Book Publishing Is Almost as White as the Oscars

*Seen many Latino-authored titles at the bookstore lately? Like the movies, the publishing industry is dominated by non-minorities. Specifically, according to this report, it’s dominated by white, straight, middle-aged women. Only 6% of publishing industry professionals are Latino. VL

By Jonathan Sturgeon, Flavorwire

If you work in book publishing, there is a good chance you are a white, able-bodied, straight woman. This according to a pioneering surveycommissioned by Lee & Low Books, a minority-owned publisher of children’s books and Foreword’s 2014 Publisher of the Year.

The Diversity Baseline Survey (DBS), released Tuesday, seeks to establish a ground floor of “hard numbers” that measures the diversity of publishing staff. According to a description in its methodology, the survey was made available to 1,524 reviewer employees and 11,713 publishing employees across most major publishers and several independent presses — although it appears that HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster did not participate in the study. They survey’s response rate was 25.8%.

The impetus for the survey, according to its introduction, was the publisher’s belief that it could “illuminate a problem that can otherwise be dismissed or swept under the rug” and “measure whether or not initiatives to increase diversity among publishing staff were actually working.”

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