Girls and Geeks in Publishing

I have a Master’s degree in computer applications. My thesis was on the dissemination of ideas and interactivity surrounding academic publishing. I have worked in a big publishing house. I have worked with app developers. I have always been interested in computers and software. I was five or six when I used to pay my brother 20p to teach me how to use DOS. I had a 2nd gen iPod before they were cool. I played online games when you had to use dial-up and lost everything when your mum picked up the phone to make a call. I play interactive stories written in 140 characters. There are few things I enjoy more than playing with new technologies.

I spend my days talking to, and working with, publishers, be they big, small or any size in between. I read trade magazines, I read the Bookseller, I read Wired and Gizmodo, I subscribe to more mailing groups and online forums than you can shake a moderately large stick at. I am a reader. I am consumer. I am a an author. I am friends with academics publishing scholarly articles. I am friends with authors publishing e-books and print books, and the publishers printing those books.

I can hand-code websites from scratch. I am a geek.

I think by any estimation it is safe to assume I know at least a little bit about what I am talking about.

By the way, I am a girl.

And I want to respond to some of the things said on the “Women in Publishing” Woman’s Hour programme on Monday 19th August.

It was an interesting show, and one I thoroughly recommend you listen to.

The main premise of the programme was to ask whether there are fewer women reaching the top in publishing in the digital age. Author Kate Mosse interviewed Ursula Mackensie on her role as Chief Executive of Little, Brown. She talked to Lennie Goodings, Publisher at Virago. She also had Clare Alexander (agent), Anne Sebba (author and chair of the Society of Authors) and Philip Jones (editor of the Bookseller) in the discussion. A lot of what was said was reassuring to hear – jobs going to the best people, regardless of gender.

At around 14:40 in the show, Philip Jones said (I paraphrase) “There is an argument that digital brings men to the fore… that men like gadgets more than women do”. He did go on to list several digital chiefs in big houses who are women, and states that he does not think women are being displaced because of digital. But his comments followed on from Clare Alexander saying (again I paraphrase) “there is a danger that publishers feel on the back foot, and in order to confront a digital world they need digital people, and publishing is in danger of defaulting to male and soldier mode”.

Firstly I want to address the comment “men like gadgets more“. Yes, Philip qualified his words to say he didn’t personally think this was true. However, on a daily basis I find that the perception in the industry is that it IS true, despite the fact that 80% of all tech decisions are influenced by women and around 50% of gamers are women. The number involved in creating technology, and devising the strategies to implement those technologies, is falling and this is just plain wrong.

What worried me, perhaps more than this comment being said by a very important voice in the industry, is that no one really challenged him on it (at least in the final edit of the show).

The wider discussion about the perceived need for the “warrior man” to take the publishing battle forward in this hostile new digital landscape also needs addressing. I need to focus my argument a little, so I won’t go into women in the armed services and the fact they are on the front lines as I write this, but I do want to draw your attention to the comment as I find it indicative of an entrenched belief that one gender or another has superior qualities in a particular arena, and taken to its logical conclusion, it implies women should step back and let the men take over and save us.

I want to be clear: whilst this particular comment was couched in a jokey “oh, we don’t really believe this” tone, it was still said by one of the illustrious, respected women on the panel. A leader in this industry thinks, at least in part, that we are damsels in distress, in need of the guidance of a strong male hand. Until this woman had given voice to the idea, I hadn’t actually given credence to the idea that a portion of my industry could believe Digital = Male.

Boys and girls are different and I thank the gods for that every day, because that is what makes life so much fun. But every single person is different, regardless of gender. Nor do I think the wider conversation should all be about women. It’s a joke that the average publishing person is a white, middle-class, Guardian reader called Emma, but we wouldn’t need bodies like EQUIP if it wasn’t also true. Publishing is probably 70:30 women at the lower levels.

But women, in general, are not the decision makers or the ones setting the tone of our industry. The upper echelons and decision makers are overwhelmingly male.

To get back to boys and girls and technology, I want to share a little anecdote. In my old Rights team, it was the boy who clung to his manuscripts, print copies, and physical colour print-outs to sell from, long after all the women had embraced the iPad and digital layouts to display our picture books on trips and at fairs. Yet I was at a conference a little while ago and there wasn’t a single woman on the tech panel. It isn’t that there are not women in technology. I can name many. It is that when putting together a panel, the default reaction seemed to be “technology = boys”.

It wasn’t even a very interesting panel.

I firmly believe the best person should get the job. That is a given. But time and again, I come across women who are reluctant to put themselves forward because they don’t feel good enough. We do not put our hands up and say “I can do that, I have something to say”. So jobs go to the people who do put themselves forward and, often, it’s the men.

I am NOT saying every techy role in publishing – or any other industry for that matter – needs to be filled with a woman. I am NOT saying every company needs a female CEO. All I am saying is that we need to take a long, hard look at our perceptions about what goes into a given role. There are perception battles that need to be fought across the industry. There are personal questions we all need to ask relating to what we think we can do.

Women might not be being actively displaced from the digital roles they currently hold, but I do think there is a very real danger that they will soon be missing out on the new opportunities that are coming through.

Comments
Comments are open because I think this is a topic which deserves people talking about it. Please, share your opinion below, but please do so respectfully. My full comment policy is outlined here, but boils down to the following: no spam and no meanness

Feel free to challenge me, question, or scold me, if you should so wish (praise is always welcome too), but try and do it without being too nasty. Let’s keep the conversation rolling 🙂

Further reading:
Women in Publishing
Equality in Publishing
Guardian article on Six ideas to get more women involved in the tech sector
Lady Geek
Report on Women’s Careers in the Technology Industry
Academic study finding the numbers of women in Science and Technology fields alarmingly low

In which I share things about Dyslexia, blogging, and publishing

I have had this post sitting in my drafts folder since 2007. Every now and then I would take it out, noodle around a little, then put it back because it just wasn’t right. I touched on it briefly, but never went into more detail (though I strongly urge you to go through the comments on that post, because they make some interesting points).

At the Gathering recently, I got talking with a sort-of-sister-in-law (one of my sister-in-law’s sisters to be precise) about how her eldest was doing at school. He’s a bright kid. Funny. Interested in how things work. But his teachers said he might have dyslexia, and not surprisingly it had really knocked his confidence, so they were working to get him back up and running, and she asked if there was anything age-appropriate I could recommend him to show him he wasn’t alone (Maggot Moon was top of the list).

And this is what prompted me to finally publish what I have been trying to say for so many years.

Firstly, a little background
Dyslexia affects around 10% of the British population, and each of those is affected to differing degrees. The brain of a person with dyslexia works differently to others – not better or worse – just different. It is a bit like a motorcar and a motorcycle: they are both powerful vehicles to get you to your destination, but they need different skills to ‘drive’ them. Each person has to work out, through trial and error, what coping mechanisms work best for them.

And this is a little snap shot of how it affects me.

This morning I tried to spell ache, a-k-e. For a fraction of a moment I couldn’t see why spell check had underlined it in wiggly red. I have never in my LIFE tried to spell it that way before. But this morning, my brain had to grasp at the rarely reliable phonetic method because I had a momentary fritz.

It has been this way since I started school. One memorable report card said “her spelling raises the eyebrows”, and my handwriting wasn’t much better. But no one ever even thought to say “dyslexia” because I read VERY WELL indeed and was in the top set for everything. I didn’t fit the profile. And I taught myself tricks, to watch out for words I couldn’t spell, and to memorise how they SHOULD be spelt. My spelling might have been shocking, but I got better very quickly once I was told how a particular word should be spelled (and I am not going to admit to how I just spelled “spelled”).

To this day I cannot spell business without sounding it out in my head busy-ness. Management (which autocorrect just fixed for me, by the way) is man-ag-e-ment.

All of this never held me back because, honestly, I thought this was how everyone did it. “I before E except after C” made no sense to me because every single word has to be fixed in my brain. Standard patterns and tips that made sense to my classmates didn’t help me in the slightest.

“Separately” is another word I cannot get right no matter how hard I try. I just cannot seem to get my head to spell a word that sounds like “sepEERRate” as “sepARRRRate”. Though I might have finally found the key to the word – pirates.

I love writing and reading but I cannot play scrabble or anagrams because a word is a singular entity to me. It isn’t made up of letters that can be mixed up, taken apart, and put back together again in another order. I love word searches however, because I am looking for a pattern I recognise that is buried in a jumble – which is essentially how I see all language.

Numbers, though, are still my nemesis. Numbers dance on the page and don’t stay where they should be. Numbers are incomprehensible. Bizarrely, I quite liked algebra – make numbers into letters and – ah-ha! I know how to conquer letters! It often takes me three or four times to dial a number correctly, which is a problem when I have to dial five or six people I don’t know on a daily basis. I say in my brain “I want to press three” and I press 9 or 7. It is worse when I am tired or on a phone I am not used to. Adding things up on a calculator can be interesting. If I try it three times, I’ll almost certainly get three different answers.

As for writing down phone numbers… Oh, that is sheer hell! I will say back to you “0207…” But will write down “0270…” On particularly bad days I will even read it back to you as “0207…” There is no fix for that.

I have to say I have made my peace with the written word. I enjoy the written word. I can’t read aloud well at all – I stumble and stutter and that is a whole other post – but I love stories. I blog. I write stories. And I have made myself a career in publishing… You can’t get much wordier than that! In no way has any of this stopped me doing things I enjoy. Would my schooling have been easier if it had been recognised at the time? Who knows – I can’t exactly claim it was hard for me. I am very, very lucky, because my particular quirks haven’t impacted my life to any significant degree. I have worked with people where that is sadly not the case. Yet it is sometimes as easy as printing forms on yellow/off white paper. Or voice-to-text software. A smile and understanding goes further than you could possibly imagine.

If you’re curious, go to the Dyslexia Checklist (what we used to use when I was doing social work) and work through the list. Answer “yes” more than nine times, and you could have a dyslexia-type problem.

For the record, I’m currently rocking a 15.

(Please note, this is NOT an official diagnostic tool. It is just a simple screening test we could administer easily in prisons. If you think you/a child might have a problem, go to your GP, the school, or the British Dyslexia Association for proper assistance).

QOTW: Book Club

QOTW Penguin

So I’m trying to get a book club off the ground because, well, it’s always fun to gossip and chat about books. The thing is, we’re stumped on what to read.

So, suggestions please!

Oh, and we’re called the “Oxford Literature and Latte Society”. Because I couldn’t find anything bookish to rhyme with tea. C’est la vie.

QOTW: #sweetchallenge

QOTW Penguin
It started with the realization that I am no longer capable of eating a jaffa cake without going “full moon, half a moon, total eclipse“.

Nor can I eat Polos without crunching. To be fair, I find it hard not to crunch most hard sweets, but I am incapable of not crunching Polos. So bad is this habit that my friends used to ban me from taking Polos into exams because it was so distracting.

A good friend, okmissmaia can’t eat Haribo without thinking “LOOK INTO MY EYES!“, whilst Etherfiend finds eating fruit pastilles without chewing impossible (though they are a rather chewy sweet, so I’m not sure this really counts).

All of which got me wondering, what other #sweetchallenges there might be. Do tell…

Narrowboat Jess

Not sure how jt happened, but currently a two boat family (green on right up for sale soon).

The Aged P has been living on Triss for the past 10 years, and whilst she is still a lovely boat, she is not quite up the 365-cruising/live-aboard lifestyle he needs her to be now he’s retired. So enter the younger, longer model – Jess. A few months back I had a grand plan to do a video tour (or at least a photo tour) documenting the state of Jess when we first got her, so we are better able to chart her progress. But I didn’t take the photos and then I just plain forgot. I did write a tour though, so just engage your imagination!

I also drew up a little plan to help. But it’s pretty crappy.

The outside. Please forgive the dusty state of her. There is construction work going on next to the marina, and the dust gets EVERYWHERE.

Entering from the back, you come into the engine room. Mind your head! Oh, never mind. Spend much time around narrow boats and you get inured to the minor concussion you sustain on a regular basis.

The engine room is where the magic happens. More practically, it is where the engine and batteries live, but as these are what power everything, it is pretty magic. Black, oily, messy, gunky, SMELLY magic, but still magic.

This here on the wall right in front of you, this is the Webasto. It provides hot water to the radiators and taps. Without such a unit in place, you are reliant on immersion heaters and/or the moderately hot water that can be drawn when the engine is running. The Webasto means reliable hot water, when you want it, for as long as you want it. Well, until you run out of water in the tank or fuel.

In theory. We have spent all weekend trying to get the damn thing installed properly. One cracked filter unit, one diesel leak, a hole in the hull (intentional!), several yards of bendy copper pipe, much swearing, four days, three men, and a large amount of praying later, is 90% installed. Just the timer unit to sort out now… If only someone knew what the extra black wire is for.

Through the engine room, you take a step down and are into the back of the boat proper, and the bedroom. That’s a full size double bed and there is lots of built in storage. She may be only 6 feet wide, but one thing Jess doesn’t lack are lots of cubby holes! Note the adorable porthole windows. These look adorable and are frosted, so people can’t see in, but they don’t shed much light, meaning the back of the boat tends towards the “cozily lit”, also known as dim.

Past the bedroom, to one side of the gangway, is the bathroom. Small, but adequately formed. Full sized shower, sink, and toilet. This room here? This is why I could never live on a boat permanently. Lack of water pressure aside, the toilet is just… Well, frankly, it is one step up from a camping toilet. You can get models that are more robust, but those have their downside as well. Everything goes into a tank in the bilges and this tank needs to then be sucked clean… Nasty.

Next, we have the kitchen and saloon area. The kitchen, like everything else, is compact but fully functioning. Gas hob and cooker. Fridge. Freezer. There was a microwave, but that got given to a neighbour. It might, or might not, be replaced. Microwaves, like toasters, and electic kettles, draw a lot of voltage and when cruising the canals away from a regular mains supply, they put a massive drain on your battery bank and inverter. You could always run a gennie (generator) to provide the extra OOMPH, but they are noisy and awkward. To some purists they also smack a little bit of cheating. You learn to do things a little bit more slowly and in a more ‘traditional’ manner when you live on a boat. We’ve even been known to resort to a toasting fork.

Then the saloon. This is VERY much a blank canvas at the moment. But it will soon be filled with shelves and books and a table and chairs. Cozy. The solid fuel stove will provide most of the heat, when the chimney is hooked up, but there is also a mammoth radiator. Yay for radiators! Oops for this one, however! It is rather on the heavy side and, at the moment, is dragging the starboard side of the boat down. We need to get some more ballast to balance things out, and also to bring the prow down. Jess is quite light at the bows, and is also tall for a narrowboat. This makes her spacious inside (for a given value of “spacious”), but slightly awkward under low bridges.

And at the front, the cratch area. With the gas locker just behind the upright, and the water tank underneath.

That’s Jess. I hope you enjoyed the tour. I’ll possibly do an updated tour when she is all finished – at least as finished as boats ever are! – but I wanted to document her at her worst.