By Heather Roy

Disgraceful Magazine launched its first digital issue only months ago, and with downloads soaring to the thousands within the first week of publication and a growing social media presence, issue two is set for even more success. 

Publishing four issues a year, Disgraceful is a not-for-profit magazine with over 200 pages centred on showing women that it’s OK to break from society’s gender expectations, and that it’s OK to be a little more… well, disgraceful. The magazine dedicates sections to arts and culture, fashion and lifestyle, and business and industry, covering everything from book reviews and personal essays to showcasing independent artists and poets.

The fact remains that the current journalistic workforce is 94% white and 55% male and Disgraceful aims to tackle these inequalities head on. The magazine team is made up of 40 women from all across the globe: the UK, US, Europe, Middle East and Asia. 

We spoke with Melissa Hawkins, the magazine’s founder and editor-in-chief to find out more about the empowering space Disgraceful is creating for women. 

“When I went into the creative industries, I couldn’t believe how much of a gender gap you see. There’s such a lack of support for women in the industry and women starting up their own businesses – the entrepreneurial gender gap is so great – there’s nothing really out there supporting women who are going after their career goals.” 

And so, out of a place of frustration, Disgraceful was born.

“I really just wanted it to be a platform to inform, support and inspire women to just be happy doing whatever it is that makes them happy, whether that’s being a mother and working, or going after their career goals and putting things that society expects of young women like marriage and kids on the back burner. It’s that space to be disgraceful in going against societal conventions and trends and just thriving doing what you love and doing what you want to do best.”

Disgraceful’s workforce has grown substantially over the past months. Starting with only Melissa and her ideas, there are now just over 40 members of the team across editorial, marketing and social media departments. The staff, including Melissa are all volunteers and are largely students and graduates.

“Obviously I appreciate that we’re a really big team, but it works really nicely because some people can only give a few hours a week, and some people are a bit more full on. It’s just really flexible for everybody.”

Melissa tells us that “for this issue we’ve really upped the editorial side of things, and on the marketing side we’ve upped our PR game, so we have a separate team for that now. We’re really focusing on working with influencers and doing a lot more collaborative things – we’ve got some Instagram Live’s and IGTV’s planned over the course of the next launch which is exciting.”

Disgraceful released limited-edition print copies of issue one from which all profits will go to Young Women’s Trust which is an organisation working towards achieving economic justice for young women in the UK.

So, where does Disgraceful go from here? 

“Going forwards… well, we’re in the process of becoming an Ltd company just so that we can offer more opportunities as we progress with issue three and beyond – so that’s really exciting! Other than that, I just want us to keep going as we are at the minute! We really want to make sure we’re giving back as much as we take in, so we will always put donating money to charity, or paying our contributors first as we progress. Maybe one day, I’d love to be able to offer everybody roles of employment. That would be the dream – if we ever got to do this as a job rather than just a side hustle. That’s the dream – we’ll see!”

Issue two is set for publication on March 1st.