Worker of the publishing world, unlikely to rise up ... Renee Zellweger as Bridget Jones

Low Salaries Lead to Facebook Revolt was the headline in last week's Bookseller, but the fact that people in junior jobs in publishing don't get paid very well is not particularly a press-stopping revelation. (The emergence of a Facebook group commemorating anything is not, in my opinion, a newsworthy topic, but perhaps that's because I'm a member of "Schwartz's Deli Fan Club" and "Guardian arts bloggers".)

But while the question of whether low-level publishing jobs are badly paid is not up for debate (you always know who the assistants are by the way that they greedily consume canapés at book launches) the article did prompt the question of whether these low salaries contribute to the lack of diversity in the industry, which is (according to Richard Charkin, anyway, dominated by "Emmas") because those who don't have their parents bankrolling them can't possibly survive on the pittances which they earn for years of slaving in the hopes that they will somehow be able to snatch their bosses' jobs.

While I didn't come across too many people who fit into that category, you do have to really love books to get yourself into the kind of credit card debt that many young people in publishing are unhappily burdened with, and the prospect of it must often serve as a significant deterrent. And with so many overqualified people competing for the same tedious entry-level jobs, it's not surprising that managers end up falling back on nepotism to differentiate between six equally well-qualified people to answer the telephone and make tea.

But as far as I can tell, this has long been par for the course. Admittedly, coming from North America where the class system is less entrenched, I wasn't aware of the lack of social mobility in the industry until my first day on the job (following months of work experience, of course) when one of my new colleagues asked me who in the company I was related to. "Oh," I said, surprised. "No one ..." My colleague looked astounded. "You must be smart," she said. With my American accent, I was practically a diversity poster child.

But beyond the issue of who gets hired or not, for the reader who has no interest in working in publishing, the broader question arises of whether the domination of the industry by a particular brand of person sets the publishing agenda such that the voice of the not-middle-class woman to be overlooked? It is stupid assume that the average posh-voiced editorial assistant is setting the publishing agenda with her princessy tastes; that's simply not in her remit, though maybe she dreams that one day someone might ask her if she has an opinion. If you think she's standing in the way between you and your glittering publishing career, I suggest you get someone other than your mum to read your manuscript.

In fact, there are a remarkable and disproportionate number of men in high-level publishing jobs who are bossing around all of these scores of lovely young women, and they tend to be the ones who make the decisions at the acquisitions meetings. This, I suspect, has much to do with the fact that men get promoted sooner because (as science has shown us) they are more inclined to ask to get ahead, rather than waiting for someone to notice how smashing they are based on their sparkly phone-answering technique. Ultimately, the "Emmas", or their middle-class counterparts, generally get very little say in what actually gets to the market, because they are too busy trying to get the filing up to the standard of their exacting managers and wondering if they shouldn't, after all, have become solicitors.

In an ideal world, publishing would be more focused on art than commerce. But it's a business, and the business model of publishing gives senior people in publishing salaries that are often 10 times as much as what their assistants are making. If publishers really wanted to increase the diversity of their companies, they'd accept that their own salaries could be a bit lower in order to increase those of their employees, and perhaps have lunch at the Ivy a little less often. But that, after all, would give the Emmas nothing to aspire to.