Eva Jurczyk writes at The Awl:
...what if I, in my capacity as a book reviewer, have the power to shift the ratio of rubbish pirate books by dudes to meaningful literature by women? The publishing houses will keep putting out books about buccaneers and they’ll keep appearing on my monthly review list but what if I don’t expend any mental energy or spill a drop of ink about them? This wouldn’t change the number of books by women that are published every year, nor the total number of books that Publisher’s Weekly reviews—some eight thousand per year, mostly for librarians, the media, and booksellers—but if someone is reserving all of their mental energy and all of their ink for female-authored books, then perhaps these books will be covered sooner, the gems among them celebrated louder, and the publishing industry will slowly adjust the definition of the type of book that is deemed worthy of attention. It seems like a better strategy than doing nothing, so moving forward, I’m only going to review books written by women.
This is such a good piece. Go read it. Look at any of our Mail Call posts and you'll see that there's a real problem in the publishing industry with male bias. Most of the books we receive in the mail are written by white men. Most of the books in most of the catalogs we receive are written by white men. Jurczyk is right; someone needs to make a stand. This matters.