The theme of this year’s International Women’s Day is ‘Inspire Inclusion’.
As an editor and woman in business, I understand just how hard it can be for us to make that work.
For decades, my own industry – publishing – was dominated at the top by pale, stale and male C-suites that overlooked the talent in the majority gender of its workforce: women.
And failed to pay us decently for it, too: the gender pay gap is real.
Women CEOs and publishers like Gail Rebuck and Carmen Callil were the exception, not the norm.
Unfortunately, there’s also some way to go in publishing around diversity. The major publishers are doing something about this with internship programmes and recruitment drives, but the bald fact is that in recent years, publishing has become a classed industry.
Young people wanting to get in might well struggle without money or the right connections. It’s impossible for some to live on free or low-paid placements.
I’ve been at the helm of my own editorial business for 24 years now, and am free to make choices about the projects I take on.
One of those choices is to support writers that give back and uplift the people in their industries.
I’m incredibly proud to have collaborated with these inspirational women authors.
Julia Elliott Brown
Julia Elliott Brown is the author of Raise: The Female Founder’s Guide to Securing Investment.
A powerhouse gender funding gap campaigner and entrepreneurial coach for female founders, Julia is a founder and CEO who’s been there and has the war stories to prove it, having created several successful businesses.
She is strong, warm, collaborative and absolutely walks the talk.
Raise was an important book to me. I immediately recognised the struggle Julia expressed on the page that women experience in corporate life.
Getting enterprises started can be an uphill battle. I was fully on board with Julia’s message, and wanted to help.
Raise is a landmark title: it’s the very first book on entrepreneurial fundraising written by a woman for women.
It went bestseller on release, and was shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2023. It’s been read by thousands of women entrepreneurs, and continues to do wonderful work for them in the world.
Barbara Koenen-Geerdink
I really enjoyed working with Barbara on her guide to uplift early career professionals in service firms.
That kind of environment can be seriously tough. The law as a profession has a high level of burnout. I’ve witnessed that grind firsthand, having worked for years with lawyers in magic circle firms (and spent a short time in one myself).
It can be a hard alpha culture: the pressure to bill and beauty parade is intense. In the big, prestigious international firms, basically you marry your job. You need to be prepared to work all the hours heaven sends, and pretty much forget what your friends or family look like if you want into the partnership track.
In short, you need grit to thrive in such a setting, which can be especially challenging for women. Barbara’s advice is savvy from the off, foregrounding emotional intelligence, self-care and achievable goal-setting.
Barbara has a lovely spirit about her, and as the business and development director of a major law firm in the Middle East, really knows her stuff. Her book is an invaluable survival guide for starting out smart and getting on in the corporate jungle.
Kate Minchin
As an 
arts industry professional, having managed and led teams at prestigious institutions such as Historic Royal Palaces and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, Kate recognised a significant gap in the literature for front-line staff.
In our initial conversation, Kate told me that so many books in the genre are high-level, aimed at the boardroom and read like a business school thesis.
And she was right.
That kind of book simply doesn’t serve her tribe: the team leaders and junior/middle managers at the day-to-day core of the business, navigating highly pressured workloads. They’re facing the public and keeping those operational wheels turning.
So her idea for Always Time for Coffee was born, as many of the mentoring, problem-solving and collegial conversations Kate had as a leader were simply over coffee. She wanted the book to read that way: open, friendly, easy to access.
Kate is an excellent writer: much of our work together was to give readers the experience of an informal sit-down with her.
I loved working with Kate. She is funny, direct and insightful: it’s obvious why she has been so successful and well-liked in her own management roles.
The book continues to receive consistent five-star reviews. Interesting to note that senior leaders in the arts and other sectors have gained great value from it too.
Pilar Orti and Maya Middlemiss
Thinking Remote: Inspiration for Leaders of Distributed Teams by Pilar Orti and Maya Middlemiss could not have come at a more opportune moment.
When I worked on this book with Pilar and Maya at the end of 2018, no one could possibly have foreseen the global tsunami of Covid on the horizon.
The business world was still very much an in-person, ‘in the office where we can see you’ culture.
But Pilar and Maya had already recognised that remote teams were becoming more popular – and that this kind of management needs a very different approach.
As time has passed, we’ve become increasingly aware of the importance of different psychologies in the workplace – especially when people are based all over the globe.
The work that Pilar and Maya do as consultants centres on change management and optimum performance. How we can incorporate those principles in a practical way, to ensure everyone feels included, safe and productive in teams, has become a key factor: not only in the business literature, but in successful day-to-day staff management.
And, of course, when Covid arrived in early 2020, this book was ahead of the curve: an important resource for organisations now suddenly having to firefight a situation they couldn’t control.
The book covers how to manage technology, lead effective virtual meetings, attend to employee wellbeing and more. It’s a deeply practical and empathic guide to working remotely.
As someone who has done this myself for decades, I recognised a lot of what Pilar and Maya were discussing in this book. And it was good.
I couldn’t be happier to have been a part of bringing this resource to a sector that really needed it – much more than they realised.
Lisa Cordaro Publishing Services 