Saturday, December 3, 2011

If we're going to be talking statistics

From the Vol 68, Issue 29 of child_lit listerv.
If we're going to be talking statistics . . . I did some research last year on diversity in children's publishing, and it turned up these numbers:

>From the U.S. Census Bureau, Census figures by race/ethnicity for U.S.
population, 2008 (these obviously need to be updated):
Hispanic: 15 percent
Black, non-Hispanic: 13 percent
Asian: 5 percent
White, non-Hispanic: 68 percent

Figures from the Cooperative Children's Book Center in Madison on the content of 3000 trade children's books published in 2009, with themes and topics focusing on or protagonists of the following races:
Hispanic: 61 books, or 2 percent
Black: 157 books, or 5.2 percent
Asian-American: 80 books, or 2.6 percent
American Indians: 33 books, or 1.1 percent.

White: 2,669 books, or 89 percent


Figures from the same source regarding the races of children's book
creators:

Hispanic: 2 percent
Black: 2.7 percent
Asian-American: 2.2 percent
American Indians: .1 percent
White: 93 percent


Finally, from the SIMBA Children's Publishing Market Forecast 2011, each group's percentage of the children's book buying market (should be read as ""X percent of children's book buyers are _____," not "X percent of ______ are children's book buyers"). Also note that there was an asterisk on the chart saying "Data may be unreliable due to small sample size," and SIMBA did not provide much info on its methodology.

Hispanic, 13 percent
Black: 8.2 percent
Asian: 3.2 percent
White: 74 percent

No comments:

Post a Comment