The digital revolution that gave rise to independent publishing in the last decade has even replicated the traditional segregation and discrimination.
Interview with Dana Beth Weinberg
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According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, full-time working women in the United States earned only 80.5 cents for every one dollar earned by men. Women, on average, earn less than men in nearly every single occupation. Disappointingly for a profession where creativity is without gender, this pay gap exists for book authors, too.
Indeed, publishing’s gender pay gap is a rather remarkable one, as a scholarly paper recently published in PLOS One has founded. The paper’s researchers examined more than two million book titles published between 2002 and 2012 – and they discovered that book titles by female authors command nearly half (45%) the price of male authors’ books. Women are also underrepresented as authors in many prestigious genres. The digital revolution that gave rise to independent publishing in the last decade has even replicated the traditional segregation and discrimination.
“We find that indie publishing, though more egalitarian, largely replicates traditional publishing’s gender discrimination patterns,” according to the study’s co-author Dana Beth Weinberg.
“We conclude that, with greater freedom, workers in the gig economy may be inclined to greater equality but will largely replicate existing labor market segmentation and the lower valuation of female-typical work and of female workers,” she notes. A professor of Sociology at Queens College-CUNY, Weinberg is an “indie” author, too, having self-published the Russian mafia crime series, Kings of Brighton Beach, under the pseudonym D. B. Shuster.
On Friday at BookExpo in New York City, Dana Beth Weinberg joins a panel of journalists who report on book publishing from around the world. “Covering Books From Cover to Cover” also features Fabrice Piault, Livres Hebdo (France); Andrew Albanese, Publishers Weekly (US); Javier Celaya, dosdoce.com (Spain); and Porter Anderson, Publishing Perspectives(US). Panel moderator is CCC’s Christopher Kenneally.
