Broadway News: The news, sent to voters Friday, requires members to take a free, online training session led by inclusion strategist Vernā Myers. The course is meant to teach viewers how to identify unconscious or implicit bias in their own decision-making processes and how to correct it, according to the course description.
3 comments:
I think this stipulation for voting is a very clever strategy to increase equity in the awardment process. Such high profile awards can really open doors and get your work more publicity and engagement, so it makes sense why it is so coveted by all those who want that award on their resumes, or even the nomination. Unconscious bias training will obviously help in directly creating a more diverse spectrum of award winners, but on a larger scale, this is a good skill that people should be aware of. I believe that this system will work for this form of democratic voting because the sample is so small, but then the question is raised; how are we selecting these voters? How do they represent the beliefs of the public and people in the industry? I think this is a great forward step in the right direction, but obviously there is still so much to improve on in terms of all forms of equity.
I think that it is very smart for the tonys to be requiring an unconscious bias training. The Tonys being one of the biggest awards shows and highly publicized across the nation and internationally it is a perfect place to be implementing change that should be seen in the worldwide theater community. The importance of getting representation for underrepresented groups at an event like the Tonys is huge. The kind of publicity and influence that comes with being recognised at the Tonys gives the opportunity for there to be a much wider spread change throughout the industry in terms of the kind of representation and diversity that we are seeing. Like the article said, the current lack of diversity in all areas of the theater industry is something that organizations like We See You White American Theater are pushing to get changed. This push has been especially prevalent throughout the pandemic and the Tony Awards coming out in this season to begin to recognise the efforts made is a very good first step. The catch here will be if the bias training will actually lead to a change in the diversity we see at the Tony Awards in practice.
So it's really cool that in Antiracist Theatre and Equitable Practices last semester, we had to take that same unconscious bias Myer's test and what we found was that it wasn't really equitable or fair in it of itself. The actual test consisted of showing you different pictures of people with different ethnicities and try to understand why you chose to assign characteristics to them. And that's all fine and good on a base level but the test doesn't understand how quickly the pattern gets caught and then people lose interest. And like, if the Tony Awards institute only has to complete the quiz without analyzing their decision making or thinking critically about the actual test itself, does it really matter that they're doing it? Like, don't get me wrong this quiz is a great lesson in seeing the bias against people from different cultures and ethnicities but it doesn't really nail the reason why.
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