
Home » Some initial notes on the 2022 Diversity Baseline Study Report, Unfortunately Without All-Encompassing Solutions
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by Matt Bowes
It has been five years since the first Diversity Baseline report from our colleagues at the Association of Canadian Publishers, and with the Prairies only contributing 13.36% of the data it’s a little tricky to make firm claims about what this means for the Albertan publishing industry, but here goes:
We saw some heartening data from the study, even though as before, your average publishing employee is seemingly still a straight (60.99%), white (74.94%) woman (75.24%) from Ontario (53.96%) with a college degree. A seven percent shift away from a white majority in five years is nothing to sneeze at though, and I hope that this will continue until the workforce of this industry looks more like the general population of the country. I would be extremely curious to see Quebecois industry stats on this too, as they’re even more focused on counting workers living in a major metropolis, albeit one that is significantly more diverse than the province itself.
People are becoming more comfortable thinking of themselves as living and working while disabled. Fully 26% of the industry (19.54% of heads of house [HOH]) are reporting this information, which I feel probably goes hand-in-hand a) an aging workforce, and b) the industry’s whole-hearted acceptance of hybrid and work-at-home employment models during and after the pandemic. Whether this indicates more disabled people choosing to join the publishing industry or people more willing to self-identify as disabled on this survey than they were five years ago is unclear, but both of these options are good to see. Our colleagues with disabilities, both visible and invisible, are providing essential perspectives for our publishing work, and as more people start to feel the effects of Long COVID I can only assume this proportion of the publishing (and Canadian) population will keep increasing.
The fact that so many people who identify as queer work in publishing is also great, especially when compared to the general population of the country. I think this stat made me the happiest, and shows that our attempts to make the industry more welcoming to queer people appear to be paying off, or, again, that more people who wouldn’t have done so in the last iteration of the study are representing themselves in the way they wish. Either way, that cheers me up.
One stat gives me a lot of pause, especially when compared to my back-of-the-envelope math on staffing levels here in Alberta: 62% of companies have 5 or less employees. I feel like that number is probably quite a bit higher here in Alberta, and I also wonder if the heads of houses who filled in the survey might have also counted interns and freelancers when responding. Like it or not, a lot of publishing companies here in Alberta are staffed by one or two people, often the founders themselves, and as such the demographics on race, disability and sexual/gender expression would skew closer to the numbers provided by heads of house rather than across the board.
Seeing as how I don’t work for a university publisher, and to my mind they would be among those very few companies with over 5 employees in Alberta, I hope their parent institutions have been working on robust diversity and hiring programs. The EDI programs for publishers with 1, 2 or 3 employees are to my mind probably also their succession planning programs: a lot of the presses founded here in the West came about in the 1970s, and by now a lot of the original publishers are looking to cash out.
Here’s a curious note: of all the departments surveyed, executive-level employees were the least likely to have undertaken publishing schooling. This checks out with what I know about my own colleagues, and it makes me wonder about the recent grads coming out of Humber, SFU et al.: I can see based on the ages of HOH that they’re probably not immediately taking over publishing companies (see above), but are there roadblocks standing in the way of starting their own? Systemic racism, funding, time, business training are all issues, but maybe the ACP’s data is skewed here by the need for ACP membership to see the survey? Or perhaps young grads and people of colour looking to get into publishing are doing it through FriesenPress and Kindle Direct, just forgoing the “official” system altogether?
This presents a dilemma for the young woman of colour who wants to run a publishing house and start steering the Canadian conversation: should she take over the backlist and distribution contracts of a company which more than likely has a few skeletons in the closet, or should she start from scratch with something completely her own, and run into issues of getting the books into stores, getting eyes on them, etc. The third way might be the best here, an established author starting an imprint with an established house, eg: Vivek Shraya’s VS. Books at Arsenal Pulp Press. Best of both worlds.
This is the part that bothered me the most: Beyond these suggestions, the common thread among respondents was, again, that even with the best intentions, DEI efforts are most often scuttled by low funding, overwork, and understaffing. And because of this, DEI initiatives are often spearheaded by the very people who are meant to be benefiting from them.
I’m sure this isn’t intentional, but it probably has a lot more to do with DEI efforts being delegated down to people with less seniority at the firm, who are in turn the most likely to be from diverse backgrounds.
So what should we do, then? If the leadership at the top of these companies is predominantly older white people, and younger grads of publishing programs and people of colour are not getting chances to move into leadership roles due to the lack of company infrastructure, what’s the next move, apart from waiting for people to retire or sell their companies? Well, in addition to working on having interesting authors take leadership positions through their own imprints (Poplar Press at Wolsak and Wynn is another good example here), one thing that’s worked well for me is to have my diverse employees bluesky together what sorts of roles they want to fill at the company, what kind of jobs they want to have.
My press is a bit odd though, and due to our non-profit structure we are actually able to approach people we think would be interesting to take on important roles on our board, but maybe there’s something to that too. I like what Wolsak and Wynn has done with their advisory board, whose diverse membership have gone on to prominent roles at larger publishing houses down the line. Perhaps we as Albertan publishers should try and engage our authors and important people in our communities with this sort of initiative, and allow them to see what it’s like on the publisher’s side and gain some experience before moving on to populate the companies of the future?
For more discussion about the results of 2022 Canadian Book Publishing Industry Diversity Baseline Survey, read Jenna Butler’s response.
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Matt Bowes has worked at NeWest Press since 2012 and became the General Manager in 2015. An avid film fan, he co-hosts Bollywood is for Lovers, a bi-weekly podcast on Hindi cinema with his partner Erin Fraser; part of the Alberta Podcast Network. He has also presented two film series at Edmonton’s Metro Cinema Society, a monthly series comparing comic books and film called Graphic Content, and a retrospective on outlaw filmmaker Seijun Suzuki. His critical writing has appeared in The Pulp, Sequential Tart, and Luma Quarterly.