic people within the next five years.”
The key to success in this program is data—the industry will be surveyed annually to track progress. The PA conducted a preliminary study and found that women now account for 49 percent of senior leadership roles but only 41 percent of executive board level positions. The survey also found that black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) employees make up 13 percent of the workforce.
The PA itself is going to be providing unconscious-bias training, a strong component in raising workplace diversity awareness, and “apprentice trailblazer standards” are being developed to guide publishers in helping a wider range of applicants find their way to entry-level positions.
Bottom line: We admire the formal commitment among publishers to diversity—there, they prefer the term inclusivity. We hope that other nations’ publishers can make similar tangible moves in this direction, and it does need to occur in national increments because each market is different. One thing the UK needs to consider, for example, is something that Brexit has helped reveal: differences in how various parts of the country are handling diversity issues. Awareness is the real driver here: the Brits are willing to make this a collective focus. We’d like to see the US market and many more follow the UK’s lead.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
