Delhi and the Diversity of Diversity
By Porter Anderson (@Porter_Anderson) | February 16, 2018 |
At Qutb Minar. Image – iStockphoto: Train Arrival
Because Diversity Is So…Diverse
If you’ve ever flown to New Delhi, you’ll have encountered one of the more peculiar time-zone anomalies in world travel: The mighty capital of India is not just 10 hours ahead of Eastern time, it’s 10 hours and 30 minutes ahead. Like Tehran, New Delhi has a half-hour time change atop the usual whole-zone adjustments.
And when I was in New Delhi this week for the International Publishers Association’s (IPA) biennial world congress, an interesting situation developed. As I wrote it up at Publishing Perspectives, the stage was busy with many publishing and intellectual property players, most of them rightly energized and newly sensitized by the political realities around us today.
In a nutshell:
- Copyright protection is being gravely threatened in many parts of the world; Canada, of all markets, is the reluctant poster child for “fair use” expansions in education that leave authors and publishers unpaid
- The freedom to publish, our industry’s evocation of free speech, is being brazenly challenged by the rise of autocratic and rightist movements in the States and elsewhere, as when Donald Trump challenges Macmillan for publishing Fire and Fury and China re-detains publisher Gui Minhai, winner of this year’s Prix Voltaire as a champion of such freedom
- And then there’s diversity, a concept that can be confused from person to person, organization to organization, moment to moment, let alone country to country.
As many as 70 national associations’ representatives were at the conference, which was designed as three days of intensive, relentless presentations, debates, and discussions around the key issues impacting the world industry. The event drew close to 400 people–with probably 400 views of what we mean when we say “diversity.”
In my congress-closing article, it fell to me to point out that the concept of gender diversity in publishing’s leadership had gotten away from the planners. We watched as waves of talented, intelligent men moved across the stage, but the organization fell short of its goal of gender parity in these presentations. Even some of the most prominent women publishers in India, well known to many of us in the international business, were oddly missing from programming. The local organizers had focused elsewhere and surely felt they were entertaining a fabulously diverse audience with as many as 60 nations’ delegates in place.
The international association has handled this criticism extremely well, without defensiveness. This is very much to the IPA’s credit, how constructive.
And what’s important to recognize, of course, is that an outfit like the IPA has the interesting dilemma of occasionally competing constituencies. In a congress cycle that’s hosted by a market like India still laboring with a major overhang of traditional male domination, the dynamic of the wider, multinational group can end up in conflict with the interests of the local hosting body.
The next IPA congress is set in Norway, and it’s logical to expect a very different reality there; the Nordic and Scandinavian publishing markets have long reflected their societies’ more even-handed gender relations.
Nevertheless, the experience in New Delhi–on the whole, an important congress and filled with collegial grace and collaboration in many other ways–brought to mind a couple of points that we as writers need to think about just as carefully as we’d ask conference planners or employers to do.
What Do You Mean by ‘Diversity’?
Provocations graphic by Liam Walsh
I had a press release come in about a week ago in which one of our prominent literary-and-humanitarian agencies was announcing the shortlists for a series of awards the group confers in recognition of good and important literature.
The note on the release to me announced that they were especially proud of the “gender diversity” of one particular shortlist: “It’s all women!”
Are you smiling and shaking your head? The organization was perfectly well-intentioned. But this, of course, is an apt example of what can happen. We can become so intent on changing an imbalance of one kind or another to something more “diverse,” that completely flipping the situation and announcing success is the result. An all-women’s shortlist is no more “gender diverse” than an all-male shortlist. And if a panel at a conference is all one gender or all the other gender, then gender diversity simply hasn’t happened on that panel, even if the gender that’s sitting there is the one you or I prefer to see.
What you begin to realize is that diversity and inclusivity lives in the blinkered eye of any beholder. We all can fall so earnestly prey to our understandings of what’s fair and right–and what isn’t–that we can misconstrue what’s in front of us.
And the problem broadens when you realize how important it is to clarify which diversity you may be discussing. Some hear the term “diversity,” itself, as automatically referring to race. Or to sexuality diversity, linguistic diversity, geographic diversity, you name it.
Free-floating “diversity” and desires to achieve it may ultimately be no more helpful than free-floating anxiety. And as writers, we have a role to play in all this. Because we’re generally more aware of words, their meanings and their power, we carry a certain responsibility to be better at this than many of our associates, We should be the bringers of specificity.
When we speak of concepts of social “diversity,” when we look for how they impact our writings, when we place our own concepts on the line and our opinions before the world and our stories in front of readers, are we clarifying what we’re talking about? Or could we unwittingly fall into expectations that our readers will understand what we mean in terms of “diversity”?
I’ve actually seen some book blurbing lately that might be efforts to capitalize on this blur. (Blurry blurbs. We’ll coin that, shall we?) They read like this:
“As electrifying as today’s wrenching struggles for diversity!”
That may be a way to get you to buy a book without telling you that it’s referencing, maybe, national-representation in Non-Governmental Organizations, rather than whichever “diversity” you wanted to read about, right? Too many Labradors at the kennel! Not enough seagulls on among the birds on the beach! To paraphrase Robert Heinlein, one writer’s diversity may be the next writer’s belly laugh.
How diverse is your experience in this? Have you encountered a book that threw you off the scent with a ‘blurry blurb’? In your own writings, how are you being sure to specify what you’re doing in various effects of diversity?
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@Porter_Anderson is a fellow of the National Critics Institute. He is Editor-in-Chief of Publishing Perspectives, the international news medium of Frankfurt Book Fair. He co-founded The Hot Sheet, a newsletter for trade and independent authors, which now is owned and operated by Jane Friedman. Priors: The Bookseller‘s The FutureBook in London, CNN, CNN.com and CNN International–as well as the Village Voice, Dallas Times Herald, and the United Nations’ WFP in Rome. is a recipient of London Book Fair’s International Excellence Award for Trade Press Journalist of the Year. PorterAndersonMedia.com
My literary agency has done okay I hope, in employment terms, with respect to gender diversity. 75% female. 25% LGBT. Not as well in racial/cultural diversity, so far. That’s a goal.
We represent many authors with diverse backgrounds. It’s a mission, especially to bring new voices to genre fiction.
I do not find the industry at all resistant to that. If anything, there is a clamor for stories written from different perspectives. It’s a good time to be an author who isn’t white/male. Believe it or not.
Not that there aren’t challenges ahead for our industry, and our literature. But I’m optimistic. That is because every day I see at work a highly powerful engine of change: strong stories.
Hey, Don,
Thanks for your comment here. And I tell you, of all people running offices in New York, you’re one I’d trust without hesitation to be making the best decisions for your staffing and its multicultural balance.
If we move past your situation in particular, though — trying to get it into a more general discussion — here’s what I might say: If you told us an agency was 75-percent men, a lot of us might say that this was pretty imbalanced and you needed more women. But if it’s 75-percent women, a lot of folks seem to feel that this is OK.
Similarly, the overall workforce of publishing in the States, the UK and parts of Europe is roughly 80-percent female. And yet we don’t have enough male readers. Women are always surveyed as buying and reading more than men. Among boys, the issue is more acute, of course, as they’re wooed away by the shiny appeal of techno-gadgets, film, TV, gaming, apparently more readily than girls are.
If things were reversed, and the industry was 80-percent men and we didn’t have as many female readers as male, we’d say (rightly!) that men could hardly be producing the content that women readers needed. But with eight of 10 publishing workers women, few people seem to feel they can say (aloud) that one reason men and boys are lagging in reading might be that our overall gender imbalance biases the industry’s output toward women.
(The 80-percent figure does not apply, by the way, to executive positions. While a great many managerial and directorial positions are held by women, the C-level spots still are too frequently going to men, as we know. It’s the overall workforce, taken as a whole, that tends to come in at between 78 and 82 percent women.)
Sophie de Closets, the terrific chief of Hachette’s famous division Fayard in Paris, gave me a great interview last fall in which she quite bravely said that what the industry needs is more men. She’s right, and it took guts for her to say this. Here’s part of her comments:
“I might surprise you now, because this may not sound politically correct, but what troubles me is the lack of men” in publishing.
“I’m trying desperately to hire men at Fayard. And I’m having trouble finding men who want to work in publishing and finding men who want to work at a publishing company run by younger women than they’re used to. And this is not healthy for an industry that focuses on creativity and culture to have such homogeneity of people.
“I mean, we’re a majority of white women, highly educated, born and raised in big cities. We tend to be exactly who the readers are because books are mostly bought and read by women. But we look too much the same.
“Women are going to be in charge of publishing. Because when you look down [the line] you only find women. The problem will be–in a few years, in many countries–to find talented men, actually, who want to work in publishing. We have to have balanced people, in charge and not in charge, at every level in work. Only white women? That’s not healthy.”
It’s a difficult thing to bring up, though, of course. The skilled and talented women of publishing are wonderful and so is every female reader we have. And being imbalanced toward women rather toward men is the “right problem” for an industry to have in a world in which most of the time an imbalance goes the other way.
But isn’t it worth considering that “too many women” can be just as serious a problem as “too many men”?
I guess what i’m interested in, in this post and in so many discussions about “diversity” (and how it seems to lie in the eye of the beholder) is that “be more diverse!” doesn’t necessarily mean “bring us more great women!” And maybe publishing needs to consider that those strong stories you rightly look to as potential change agents need to speak to both men and women today, to girls and boys. Can that happen when the industry is so majority-female in its workforce?
Wide open to your good thoughts as always, and I hope this isn’t an irritating line of inquiry. I just think it needs consideration. (It’s always the uncomfortable ones I come up with, right? LOL)
Thanks, Don,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Porter–In terms of achieving a Platonic diversity ideal, the only way would be to choose “the best.” Best writers, editors, panel participants. But who will be the arbiter of “best”? There’s the rub. So, right-minded people in charge fall back on quantitative measures. And sometimes, looking to redress past unfairness, they end up with a short list of “100% women!”
But since you mention the principal special interests in play, let me add one that often ends up off the grid. I’m talking about the unyoung (thank you, zombie nation)–that is, the older reader and writer. Does high-minded talk among agents and publishers about “looking for strong stories” ever address questions related to books written by and for older readers? Perhaps you or Donald Maass know of such instances, and can pass them along. IMO, the older reader is an underserved market. It’s made up of people who grew up when reading was valued, and who, in retirement, have disposable time and money for books.
As always, thanks for a literate, thought-provoking post.
Hi, Barry,
Very good topic in the world of diversity — ageism is just as much a thing as racism and sexism.
Let me point you in what I hope are a few good directions.
First, let me introduce you to Ashton Applewhite, whose book “This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism” is one of the best we’ve had. You can find it here and I had an interesting interview with her as she was bringing the book out in the summer of 2016 here . I heard Applewhite speak in January at the Museum of Modern Art and her points are quite compelling and, I think, might give you some framework for how you analyze the topic of aging and ageism.
Second, this is an observation easily forgotten by all but the younger set: the population is aging. If you look at television commercials, you’ll find there are far, far more ads and appeals being made to older citizens than there were in the past because the Baby Boom is a formidable commercial class. Many of our younger citizens, in fact, resent this, and in England, many younger citizens were especially furious with older voters who voted for Brexit because, as these younger voters saw it, the older folks didn’t care that they would leave the younger citizens to lives outside the EU. In short, the aging population is far more powerful than you might think and I’d urge you to track specific writings on this, you’ll find them quite pervasive in the media if you set up a Google alert to catch them for you.
Lastly, look at author Debra Eve’s site, “Later Bloomer” here
Debra gathers the stories of great people, many of them authors, who either started late in life or had their success late in life. You come to realize that an awful lot of people we revere simply had to have some maturity to produce what they did. It’s great stuff, much of it fascinating.
So there you go. And would you like a specific reading recommendation? Here are two: John Le Carre’s A Legacy of Spies and A Delicate Truth — both utterly unafraid of age and aging. And John, himself, is 86 and, I’m told, still writing.
Cheers,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Porter–thanks yet again for your generous reply, and for troubling to provide me with links. I will certainly look into them.
Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear: what I wrote had less to do with wanting to educate myself on the subject of ageism (you could say I’m living that particular dream–hahah), than with the more selfish issues faced by older writers in relation to the publishing business. The stats you recount underscore the problem. If the great majority of literary agents and their editorial counterparts are young women, all looking for the same thing–the next blockbuster written by someone young like themselves, about the young, like themselves–what old male or female fiction writer has even a slim chance of getting a partial read, let alone a full manuscript? Maybe someone’s grandmother? It’s all well and good to talk of “strong stories” being the marketplace’s true determiner as Donald Maass does. But strong stories written by older writers and aimed at older readers don’t really have anywhere to go. The queries all go to young people, etc.
But if this is not true or is over-stated, I am more than ready to be educated.
I once thought that it was diversity of thought that would be most prized in literature, and that all these other “diversities” were being used as useful but imperfect proxies for it.
Turns out I was dead wrong. Most people don’t want diversity of thought, they want the thoughts they already have validated and reinforced. The want to feel they’re right, even if they aren’t. So being open-minded — willing to consider other views — is becoming less and less valued in our society, and being fanatically loyal to your socio-political tribe more and more so.
Authors, you want to be a subversive, you want to make the world better? Learn to be sneaky: you can’t let the reader discover that you’re challenging their prejudices and preconceptions until it’s too late for them to put the book down.
Open-mindness and a free competition in the “marketplace of ideas” turned out to be passing phases on our way to social-network gulags. And now “diversity” is becoming a marketing check box, like “New and improved” on a box of detergent.
PCGE: Very convincing. All must now pay lip service to diversity. But agents and editors still look for what went before, with an added smidgeon of glitter. Even so, this dog whistle means that gatekeepers must now factor in something that didn’t register until recently.
Hi, PCGE,
I fully agree with you that most people don’t want actual diversity — especially of opinion. Having started my journalistic career as an arts critic before going into hard news and politics, I learned very fast that the critic’s understanding of one person’s opinion as a touchstone against which to test your own is very, very rare. You’re quite right that most people today feel they must “win” at any conversation and that in a difference of opinions they must overcome the other side. This is partly the competitive nature of our society, partly a complete loss of touch with the fact that we were founded as a nation FOR dissenters, and partly the result of the conservative backlash, which is based (for many, not all) in a rejection of “the other,” hence our struggles today around immigraion.
However, to say that “diversity” is just a buzzword now is too cynical a dismissal. It can certainly become a mere token of political correctitude, yes. But any important impetus toward something right or wrong in our culture now can become “just a buzzword” because our massive media structure pushes it around in so many directions at once.
In the past few days, I’ve been impressed by the articulate and elear-eyed young people at the school in Parkland, Florida, where the school shooting occurred last weekend. Their effort to turn the event into an engine for gun law progress can — and will — quickly start to sound like buzzword stuff. But that won’t mean that it’s any less correct or less urgent.
In short, I’m afraid that a kind of reductio-ad-buzzword effect is inevitable in almost any movement, cause, campaign, or issue — both the right stuff and the wrong stuff. This is part of the communications-bombardment under which we live. And at times we have to remember that the right idea is still the right idea, even if it’s getting so much lip-service that it seems to be nothing but another fad.
Thanks for your comment, and for reading me!
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
I imagine many of those who ‘fall so earnestly prey to our understandings of what’s fair and right’ are focused on being SEEN to comply with the ‘new’ standards, rather than ever really making the effort to consider other people’s lives with empathy and compassion.
Hi, MA,
Very perceptive, yes. I’m sure there are instances of more show than actual empathy and fellow-feeling.
The tricky part is that we need to trust each other’s intentions at the outset, hoping they’ll prove authentic. If we start with mistrust of each other, then we short-circuit any chance of progress.
But this isn’t easy. As PCGE is saying above, we so quickly seem to reduce even important causes to buzzwords, and the stamina required to maintain an actuality and authenticity in a cause is extremely taxing. (The young, articulate students leading the @NeverAgainMSD effort in gun law reform from Parkland, Florida, this morning talked abou how exhausted they’re becoming after just four days of network and newspaper interviews an appearances.)
Let’s hope we all can have find the strength to find genuine commitment to important efforts to maintain the authenticity those struggles deserve.
Thanks,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson