StarTribune.com: Honored for lifetime achievement at Monday’s Ivey Awards in Minneapolis, Ten Thousand Things theater founder Michelle Hensley used her acceptance speech to make a powerful plea for equity and gender diversity in the leadership of America's theater.
Hensley noted that a number of top jobs are expected to open in the next five or six years. “Most of those positions need to be filled by women, and the majority of those women need to be women of color,” she said.
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I find this article to be very important, and a very good reminder as to why we need to work at hiring a more diverse body of theatre artists. "Women make up some 70 percent of theater audiences at the nation’s largest regional theaters, yet less than 30 percent of the leadership of those institutions. The numbers for women of color in leadership are even more abysmal," which is very discouraging to hear that this is still the case in 2017. These statistics are infuriating to consider, and really I wonder just how long it has been since they have changed in any significant way. I find the Guthrie's Joseph Haj to have quite a good read on the situation, "boards all want to make good choices but also safe ones. They want to know they’ll get someone who’s able to protect the organization and move it forward. Often, they see white men as the only people who can deliver. We, as a field, have been suspicious about whether a person of color and/or a woman can do these jobs. And the search for new leaders is a necessarily clandestine one, which has allowed hiring practices to be inequitable." To me, one step forward to helping solve this problem is more transparency.
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