Women Writers Get Serious
by Victoria Fortune
This year, International Women’s Day was not just a single day of observance but the culmination of a year’s worth of momentum that began with the post-inauguration Women’s March and continued to pick up speed with the #Me Too and #Time’s Up movements. Women all over the world are feeling empowered to say enough to discrimination and harassment in the workplace, abuse at home, and gender bias in general.
In the publishing, as in society at large, women are demanding the industry come to terms with its chauvinism. To the outside observer, it may seem the publishing industry is ahead of the game regarding the gender gap. After all, women make up about 78 % of the workforce, according to an article in The Guardian. However, in recent years, as the industry has become more consolidated and corporate, a spate of female senior executives has retired and been replaced almost exclusively by white men. Women now occupy less that 40 % of executive positions in publishing, and the positions they do hold are typically in traditionally female fields, such as children’s literature and educational publishing. Moreover, even though women have a growing presence among the ranks of reviewers and editors, men continue to be published at higher rates and receive more awards and accolades.
In one of the first novel-writing workshops I took, in 2012, the discussion turned to the challenges of getting published, particularly as a woman. The instructor described her experience looking for an agent. A friend from her MFA program had recently signed with an agent, and she asked if he thought his agent might be a good fit for her and whether she should query him. Her friend told her not to bother; his agent only signed male authors. Can that be? I thought. Is there still such blatant sexism in this day and age? I laugh now at my naiveté.
In 2010, in an effort to bring attention to gender bias in publishing, several women writers started an organization called VIDA, and began the VIDA Count, tracking books published by, and awards and honors granted to, male vs. female authors. According to their website, “The VIDA Count has revealed major imbalances at premiere publications both in the US and abroad. For example, the inaugural count (2010) determined The New York Review of Books covered a total of 306 books by men in 2010 and only 59 books by women.”
In her article “Bias, She Wrote,” Rosie Cima takes an in-depth look at gender trends in publishing since the 1950s. She claims that “in 2015 books by women made up less than 20% of books reviewed in the New York Review of Books, 30% in Harper’s, 29% in the Atlantic, and 22% in the London Review of Books.” Critics argue that the VIDA Count is skewed because it doesn’t track the number of submissions. They claim you can’t fault a publisher for signing more men if more men than women submit manuscripts. However, that seems unlikely considering that MFA programs have been expanding since the 90’s, “and about 2/3s of MFA earners are women,” according to Cima, “but the gender ratio on the Best Seller list has been frozen at under 50% since the early 2000s.”
Perhaps men are simply better writers than women, some might argue, but author Catherine Nichols conducted an experiment that refutes that argument. As she describes in her article, “Homme de Plume,” she was so frustrated by the stream of rejections she had received for her manuscript that she decided to try an approach used by female authors of the Victorian era. She sent out her manuscript under a male pseudonym. She even submitted it to one of the same agents she had sent it to under her real name; while Catherine had received a form rejection letter, her male alter ego received an eager request for the full manuscript. As a woman, she received one response to 25 submissions. Under her male pseudonym, she received 17 responses to 50 queries. In other words, she was eight times more likely to get a response to the exact same manuscript when she presented it as a man’s work.
She allows that this may have been because agents were intrigued by a male author writing in a female voice. But she also questions whether it had to do with their expectations of a woman writer: the agents may have been expecting “Women’s Fiction,” and her work did not fit their preconceived notions. The few comments she received as a female author applauded her “beautiful writing” but questioned whether the protagonist was “plucky” enough, and suggested she was attempting something too ambitious. Her male counterpart, on the other hand, received far warmer and more encouraging feedback and was complimented for his “clever,” “well-constructed,” and “exciting” work.
Catherine felt guilty about the deception but it was warranted by the results. As she astutely observes:
Whenever VIDA numbers come out counting how many men and how many women write for literary publications and people discuss discrimination in publishing—do women pitch less frequently? Are they more easily discouraged? Are they less daring, more eager to be liked, care less about speaking truth to power? Do they prefer small topics and small templates?—I’ve started to think that some large number of these women must be drummed out and bamboozled before they reach their mature work.
I’m in that category of writer that Nichols describes as in the “middle stretch,” when writers are “neither beginners fresh for the journey nor secure professionals with a known name.” These are the writers for whom the type of feedback an agent provides, if any, can have a huge impact. “Women in particular seem vulnerable in that middle stretch,” she writes, “to having our work pruned back until it’s compact enough to fit inside a pink cover.” I admit it is a constant worry in the back of my mind that whatever I’m writing may be deemed a “small topic,” not serious enough to be literary fiction.
In June 2015, the acclaimed novelist Kamila Shamsie wrote an article calling out the book industry, asking it to “redress the inequality” of the literary scene. “Enough,” she said, before it became a rallying cry. She challenged publishers to commit to making 2018 the year of publishing women. She did so not with the expectation that the major houses would actually heed her request, but to raise awareness. And though only one independent publisher, And Other Stories, took up her challenge, many others at least felt chagrined enough to take a hard look at their publishing lists and make room for more women. And when they did, they found, lo and behold, that they did not have to lower their standards in order to include women. “That skewing isn’t about quality, or about the opinions of the reading public – it’s about gender bias that treats male writers as more ‘serious’, even if women writers are more popular among the (largely female) readership for fiction.”
Just as with the women’s movement at large, there are hopeful signs of change in publishing. In the UK last year, nine out of the top ten authors on the bestseller list were women. Women writers are getting bolder and more ambitious, and our ranks are certainly growing. What I would like to see, however, is the day when those topics that are seen as “small” and trivial because they focus on women’s inner lives, are considered serious. That’s when we’ll know there has been a true shift.
