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Canadian Women in Literary Arts (CWILA) is a Canadian non-profit organization found in Spring 2012 and compiles the largest data set in Canada that tracks gender in book reviewing culture. Moss argues that “The core idea behind CWILA is that it is not enough to point to the problems of inequality but that those within the literary community must work together to change the culture itself.”

CWILA “strives to promote and foster equity and equality of representation in the Canadian literary community by tracking statistics on gender representation in reviewing; bringing relevant issues of gender, race and sexuality into our national literary conversation; and creating a network supportive of the active careers of female writers, critics and their literary communities.”

Foundation

CWILA was found by poet and UBC lecturer Gillian Jerome. Jerome explains that the idea for CWILA originated in her when she read Natalie Walschots’ blog in which Walschot counted the number of reviews Michael Lista had written in National Post’s poetry column in the last year, and found that out of fourteen books reviewed, only two were authored by women.

This inspired Jerome to question the status quo and to prove that women writers in Canada were at a significant disadvantage. Within a month, she and a small group of women and men had rallied over 50 volunteers to count and analyze the numbers in almost 2500 reviews in 14 publications. Moss argues, “While many had long suspected that there was a gender bias in literary culture in Canada, the first CWILA count proved it.”

Over the course of its first year and a half in existence, CWILA grew to 400 members (writers, critics, poets, reviewers, editors, publishers, scholars), became incorporated as a not-for-profit organization, and chose its first Critic-in-Residence, poet Sue Sinclair.

Statistics

2011

The first CWILA count initiated in 2011, which counted a total of 14 Canadian publications reviewing Canadian books. The summary concluded that 62% of the reviews were written by men and that 59% of the books were written by men. However, in the following year, the CWILA Count raised the number of publications to be reviewed from 14 to 25. In 2011 and 2012, the CWILA Count showed that there is “about a 50/50 split of male/female authors reviewed and about a 60/40 female/male split of reviewers” (see interview about Canadian Literature by book review editor Laura Moss).

2012

The CanLit Guides note that the CWILA’s 2012 inaugural Count showed that men tend to review books by other men. It is an almost 70/30 male/female split, and in contrast, women reviewers had a 57/43 female/male split. The 2012 CWILA Count showed that 56.6% of books reviewed by women were written by women, while only 30% of books reviewed by men were written by women. (used with permission from CWILA). The Count also found that more books by women were reviewed in 2012 than in 2011, but that there are still “stubborn gender disparities” (n. pag.) in the field.

In order to enhance and advance from their previous binary data, CWILA broadened their categories to include transgendered writers, genderqueer writers, non-binary writers, and mixed-gender co-authors. CWILA also began to track “the percentage of authors and publishers of the books reviewed that were Canadian”.

The 25 publications in the 2012 CWILA Count consist of 3,092 reviews, where two-thirds of the publications pertained to books by Canadian authors and two-thirds reviewed books by Canadian authors at least three-quarters of the time. In addition, in 22 of the 25 publications, the majority of reviews are of works by Canadian authors.

2013

In 2013, the CWILA Count totaled to 5,613 book reviews in 31 publications. Additionally, CWILA broadened their horizons of reviews by including French-language publications into the mix. For the 2013 CWILA Count, CWILA included 4 French-language publications. This was an 82% increase in reviews from the previous year. The additions to the annual report included that overall, 57% of the reviews were written by men, 37% were written by women, 5% were by male and female co-authors, 1% by unknown writers, and under 1% by non-binary writers.. Of the reviews written by women, 43% were books written by men and 51% were books written by women. Of the reviews written by men, 69% were books written by men and 28% were books written by women. The CWILA Count showed that men were 3 times as likely to review books by men as opposed to books by women.

2014

CWILA’s 2014 Count included 5,866 reviews, of which 32 were publications by journals and newspapers, and of those 32 publications, 5 were French-language publications. The results of the reviews by category were: 53% written by men, 39% written by women, 7% written by mixed-gender co-authors, under 1% written by unknown authors, and under .1% written by non-binary authors.

Within the 2014 CWILA Count, the results showed that men were 2.5 times more likely to review books written by men than books written by women, which is .5 times less than the previous year. The CWILA Count also showed that women were 12% more likely to review books authored by women compared to books authored by men. Furthermore, the CWILA Count for 2014 noticed a disparity among the genres being reviewed in books, particularly in non-fictional works. Of the non-fictional works, the results showed that 29% of the books were written by women, 61% by men, 8% by mixed gender authors, 2% by various/unknown authors, and under .1% by non-binary authors. This emphasized that genre and gender could and did impact the gender disparity amongst authors for literary works, still enabling a disadvantage to those who weren’t male writers.

2015

For the first time since the project initiated, the overall CWILA Count had reached its closest to an equal balance of male to female reviewers with the final ratio being 49% of reviews being written by men and 48% by women. The remaining included 3% anonymous reviewers, under 1% mixed-gender co-reviewers, and under .1% non-binary reviewers.

However, there is still a large unequal gender disparity of reviewers in French publications. The 2015 CWILA Count results in reviews in English publications were: 55% women, 42% men, 2% anonymous, under 1% mixed-gender co-authors, and under .1% non-binary reviewers. The results for the reviews in French were: 67% men, 29% women, and 2% anonymous.

Of all of the books reviewed, there still remained a gender imbalance throughout the authors of the books being reviewed. The CWILA Count included: 52% by men, 40% by women, 7.5% by mixed-gender co-authors, under 1% written by anonymous authors, and 0.1% by authors identified as non-binary. The male to female results had shifted from the previous year, as in 2014, only 39% were women authors and 57% were male authors.

Of the total books that were counted, 60% were Canadian, 39% were non-Canadian, and under 1% were various/unknown. An analysis within CWILA’s statistics of non-fictional genre also shows an imbalance, resulting in the works by gender to be: 59% by men, 30% by women, 9% by mixed-gender authors, 1% by various/unknown authors, and 0.1% by non-binary authors.

Critic-in-Residence Program

In 2013, as a part of their mandate to encourage a female perspective in the Canadian book review community, CWILA instituted the position of critic-in-residence. Each year, CWILA chooses a female, transgender, or genderqueer writer as their critic-in-residence; they are responsible for commenting on the statistics gathered in the CWILA annual count, and submitting critical essay and book reviews, which will be archived at year-end by CWILA.

Critics

• Sue Sinclair (2013): CWILA's first critic-in-residence.
• Shannon Webb-Campbell (2014): Stated that her role as critic-in-residence would be "to help close the gender gap, evaluate and improve Canadian literary discourse".
• Lucas Crawford (2015): Was inspired by CWILA's goals to address gender-bias in the Canadian literary establishment, and by CWILA's active interest in transgender/genderqueer involvement and representation in the organization.
• Adèle Barclay (2017): CWILA's most recent choice for critic-in-residence. Her interests centre on the representation of "intersectional voices", and broadening CWILA's examination of non-fiction as well as fiction.

Group Reflection

Our group found the experience of this wiki edit-a-thon almost became like a class paper because we needed to find and cite a lot of sources. We learned that a lot of effort and expertise is needed to put the Wikipedia article together and that contrary to popular belief, Wikipedia is more accountable than the myth of it being untrustworthy and an unreliable source of information. However, a flaw to wiki is that there is a lot of North American perspective and may ignore oppressed perspectives.

We dealt with the gender disparities in national book reviews in publications as well as gender disparities in certain books by certain gendered authors - where some are given more attention than others. Publishing this project live means that it can be accessed anywhere and it gives a nicely compact overview of what CWILA is and does. This also gives the opportunity for people outside of Canada to take a look at the structure of book-reviewing and to give more notability to CWILA.

If we had more time and more reliable sources, we would have liked to have expanded on our article by making pages or other articles related to CWILA. For example, we would make a wiki page for Gillian Jerome or some of the critics-in-residence. It would help to give more rounded information about the foundation as a whole instead as well as enable readers to see first hand who these people are (and put a face to the name) instead of just listing these names. Readers can still access information about the listed names through other web sources, however, it would have just added some convenience to our article to have small articles made for them too.

Web 2.0 is so multi-dimensional and multi-layered in a way that it enables such a vast accessibility to knowledge in this day and age. Web 2.0 is ever changing and what we see online is the result of who is tech-savvy and who spends most time online. It only reflects a small, and perhaps distorted, reality of the actual world.

Our Wikipedia experience was incredibly engaging and even fun. It’s unlike any other group project we’ve ever had and our team functioned very well together. We found that everyone carried their own responsibilities fairly because it was a team effort. We divided the work up and worked on our own and brought everything together on a google doc. Everything was organized and we helped each other out when we needed help and made up for each others’ shortcomings.

We found it somewhat challenging to meet the rigorous citation expectations of Wikipedia. We were confident that a few quotations, accurately marked, would as in a university paper, be acceptable. We have however received a note on one of our talk pages regarding our use of the cited material. This can be cleaned up fairly easily as it just requires that direct quotations be avoided in all situations. In addition, we found discrepancies between articles and the actual statistics from the CWILA graphs.