We’ve done a lot of reporting on the gender gap in playwriting and the efforts to counter it, including a whole special issue on the subject in 2015, which could be seen as our own effort to counter it—to shout as loud as we could the obvious truth that women write plays as well as men do, and that the disparity in productions their works receive is neither meritocratic nor accidental but is another byproduct of centuries of patriarchal bias, both conscious and unconscious.
2 comments:
Differences in gender, race, sexual orientation bring more diversity, and more diversity is only helpful both in the writing room and onstage. The statistics are a bit upsetting to me personally, since some of the most quality and progressive work I've ever seen have come from women. What was really interesting was the shuttle sexism thats occurred within co-writers of shows, tons of men have capitalized on the views and the input of women and its important to acknowledge that there are tons of male artists that we look up to that are sadly guilty of this. This makes me think of the play, "Steel Magnolias", a story about the hardships,relationships, and arc of women's lives was written by Robert Harling, a man. Th problem is simply that he's a man capitalizing on a pain that he has no idea about, and delivering a perspective that is a women right to show. The show itself is great, it just puts into perspective the treatment of women throughout the industry as less thanks, it's time that our industry starts officially breaking those boundaries in terms of diversity and its pleasing to know that slowly but surely it may happen.
I think that this is a very good strategy when truly figuring out the unbalance of women playwrights in the industry. I think one of the most shocking conclusions in the article is that the percentage of women playwrights didn't increase at a steady pace. I am very curious in finding out why this is. Does it have to do with the state of the world at the time of this research, or does it have to do with a fundamental theater community problem? It is encouraging to hear that the number of co-gender co-authors is healthy. I am not sure I have seen any new plays that have been co- gender co-authored, but i think that these collaborations are sure to be beneficial ones. I think the next step is to hypothesis on what can be done to further close this gap and then enact a plan that is sure to improve the situation.
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