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Thursday, October 26, 2017
What do Chicago theater actors make? A new study looks at inequality in pay, race and gender
Chicago Tribune: The majority of Equity acting jobs across Chicago theaters are going to men, white performers are often paid higher salaries than performers of color, and women are paid less than men on comparable contracts, according to a study from the Actors’ Equity Association.
1 comment:
Joss Green
said...
In general, labor unions have not been exactly welcoming to women or black people. That's just historically the case. Labors, like much of the rest of the professional industry, are a white man's world. This data is not at all surprising. More theatre is written for white men in the first place. This has to do with the fact that white men are the ones being produced at large theatre houses a lot of the time. I have never really understood the gender and race pay gap. I understand that fundamentally work places do not value women and people of color the same way they value white men but in my opinion pay should always be based off of a flat rate that then moves up because of diligence. In the case of theatre that is pretty impractical because some parts require more rigorous emotional work. However, all chorus workers could easily be started at the same rate and all principles at the same rate. It may be hard for Equity to control who is being cast but they sure can control what people are being payed. All this being said: all the theatre I've seen in Chicago in the past year has been written by black women and cast with mostly, if not all, black casts. There is amazing and riveting diverse work being done in my city. You just have to know not to look in all the conventional spaces.
1 comment:
In general, labor unions have not been exactly welcoming to women or black people. That's just historically the case. Labors, like much of the rest of the professional industry, are a white man's world. This data is not at all surprising. More theatre is written for white men in the first place. This has to do with the fact that white men are the ones being produced at large theatre houses a lot of the time.
I have never really understood the gender and race pay gap. I understand that fundamentally work places do not value women and people of color the same way they value white men but in my opinion pay should always be based off of a flat rate that then moves up because of diligence. In the case of theatre that is pretty impractical because some parts require more rigorous emotional work. However, all chorus workers could easily be started at the same rate and all principles at the same rate. It may be hard for Equity to control who is being cast but they sure can control what people are being payed.
All this being said: all the theatre I've seen in Chicago in the past year has been written by black women and cast with mostly, if not all, black casts. There is amazing and riveting diverse work being done in my city. You just have to know not to look in all the conventional spaces.
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