Diversity in Publishing: A Closer Look at LEE & LOW’s Staff

In our earlier blog post, Diversity in Publishing: How Diverse is LEE & LOW’s Authors, Illustrators, and Staff, we shared a mini breakdown of our authors and illustrators as well as our staff. In the past, we’ve received a few questions asking about the percentage of authors/illustrators of color we publish as well as the percentage of people of color on our staff. And we hoped that this post would answer a few of those questions.

After posting the percentage, we received a few more questions: what is the breakdown per department? What is the breakdown by race and ethnicity? How many members of your staff are LGBTQ+ identifying, and/or disabled?

To specify, the following mini demographic breakdown will examine the racial background of our staff. We acknowledge that the term diversity applies not only to one’s racial identity, but also gender, disability, and orientation. However, given the sometimes sensitive nature of gender identity, disability, and sexual orientation, this is not something we can publicly report on for our small staff of under twenty people—the study size is simply too small to protect anyone’s anonymity.

For now, let’s take a closer look at the racial breakdown of our staff by department:

Editorial:
We have a total of 5 members on our Editorial staff.
The current breakdown of our editorial staff is 60% White, 20% Black/African American, and 20% Latinx.

Editorial

Marketing/Publicity:
We have a total of 3 members in our Marketing department.
The current breakdown of our marketing staff is 33% Black/African American, 33% Asian/Asian American, and 33% White.

Marketing

Sales/Literacy:
We have a total of 3 members in our Sales/Literacy department.
The current breakdown of our sales/literacy department is 67% White and 33% Latinx.

Sales

Operations:
We have a total of 4 members in our Operations department.
The current breakdown of our operations staff is 75% Asian/Asian American and 25% Latinx.

Operations

Design:
We only have one in-house designer who identifies as Asian/Asian American.

Design

Management:
We have a total of 3 members in Management who all identify as Asian American. They are all part of the same Chinese-American Low family for which LEE & LOW is named!

Management

Total:
In total, we have 19 staff members at LEE & LOW BOOKS.
The current breakdown of our entire staff is 42% Asian American, 32% White, 16% Latinx, and 11% Black/African American.

Entire Staff

We acknowledge that there are still gaps to fill, and we will continue to seek out people of color and people of Native American/Indigenous descent to join our staff. And as always, we will continue to publish diverse stories that all children can enjoy and to make a special effort to work with authors and illustrators of color.

Find more information about our Diversity Baseline Study here.

Check out our Diversity Gap studies here.

Missed the first Diversity in Publishing post? Check it out here.

3 thoughts on “Diversity in Publishing: A Closer Look at LEE & LOW’s Staff”

  1. Can you please do one more more survey of your staff, this time about political ideology? Skin color and other identity markers tell us nothing about how a person thinks. Diversity of identity markers without diversity of thought means that people are just various shades of the same.

    Here’s a simple, one-question survey about social and political ideology to use. It uses political candidate preference as a proxy for political and social ideology.

    1. In January 2016, at the start of the 2016 Presidential election campaign, who did you support?

    A) a candidate of the far left, like Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein
    B) a candidate of the center left, like Hillary Clinton and Martin O’Malley
    C) a candidate of the center right, like Marco Rubio, John Kasich, and Donald Trump
    D) a candidate of the far right, like Ted Cruz

    Thank you. I am sure that many would love to see the results.

  2. It’s great of you to seek out minorities to join your staff. There is a lack of minorities in every part of society which gives the impression that they’re not smart enough or don’t work hard enough which is dishonest and disingenuous. For most of them opportunity never presents itself and when they go looking in the right places for jobs they’re qualified for, there’s other’s already there that have some sort of connection into that position. It’s life I guess.

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