50 years ago, 1965, still puts you in a time with massive sexism; there would be no hope of anything balancing out. Roughly thirty years ago, in the 1980's, a math teacher at my high school tried to keep a female student from going to an engineering event, because he felt that women shouldn't go into engineering. Blind auditions in the 1970's and 1980's were needed before female musicians started taking a reasonable percentage of the positions in top orchestras. I think that we have not yet entered an era where sexism has been reduced to the point where women have an equal chance. It would be interesting if we could do the literary equivalent of blind auditions, but it's not practical.
And I wouldn't be surprised if there were some fairly specific things driving that statistic. For example, are women more likely to be willing to work for low salaries or work as interns at zero salaries? And, of course, there's no assurance whatsoever that the gender distribution at the low levels will extend to the high levels. I'm not prepared to go dig up statistics, so feel free to ignore this, but I seem to recall that in many low-paid professions, like teaching, women tend to dominate the lower levels, and those who get promoted to higher levels tend to be men.
I am. The figure came from a survey run by Publisher's Weekly in 2010 (presumably to its readership). There were 1584 responses, and of those: 85% of people with less than 3 years experience were female 82% of people with 3 to 6 years' experience were female 70% of people overall were female The gap between 0-6 years' experience and overall does suggest that the men were more likely to be higher up, as does the ~$40,000 pay gap. In both the publishing companies I've worked in (both fairly small), women did significantly outnumber men, and they also occupied most of the senior roles. Citation, if needed
Interesting article I found: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/48618383/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/word-womens-status-rises-so-do-literary-shes-hers/#.VY3Gk_lVhBc
Can't resist. http://www.buzzfeed.com/shannonreed/jane-austen-receives-feedback-from-tim-a-guy-in-her-mfa-work?utm_term=.uvABDWrWv&fb_ref=click_share#.djmYgejgeZ
Six years is still quite junior. That's still only telling me that the majority of junior employees in publishing are female. Since junior employees make up a high percentage of most companies, it makes sense that the overall percentage is also skewing female. I don't yet have a non-anecdotal answer to the question of percentages of more senior employees.[/QUOTE]
Well, you don't have a precise one, but the stats are fairly clear in that there's a higher proportion of men to women when you look at over 6 years experience, and the average wage gap suggests they're in higher-paid, and so probably senior, positions. It's possibly worth noting that experience doesn't necessarily correlate to senior, so the wage gap is probably better evidence.
[/QUOTE] Well, if you go right to the top, at least for the Big Five: Hachette, http://www.hachettebookgroup.com/about/leadership/, CEO male, top execs five male, six females Harper Collins, http://corporate.harpercollins.com/about-us/leadership-team, CEO male, top execs seven male, four female MacMillan, http://se.macmillan.com/Who-We-Are/Management-team/Leadership-Team/, CEO not clear, top execs ten male, five female Penguin Random House, http://global.penguinrandomhouse.com/management/, CEO male, top execs ten male, seven female Simon and Schuster, http://www.simonandschuster.biz/corporate/executives, CEO female, top execs ten male, six female
