The opening of a PublisHer chapter in South Korea has been announced by Bodour Al Qasimi, CEO of Kalimat Group. Bodour founded PublisHer as an international initiative to help female publishers assume leadership positions in the heavily male-dominated publishing industry.

At the first-ever PublisHer gathering in South Korea, which took place during the 65th Seoul International Book Fair, where Sharjah is being honoured as the Guest of Honour, Bodour Al Qasimi stated that she founded PublisHer four years ago so that “female publishers could get the recognition and professional success they deserve.”

“Female publishers are far too frequently excluded from senior management and leadership positions in a field where women are typically employed in greater numbers than men,” she claimed. I didn’t comprehend this system when I first started my publishing career more than ten years ago, and I still don’t. Until we launched the PublisHer chapter in Brazil last year, our colleague Flavia Brevin said she had never had a female supervisor in her whole career.

The CEO said, “What’s frightening is that these stories won’t be the exception even in 2023. That is why I founded PublisHer.

This is also true for the South Korean publishing business, where 4,175 men and 5,356 women make up the general book publishing sector, according to a K-Book Trends Report released last year.

In light of this, Bodour Al Qasimi launched the PublisHer platform in South Korea as part of a plan to give female publishers in the country a bigger platform to speak out against gender inequality, examine the publishing industry, and uncover implicit biases, discrimination, and systemic resistance to change.

Bodour Al Qasimi ended her keynote by quoting from a Fast Company piece about the difficulties faced by women in leadership, which said that “the only way for women to advance in their workplace is to change the culture from ‘We want what you are not’ to ‘We want what you are.”