Exciting things have happened with the Diversity Baseline Survey since our last update!
The Diversity Baseline Survey gathers statistics on publishing staff and reviewers in four major categories:
1) Gender
2) Race/ethnicity
3) Sexual Orientation
4) Disability
These categories will be further broken down by department. The goal is to have all major review journals and publishers—from small, to mid-size, to large— participate in this project. If we are serious about trying to address the lack of diversity in the publishing world, this is the very first step we need to take. Sharing our numbers as an industry will not only clue us in to important patterns that may be missing, it will also show that we are committed to change.
Since our last update, several new publishers have joined the survey, including Bloomsbury, Lerner Publishing, Chronicle Books and Abrams. More small publishers have joined, including Clean Reads, Dancing Lemur Press, L.L.C., and Owlkids Books. Macmillan, one of the “big five” publishers, has also joined. You can see the full list here.
All in all, almost 30 publishers and 8 major review journals will be administering the survey. This is huge.
This week, a supporter created the hashtag #BigFiveSignOn to encourage more publishers to join the survey, including the rest of the “big five” publishers (HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, and Hachette), in advance of the mid-September deadline. We were thrilled to see the hashtag trending on Monday! Check out some great media coverage of the campaign from around the web:
“Diversity Matters: Lee & Low Push for Diversity in the Publishing World” at BookRiot
“Diversity Survey Deadline Nears” at Publishers Weekly
“Why I’m Asking that the #BigFiveSignOn” at SC Write
“The Page is a Mirror…Or Is It?” at Jamie Ayres’ blog
“Why #Bigfivesignon? #WNDB” at Coloring Between the Lines
Over at Change.org, our petition encouraging publishers to join the survey is now at almost 1,900 signatures. Have you signed yet?
The deadline for joining the survey is September 15, 2015. Help us encourage remaining publishers to join by spreading the word on social media using hashtag #bigfivesignon and by signing the petition!
Read our previous update on the Diversity Baseline Survey.
Learn about why we are asking publishers to join our Diversity Baseline Survey.
Interesting. About 25% of American teens in public school are Latino American. It’ll be interesting to see how many Latino Americans work in publishing. You probably can count on one hand, maybe tow, the number of Mexican Americans who are literary agents or editors.