What Three Months of Reading Business Books Taught Me

Over the last few months I read a bunch of books, mostly business-related. Here’s the business-y ones:

So what did I learn? Three months of reading business books taught me that I love reading books by white men.

Wait, what?

I like to think I’m sensitive to issues of race and gender. I need to double check this.

Let’s run through my list. The authors are: white, white, white, white, white, white, white. Shit.

Let’s look at gender. They’re written by a man, edited by a woman, written by a man with a female co-author, written by men, men, men, and a man. Shit.

Well, I didn’t exclusively review business books. What about the other things? Two books and a podcast. Three male authors. Two white. The books I had noted to read in the future? Written by white dudes.

Shit.

I made an all male panel.

Maybe it’s “the system’s” fault. The publishing industry favors men and discriminates against women. The publishing industry is overwhelmingly white.

Sure, there are systemic issues, but it’s easy to ignore race and gender as a white man. I can peruse the bookstore, only pick up books by Adam, Ed, Don, Jake, Stephen, and Chris and pretend like this is normal.

Simply put, I did not value diversity when deciding what to read next. Sure I can rationalize it: “Oh, I didn’t put much thought into what I was reading” or “I just picked what looked interesting” But I didn’t pick these books at random. If it had been random, I would’ve had more non-white authors and read more books written by women.

If I had tried for one minute, I could have found books written by people other than white dudes just as easily:

What did three months of reading mostly business books teach me?

Race and gender are always there, whether I pay attention or not. If you don’t value diversity, you’ll never get any.

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