If I had ten bucks for every time a journalist has asked me recently about the rise of women in Indian publishing, my bank account would be pleasantly plump by now.
The argument goes something like this:
1) There are now far more women in key positions in Indian publishing, demonstrating that we have stormed this male bastion
2) This will make publishing a less sexist industry, change the nature of the business and encourage women writers.
The truth is slightly different, as a group of us were discussing at a party for Women in Publishing. Fifteen to twenty years ago, publishing was seen as a gentleman’s game: most editors and CEOs were male and most of them, as Zubaan’s Urvashi Butalia noted, came from a public school background. The workplace may not have been aggressively sexist, but it was not especially supportive of women, either.
If you look at the scenario today, women occupy key editorial positions in most publishing houses, from Penguin India to OUP. The chief editors at Scholastic, Random House, HarperCollins, Picador and my own company, Westland, are all women. This would seem to indicate a massive shift in attitudes, and a more “feminised” workplace.
Look a little more carefully at the situation, though, and the picture changes. Publishing was a man’s world twenty years ago — but so were most professions. By the time I joined Penguin (briefly) about a decade ago, there appeared to be little gender discrimination in most publishing houses, except for a small handful that continue to be conservative. Out of the team I met at Penguin, four of us went on to head publishing houses. Ravi Singh heads Penguin India, Karthika runs HarperCollins, Thomas Abraham is the CEO at Hachette and I muddle around at Westland. The gender numbers are evenly split.
Those of us who were part of the profession ten years ago had few gender battles to fight, unlike the women who preceded us. At the party for Women in Publishing, I enjoyed myself — but I also missed some of the male colleagues who shared this journey with me.
If there are more women on the editorial side than ever before, that is also because publishing is traditionally a low-paying industry, especially at entry level. Men tend to look for better-paying jobs. And the high numbers of women in editorial are not reflected elsewhere in the industry. Few women want jobs in sales and distribution, which involve considerable physical discomfort. Publicity departments attract women; but the more senior marketing jobs in most publishing houses are occupied almost exclusively by men.
Indian publishing also reflects the situation in the West, where few women occupy the CEO’s chair. Some women don’t want the position because of the additional business responsibilities that come with it, some find the competition too fierce. (If my CEO is reading this, I hasten to add that I belong to the former category, and I would never hold his gender against him!)
The second part of the argument is more complex. With so many women making editorial decisions, have we changed the nature of publishing? One journalist asked me whether my publishing house planned to do more books on motherhood, pregnancy, parenting and the family, and I found the assumptions underlying that statement saddening — as though these were the only issues women might find of interest.
But I have to say that it’s true that we discuss more books aimed at women on subjects ranging from health to financial management and relationships. The most interesting editorial offices have a healthy mix of men and women, ensuring that there’s no gender bias either way. And some stereotypes fall by the wayside: you’ll find male editors who are passionately interested in parenting and cooking and who don’t see these as “feminine” subjects, and female editors who are football-mad. We reflect the variety of today’s world.
Are we more encouraging of women writers in general? I don’t think so. When there are more women in publishing, there’s less resistance to women writers — but there isn’t and there shouldn’t be active discrimination. A manuscript has no gender, it’s accepted if it’s good, rejected if it’s not. If, fifteen years down the line, there is less need for the category called women’s writing and if women writers are accepted into the mainstream as easily as male writers, I’ll know that we did our job.
(Disclaimer: The columnist is chief editor, Westland and Tranquebar; the views expressed here are personal.)
