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Guest Post: Century-long inequality persists in Scottish literature today

 

In this guest post, Dr Christina Neuwirth writes about their new research, the Quine Report, which examines gender equality across the Scottish literary sector in numbers.

What is the Quine Report: Quantifying Inequality in Scottish Literature?

I first started my research on gender equality in the Scottish literary sector in 2017 with a real desire to find out what was going on structurally in this industry. I had been working as a bookseller, writer and project manager in the industry for a few years already, and I knew both that it was a female-dominated workplace and that it was far from equal. In my research over the subsequent five years as part of my PhD, I had the opportunity to interview tastemakers – literary critics, literary festival directors, publishers, librarians, booksellers – to get their sense of gender equality in the literary sector. I also conducted a wide-ranging count of Scottish literary output, by which I mean authors published in Scotland, authors reviewed by two large national newspapers, authors speaking at a selection of book festivals, and authors winning literary awards. In the two years since finishing my PhD, I worked to summarise my key findings and make them available to readers in an accessible way – and that’s what the Quine Report is.

What are some of its headline findings?

My findings are perhaps unsurprising, but nevertheless, I think, shocking: In each of the areas of the Scottish literary sector that I analysed, I found gender disparity. In over 100 years of prizes, only 33.4% of winners were women and a starkly low 4.6% were BPOC authors. In 3 years of publishing, less than 39% of authors published in Scotland were women; in the same period in reviewing, men wrote more than 4 times as many reviews as women; and in the same period in festivals, men were programmed more than women, and given solo events at an even higher rate. I found that male authors’ visibility was more amplified through multiple appearances, and they made up a larger percentage of highly visible authors than in each individual area of publishing, prizes, reviewing and festivals. While doing this work on gender, I also found racial disparity: the more visibility was amplified, the more BPOC authors were excluded.

From my interviews, I learned that, at several stages, ideas of what Scottish literature should or could be are limited. Firstly, the Scottish literary canon, which historically favours white male authors, still impacts tastemaking today. Secondly, our ideas about literature are limited by the capitalist market idea of risk, in which literary sector businesses appeal to imagined ideas of consumers.

The tightly-woven web of connections and financial relationships within the literary sector can limit scope for change. Additionally, the scope for any action is narrowed by what the literary market imagines that audiences want to read, and through discrimination, harassment, and systemic devaluing of women’s work. Simply being aware of inequality is not enough to lead to meaningful, sustainable and systemic action. The sector runs the risk of not taking enough action through its own self-image of being a progressive sector with good intentions. This self-image can shield the sector from recognising its biases.

Diving deeper into the research

I think frequently in discussions of arts and culture, we talk about participation: the problem is that there aren’t enough women working in the field. This, however, isn’t the case in publishing – Bookcareers found that 87.3% of workers in the UK literary sector are women,[1] and yet the same survey also found a persistent 15% wage gap.[2] We also know that female-dominated work spaces are often devalued in society; as Ana Alacovsca notes in her work on Scandinavian crime fiction, quoting Tuchman (1989) on ‘novel’ writing: “[w]hen women enter the field, the social and symbolic value of a genre further erodes, so men decamp and leave it to women”.[3] We also know that publishing, despite, again, being extremely female-dominated, is a field where harassment is frequent: research from The Bookseller from 2017 found that over half of survey participants had been sexually harassed.[4] Parnell, Dane and Weber write that “publicists experience higher rates of sexual harassment than other professions within the industry”,[5] which they link to an expectation that they will “enact femininity as a major part of their employment”.[6]

These findings are echoed by the interview findings from my research: interviewees told of wage gaps in their businesses; of male publishers holding a lot of power over mainly female employees; of women being harassed, intimidated, and discriminated against in their workplaces. These findings were particularly striking to me as my project hadn’t set out to interview people about experiences of gender discrimination; rather I had set out to talk to tastemakers about their impression of the industry, yet interviewees still disclosed this information because, understandably, these experiences shaped their impression and their ongoing work.

Claudia,[7] a woman of colour with experience across the Scottish literary industry, spoke about being stopped from applying for an award. She had edited a book as part of a community-based project, and was “specifically in that role as a person of colour”:

[…] my two white colleagues got statements of support from my boss, I was not given one, so I was not allowed to apply. And the reasoning I was given was “I don’t think it’s your kind of role that they’re looking for.” Which I find incredibly interesting, because I was still publishing, I was still being a publisher, so what are the parts of my role that were different? It was public engagement, it was working with young people, it was taking on a caring role, and it was specifically doing work that would be seen as traditionally ‘outreach’ work.

Claudia continued, “I just think it’s incredibly telling that people with more power than me in the industry think that it’s not the type of thing that would be seen as good, valuable or worthy of an award.” Claudia’s work was financially valuable to her employer, but because it included caring work it was seen as less artistically valuable.

What recommendations does the Quine Report have for Scottish literature?

I published this report to share my findings with the Scottish literary sector, but also, in a sense, to give them back to those to whom they belong. I firmly believe that concerted, joint action is needed to address sexism, and we can only do that if we have this baseline information.

I end the report with three recommendations:

• Greater transparency around pay, royalties, and representation
• Stronger equalities training and lived-experience leadership in literary organisations
• Robust systems for reporting and addressing gender-based harassment and discrimination.

Most of the Quine Report discusses gender as a single axis of oppression, but we of course know that oppression functions intersectionally, to use Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw’s term. So my call for further transparency around representation is also a call for more research, ideally research which allows participants to self-describe, as research using publicly available information (the way I did here) is only able to get at a limited amount of data. Any further research needs to have a safeguarding plan in place, and recognise the burden of disclosing demographic information that is disproportionately placed on minoritised people.

The Quine Report is published freely and independently, and you can read and download the Quine Report on www.quinereport.com or receive it in twice-weekly instalments via quinereport.substack.com.

Christina will be discussing the report with Dr Helen Sedgwick of Society of Authors in Scotland on 1^st May 1-2pm at an online event, tickets are available here.

 

Originally from Austria, Christina is a researcher, writer and bookseller based in Edinburgh. They recently completed a PhD examining gender inequality in the Scottish publishing industry, and spent two months as a research fellow at the University of Munster in Germany. They are also the festival director of First Date, Edinburgh’s Romance Fiction Festival, and prize administrator for the Bread & Roses Award for Radical Publishing. Their debut novella Amphibian was published by Speculative Books in 2018 and was shortlisted for multiple awards, including the Saltire Society First Book Award. You can find more information and say Hi on www.christinaneuwirth.com.

 

 

 

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[1] ‘Bookcareers Salary Survey 2021 - RESULTS’, Bookcareers (blog), accessed 9 April 2024, https://www.bookcareers.com/bookcareers-salary-survey-2021-results/.

[2] ‘Bookcareers Salary Survey 2021 - RESULTS’.

[3] Ana Alacovska, ‘The Gendering Power of Genres: How Female Scandinavian Crime Fiction Writers Experience Professional Authorship’, Organization 24, no. 3 (2017): 387, https://doi.org/107.171/1773/51035058048146166887766.

[4] Bookseller news team, ‘Sexual Harassment Reported by over Half in Trade Survey’, The Bookseller, 10 November 2017, https://www.thebookseller.com/news/sexual-harassment-reported-over-half-trade-survey-671276#.

[5] Claire Parnell, Alexandra Dane, and Millicent Weber, ‘Author Care and the Invisibility of Affective Labour: Publicists’ Role in Book Publishing’, Publishing Research Quarterly 36, no. 4 (1 December 2020): 649, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-020-09763-9.

[6] Parnell, Dane, and Weber, 656.

[7] Name of interviewee has been changed.