Is the publishing world sexist?
Is it harder to get published as a woman?
Writer Catherine Nichols was getting frustrated with the silent treatment from agents she had been contacting about her latest novel. So she decided to conduct an experiment, sending the exact same letters and opening pages to agents under a male pseudonym.
The response was, in her words, "shocking" — her male alter-ego heard back with almost nine times as many manuscript requests.
For Nichols, the experiment pulled back the curtain on gender bias in the publishing world. But publishing insider Cynthia Good is a little more skeptical.
She's a former president and publisher at Penguin Books and the founder of Humber College's Creative Book Publishing program. And she's not sure that gender has much to do with why manuscripts are accepted or rejected.