FOR THE past two years, Q&Q has been working to find a meaningful and balanced way to cover the issue of gender disparity in the publishing industry. While Canadian Women in the Literary Arts has done an admirable job in drawing attention to the inequalities – and inspiring change – in book reviews across the country’s media, the organization’s annual count cannot reflect how many books by men versus women are actually being published in the first place.
Of particular interest to me is non-fiction – my original assumption being that women authors are published less than men, especially in domains such as history and science. But assumptions are useless and unfair. We knew we had to start with the numbers, which was no small task given how many books are published annually across Canada. We counted titles through a year’s worth of publishers’ catalogues; it was an extremely helpful process, but the results made me realize that for the numbers to be significant, we needed to dig deeper, and for a longer period of time.