3 Jane Anger reflects on the quality of WiP's training

Transcript:

We provided training that the book trade was not providing at that point, you know when it started.  The training on offer was not very good and it didn’t address the issues that we had with glass ceiling or women being able to get on in the trade.

And so senior women in publishing were canvassed as to whether they would be prepared to run some training courses, and some not so senior women but people who just worked in particular areas.

And Women in Publishing became renowned for the quality of those courses because it was genuine, you know: This is how this works, this is how to get into it, these are the skills that are required.  It was about how to do that task and what it involved. Paula somebody from Longman, very famous …

Paula Kahn?

Yeah. So she was one of the early people who did courses. Yeah, to have somebody that senior to come and share her knowledge and be absolutely upfront about that and about ‘This is what you need to do’, and to be generous with her time and her intellectual knowledge was fantastic.

They were the best of courses!  And something about Women in Publishing was, OK there would have been competitors in the room, you know, people doing the training, but it didn’t feel like that because actually publishing is, and it still is over all the sexism and genders, it is a very sharing industry.  People from outside the industry are constantly surprised that we share so much across what they would see as competitors.  But it is quite a generous industry, and within that Women in Publishing, I think, was even more generous within itself, because people could see how badly it was needed.

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