More on Gender Bias in Publishing: A Battle of Anecdotes

Today, The Huffington Post follows up on the report I had written about on Tuesday concerning one woman's experience submitting author queries under both male and female names in "Can We Stop Pretending The Publishing Industry Is Fair Now?" The HuffPo piece draws a contrast between Catherine Nichol's deeply troubling experience of finding that her work received a dramatically better reception when submitted under a male name than under her own name, with that of Kevin Morris, a Hollywood entertainment lawyer whose self-published book White Man’s Problems about (you guessed it) white middle aged men was picked up by Grove/Atlantic after Morris met the publisher at a Hollywood-insiders party. In the words of the HuffPo pieces author: "How fortunate for middle-aged white man Morris that this underdog network of middle-aged white men was able to launch his literary career, against all odds."

I have one major problem with the HuffPo piece, and one minor one. On the minor side, the author neglects to mention that the reason Morris's book was self published was that his earlier novel touching on similar issues was repeatedly rejected. For all I know, the earlier work did not deserve to be published. But it might also have been good work. Perhaps it was rejected because, as I wrote earlier, most consumers of fiction are women and there was no perceived market? Or maybe it was rejected because the publishing market is biased against men? We simply do not know. The fact that his later book was published seems to directly reflect the privilege of being a Hollywood insider far more than it reflects any advantage to being a middle-aged white man (not that the two have to be mutually exclusive).

The major problem is that the debate on gender bias in publishing seems to have been reduced to a battle of anecdotes. For every anecdote about gender bias against women there is a matching anecdote about bias against men. My belief is that the system is probably biased against women; Catherine Nichol's experience is worth substantially more than one anecdote as it is based on sending out 100 queries under two different names. However, there may be other explanations for Nichol's experience. Maybe there was something about the title of the book, or the sample chapters sent, that led the agents to have more confidence in a male author? I do not know what that might be, but it seems possible.

The point of all this is simply to say that we need a systematic study of the issue, and not more battles of the anecdote. In my prior post I sketch how such a systematic study could be carried out; I hope that someone takes up the challenge of implementing it.