Skillset Blog

Last week I received an invitation to attend a ‘Cultural Diversity in Publishing’ round-table from The Bookseller.

It was billed as a discussion of the current situation with an in-depth look at why publishing is still predominantly a white, middle class industry. Pearson’s Diversity Communications Officer, Dele Fatunla, and HR Project Manager Beth Callan from Random House were also on the guest list.

Armed with some research from Skillset’s Creative Media industries and the draft publishing skills needs analysis that we are developing, we worked our way through a range of questions, looking at what the research says and at projects that are currently running in the industry (including the Pearson Diversity Summer Internship programme, which has helped increase cultural diversity there). 

What is of concern is that there hasn’t been substantial change over the last few years.  Unsurprisingly, publishing is fairly consistent in representation when compared to other creative media industries: they all hover between 5% and 7% of the national workforce from Black, Asian or Minority Ethinic (BAME) groups.  That in itself reflects the national average, but what we should be worried about is that around half of our workforce is based in London and the South East.

BAME representation of the overall workforce in London is around 27%. It makes the 12% in London for publishing look a little low don’t you think?

We’ll be looking at diversity in publishing as we develop our research and strategy and I’m interested to hear about any relevant projects. The Bookseller article should publish next month.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 9:00 am and is filed under Publishing, Skillset. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but we reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.