VIDA, an American organization that supports women in literary arts, recently released 'The Count' for 2011 providing a sobering (and somewhat depressing) look at the current state of rates of publication between women and men in some of the most prestigious literary review outlets (including the New York Times Book review, Times Literary Supplement and the New Yorker). The statistics on the gender split in book coverage is, though not surprising (in 2010 they were just as depressing!), an indication that we women still have a long way to go in terms of breaking the perceived literary glass ceiling.
Now, before I raise the hackles of every male reader of TKZ (and no doubt some of the female readers too!), I want to preface this blog post by stating that I do not believe there in overt bias in the literary world - what concerns me more is how we deal with what appears to be an ongoing systemic issue - one in which women continue to be underrepresented in terms of publication, review, awards and media coverage.
My aim is to promote discussion not to whine, complain or moan (which sadly, seems to be the reaction to many women commentators when they raise the issue of gender in publishing!)
The statistics, however, speak for themselves...
For example, Vida's 'Count' for 2011 reveals that at the London Review of Books last year 26% of authors reviewed were women, at the New York Review of Books that figure was 18% while at the New Yorker of the books mentioned in the 'briefly noted' section only 33% were authored by women. When looking in terms of reviewers that are women the results are eerily similar - with 16%, 21% and 30% of female reviewers at the London Review of Books, New York Review of Books and Times Literary Supplement respectively.
When I started telling my husband about the figures he immediately leapt on the fact that, when considering the statistics in terms of reviews, you also need to look at the percentage of books authored by men and women. Fair enough.
Now these statistics don't seem all that easy to come by, though The Guardian newspaper recently contacted some of the UK's largest publishing houses and found that for their 2011 non-fiction releases Penguin, Atlantic Books, Random House and Simon & Schuster reported 74%, 73%, 69% and 64% of their titles were (respectively) authored by males.(The article citing this can be found here) This genuinely surprised me - for I had no idea that there was such a gender imbalance in terms of publishing.
These figures are, however, for non-fiction titles, and I wondered whether there were similar figures in terms of fiction. An article by Ruth Franklin on the 2010 VIDA figures in The New Republic provided me with a little more insight. Franklin reviewed the Fall 2010 publisher catalogs and again, to my surprise, this revealed a similar pattern with most of the major houses hovering around 25-30% female authorship. Only Penguin's Riverhead imprint came close to parity with 45% of its titles authored by women. When the Franklin investigated the smaller, independent presses she found their results fared just as poorly with the best performing publisher (Graywolf) having only 25% of titles by female authors.
All in all these statistics suggest we have a long way to go before we understand why women are underrepresented in publishing - especially given that the overwhelming percentage of readers are women.
So what do you think these statistics suggest (and please, no abusive comments...) and how do you think the balance can be redressed? Should it even be redressed? In my view the first step is awareness and the second will be getting more men to read books authored by women(!) as well as more women involved in the upper eschelons of both publishing and reviewing. But will this really help?
What are the numbers really saying about the perceived literary glass ceiling?
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