Stage Directions: A full 90 percent of respondents to a recent survey of female-identifying theatre design and production practitioners say that they have experienced negative workplace environments, gender-based harassment, or pay gaps. The results of the survey appear in the Summer 2019 edition of Theatre Design & Technology(TD&T), the journal of USITT.
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I would be interested in seeing some additional statistics about how parents of all genders fare in the performing arts industry. I certainly know a fair few people who have kids, but most of them are in education and/or have strong support systems to help care for their families. Although the survey set out to examine discrimination against women in the industry, this article seems to have found childcare as the most significant factor in women leaving the industry. I would imagine that limited access to jobs with benefits is a significant factor; I know people my age without children who have chosen jobs outside the industry in order to take better care of themselves and have better lives. There is a dearth of jobs that are conducive to having a reasonable work-life balance, which is an absolute necessity with children. I am not sure that is something that will ever change, though.
This article is one of the most unsurprising things that I’ve seen ever on this blog. It is really sad to see that changes aren’t happening in the industry. I personally see theatre companies have statements of equity and diversity and only enforce this when it comes to casting so I am not surprised to see Women+ people leaving the industry due to a pay gap and discrimination. And by enforce, I mean try to have a certain number of X type of actors something that really doesn’t promote equity - it just is a token of equity not really action to solve a systemic problem. I love that the article brings up the idea of not getting more women but getting women to stay. This is a question of equity and building a place with a minority group in mind verse a question of equality and just making availability in a flawed system. Making a more welcoming environment to minorities/fixing the pay gap issue is what is going to help keep women in jobs.
I hate to be negative, but this is really discouraging. It's not surprising, but it makes me so sad. I have been in hostile work environments in theatre before, but I always thought it would be better as a professional. That's probably naïve and too optimistic, but I hate to think the worst about an industry that I'm ready to enter. It's scary. We can talk about this statistically and use surveys, but as a woman, I'm just scared. As excited as I am to work in this industry, this makes me weary. From the parental perspective, all industries do this, and we just allow ourselves to ignore it. The sooner we face the fact that single parents are treated like "not our problem" and its truly upsetting.
As a hopeful young woman entering the technical theatre industry, I am saddened to hear the statistics from this study regarding how many women leave the industry due to harassment and lack of support. Personally, I would like to have a family some day, so when this article showed how many women were not offered maternity leave was shocking and heartbreaking. One thing that intrigued me was the chart on the percentage of women in each age category. It is clear that there are more women ages 18-30 rather than 60+, which to me makes sense due to the rise in equality or conversation about equality. I wonder what the chart would have looked like 40 years ago when all the 60+ women were in the 18-30 category and actually see the change. It is the difference between a longitudinal study and a cross-sectional study. A longitudinal study would actually be able to show home many women leave the industry over time versus the cross-section study that they did conduct just shows that potentially in the 1970s there were less women going into the industry of technical theatre. In my two weeks of college for technical theatre, I have met many people therefore made a lot of introductions to what I do; when I said that I am interested in lighting design, almost every person said “oh that’s amazing, we need more female lighting designers.” I know that this is a good thing as it means I might have opportunities to pave ways for generations to come and set standards, but it is also kind of discouraging that there are few role models for me to look up to.
I have pretty intense fears and nerves similar to what Elena and Bianca also seem to have about moving into the professional world and working in the theatre industry as female, especially because of my strong interest in carpentry and technical direction. I think it is interesting that not having support as a parent from an employer is one of the leading reasons women+ drop out of the working industry – that is a statistic I have not heard before, but not surprising. While I still have my fears, I think a lot of my nerves have been alleviated by working in a theatre that had a large amount of non-male production staff and overhire. What I have learned is that the “suck it up and work the weird hours for less than minimum wage and be grateful for the opportunity” mindset from (mostly) older generation people pushed on non-male individuals is total BS and that many people from that 18-30 age range embodied a mindset of “I can do the work and there is space for me here”. And that is incredibly encouraging. I intend on seeking out the copy of TDT to read the full results of this survey.
This article hits very close to home for me, as I'm sure it also does for many young women in the industry. As an Asian-American woman fresh out of high school who primarily works overhire in carpentry, I am not just discouraged and disgruntled, I am often angry and genuinely terrified. Whenever I am called into work, more often than not I am surrounded by men, white men, and older white men who have been at it for far longer than I have with far fewer socio-political obstacles between themselves and success. They move quickly and talk strongly and know each other better than I know any one of them, so I am an outsider made to feel smaller, younger, and stupider, but I am not allowed to screw up. If I ask for help, if I fumble a task, I lose all semblance of authority.
Worse more is that a position of authority is no armor from prejudice, as is well established in this article. I was once assistant technical director for a show. One man, a carpenter, always came to check in with me before moving onto his next project, but it was evident that he did not care about my input. He never fully faced me when he spoke, he was always poised to move on, he knew what he had to do next, he only came to me because I was in charge of him and it was expected of him to brief me.
I have always aspired to move up, lean in, and change the atmosphere of scenic and carpentry, but more than once I have thought of taking "the easy way out" and working in another area of tech. It is so taxing to be so aware of your own faults, others’ biases, and how none of it will change in the near future.
Relating to the ladies before me, this is incredibly discouraging. To see such inequity and discrimination from an artistic field is devastating. We pride ourselves on forward thinking and acceptance, but the numbers reveal that those advertised ideals may simply be a mask. My background is mostly in costume design, normally the most female+ area of technical theatre, but as I traveled the country for interviews last winter, it was devastating to sit down to an interview panel of majorly white male faculty. And that was the reality for 90% of the programs I interviewed for. I don't doubt that these professors were talented in their own right, but I couldn't help but wonder how many women+ had they turned down for the very same jobs? It honestly turned me off of many schools, simply because of the lack of diversity I witnessed in their staffs. At the local entry-level theaters I have worked at, I have been surrounded and overwhelmed with the incredible talent of female+ technicians and designers and I hope that our generation of theatre brings more of these incredible people to the forefront of modern theatre.
I am not at all surprised by the numbers in this article, but nevertheless I am still disappointed. I would love to be able to say that this has not been my experience, but I have definitely encountered my share of a lot of what is in this article. I have begun to take more notice of the gender balance (or lack thereof) at events I attend, for example, at Lollapalooza this summer, out of all stages I went to, I saw not one woman in any of the booths, and each booth had around 4 people in it each. I saw a few women working on the deck of a few of the stages, but the presence of technical people at that event was almost entirely male. While I hope that these numbers are changing, it is still intimidating to think that this is the way our industry is currently and that theatre still has a long way to go in terms of equality.
I can’t say I’m surprised by this article and that I haven’t found it to be true in my experiences. After my summer position I was so ready to come back because though School of Drama has its issues it is a much better environment than most companies. I had male interns this summer who were constantly questioning some of the most simple skills I was preforming not to mention the fact that they’d respond to my explicit instructions as if completing it was doing a favor and not simply doing their job. I hate to see that we are losing Women+ in the industry but if you look at the reasons their leaving I have a hard time making a good argument to stay that isn’t based around “if you devote more time to the industry maybe we can change things”. Which doesn’t factor well with the reasons their going in the first place. I’m hopeful that with some perseverance and the thoughtful humans currently being trained we’ll be capable of re-shaping the industry standards so when we’re in charge things will be different. I want the environments that I work within to be welcoming to everyone who chooses to come into it.
I can't say that I am overwhelmingly surprised by the figures in this article. Disappointed, sure, but not surprised. Sure, we still live in a man’s world - and, typically, a white man’s world - (even in an industry that often proclaims diversity as loudly as possible) but what I find interesting is that, in my experience, I’ve gotten as much flak from older women in the industry as I have from men. I won’t speculate as to why because, to be completely honest, I don’t know. Hopefully, this is not the norm, but I’m certain that the type of mentality will never go away (from either sex). Something easier said than done, I think we must all strive to think of other people not as stepping stones to an ultimate goal, but as wings on which to fly. In the article, they also mention how families make working in theatre harder for women. While weird hours can certainly be hard to find a work-life balance around - especially when children are concerned - it’s not impossible and no one should be putting the sole burden of that on the mother. After all, it takes two to tango.
Wow I find this article to be deeply disheartening. It is so sad that women still have to deal with the pay gap and negative comments and/or harassment in their workplace. Especially in theater. We’re the ones that are supposed to be accepting of everyone. 90% of female technicians in a recent study said they left the industry because they felt that they had been discriminated against because of their gender. In another study, 80% of women left the industry do to a negative workplace, 76% left because gender-based harassment, and 51% left because of the pay gap. Another reason that women are leaving the industry is that there is no support for having families. The performing arts industry has a lot of work to do, but there are several organizations such as Parents in Performing Arts and Not in Our House are working hard to make the industry more inclusive.
The theatre industry is trying to move into a more inclusive and diverse environment, but it has not changed its patriarchal ways. Women & non binary folks are ‘welcomed’ but the work space is not safe from them. I personally have encountered people who refuse to use They/Them as pronouns, or drop the phrase “Ladies and Gentlemen”. The saddest part of all of this, is that usually the people who get the heat of this lack of acknowledgment are interns. People who can’t really defend themselves or who again… “should be happy to be here”. This issue is really tied to the age of the people working on the spaces, I once met a designer that when told “we have non binary folks in our workforce, please use non binary ways to address the crowd” he said. “I’ve been working here for thirty years, I will keep calling people however I want”. How do you force a company’s pillar to acknowledge you existence?
It is disappointing to hear that this still a problem that occurs. Personally, I have not yet had any horrible experiences being in a "male-dominated" field. For the most part, I tend to enjoy the job and the people that I work with. I will say, though, I always have to earn my stripes and I have realized that that is not the case with the men that I have worked with and who are seemingly at the same level. Though most times it is subtle, whenever I go somewhere new, I can tell that people wonder if I can get the job done- just by their questions or the tasks that they are willing to hand to me. In the same turn, there is no doubt in their mind whether my male coworkers, who may be new to the job as well, can get the job done. It does bother me a bit that I constantly have to prove myself and earn my stripes to be seen as an equal. But I think it is something that I have grown accustomed to, which is even more disappointing. So to a certain extent I can understand why women may feel the need to leave, but I don't think that that is the answer. I think it is important to stick around, even though we may have to prove ourselves, because by doing this it shows that we can and we will. And we may just be better. Then, hopefully, the day will come when we no longer have to prove ourselves.
-Apriah
To be entirely honest, the information that this article speaks on is far from new or unheard of, but rather just puts a factual number to the true amount of women+ that face challenges in the workplace. Almost every woman or non-binary person that I have spoken to, that not only works in theatre but just in the world in general, has faced some form of harassment, pay disparity, or negativity surrounding their job based on their gender identity, so while I want to be surprised at the 90% polling average, I am so far from surprised (and I would argue that is more shocking and concerning). It is sad to know that gender parity is still something that is so prevalent and, in some cases, causing women+ to no longer work in the industry. I also think it would also be interesting to do an additional poll to see the reasons why women+ who are no longer in the industry actually left.
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