equality

The Problem Still Exists

Hey All,

I recently wrote a little something for TCG’s blog on gender parity in the arts. Obvs, I figured I’d share it here as well.

If you prefer to read it on an orange background with a silly picture of me sitting backwards in a chair you can click here. Otherwise, the full text is below:

———–

The Problem Still Exists

(This post is a part of the Diversity & Inclusion blog salon led by Online Curator Jacqueline E. Lawton. Check out further Diversity & Inclusion interviews on Jacqueline’s blog. If you are interested in participating in this or any other Circle blog salon, email Gus Schulenburg.)

Diversity & Inclusion blog salon: Gender Parity in the American Theatre

JACQUELINE LAWTON: Year after year, research shows that approximately 17% of all plays produced in the United States and the United Kingdom are written by women. We’re stuck at this number and it’s hard to comprehend. Last year, Forum Theatre convened a symposium to investigate the gender imbalance in theatre and posed this question: Is there a female dramaturgy (ie. a specific point of view that female writers bring to theatre)? If so, what does it look, sound and feel like? Who holds the agency for it?

ADRIENNE MACKEY: I think that any artist can’t help but create out of the materials of their own experience. Being a woman in the world means dealing with assumptions about how women are and can be.

I work in the devising community so my plays don’t come fully formed and ready for rehearsal. The space between the story/material at the work’s center and those tasked with representing it is a much smaller one and therefore less tricky to navigate. What is the makeup – it’s look, sound and feel – of the female dramaturgy in these works? Its the mixture of the women taking part in the process. And the agency for it is held by the particular women creating that particular piece at that particular moment.

JL: Where do you live? How do you feel your community has addressed the issues of gender parity? How has this particular issue impacted you and your ability to practice your craft?

AM:I live in Philadelphia where it feels the artistic community exists in two spheres – the half that works in the traditional regional theater mode of season programing and the half that works in a generative and original collaboration style without a set amount of content to be produced. Though the two halves are very fluid (many performers traverse between these two worlds often) I make this distinction because I see gender parity playing out very differently depending on which of these two worlds you’re operating in. Most of the women here in Philly, myself included, who feel a high degree of ownership over their artistic output and less at the mercy of others’ biases towards women artists are making their own stuff. They are self-generators and self-producers and they aren’t stuck waiting for roles or slots in a company’s season.

Last year on my blog I surveyed 12 different season-based theaters over the past six years in Philly for numbers on women directors, playwrights, performers and designers. (https://swimponypa.wordpress.com/2013/02/07/true-story/) The results were mostly skewed towards men in all categories (generally with 2 men for every woman) and were most pronounced in this regard the larger the budget size of the company. I see how the weight of that imbalance can simply corrode a person’s soul after a while. So I feel lucky that I am mostly in control of the work I make and my ability to create and program plays that are representative of a world where female narratives are an important part of the conversation. The only real barrier to feeling total equal is my sense that funding organizations may also be mirroring the trends we see in the theaters. My next project probably ought to be the number breakdown on funding sources and whether their support is equally gendered across their grantees…

JL: Do we need gender based theaters? What is gained by having stories of a certain community told by artists of that community? What is lost?

AM: I don’t know if I think we need gender based theaters per se. I think it’s an impulse to equalize the numbers and while I have nothing against it, it doesn’t help integrate the female perspective into the spaces that need it most. We need women in all theaters so that the next time a work has potentially misogynistic imagery or themes, there are women interested in talking through and discussing them. I personally want to give our male allies the eyes with which we see these works rather than simply secreting away. I believe this will pave the way to true equity faster.

Better, I’d propose, to create financial incentives for companies that consistently display a parity of representation in its performers, writers and directors. Reward the outcomes not just the intentions. Try and tell me that a $25,000 grant at the end of three seasons of equitable gender distribution wouldn’t motivate AD’s to find themselves plays with more women writing, directing or performing in them.

JL: What practical action steps would you recommend to local, regional and national theatre companies to address issues of gender parity?

AM: Assume the best intentions of all creators, that no one wants inequity. So when you have these conversations, work hard on both sides to remember not to pull into defensive postures or aggression towards the folks that might want to change but just don’t know how yet.

Find measures that are quantifiable that you want to meet and share them with others.

And while I don’t necessarily advocate for only doing all-women works, I do most definitely advocate for creating an all-female spaces to discuss and strategize how to tackle these issues. It is nothing against one’s male colleagues to say there are certain struggles they just can’t really understand. There are times you need to talk to people who have dealt with the same issues and one of the unfortunate outcomes of an unequal field is that if you don’t seek it out, it’s rare to find that many female creators gathered in one space.

Most recently in Philadelphia, my company Swim Pony launched the Awesome Lady Squad – a forum to meet and use the collective brain power of women to systematically tackle the inequities we see here in our community. In two short meetings I created a longer list of actionable steps to start working on this issue than I have felt able to do on my own in the past several years. (https://swimponypa.wordpress.com/2014/02/14/dispatches-from-the-awesome-lady-squad-4-on-the-topic-what-wed-like-to-see-instead/)

JL: Why is it important that we continue to have these conversations to address issues of gender in theatre?

AM: Because the problem still exists.

When it’s done – when I see an equal distribution of female artists across the theaters of Philadelphia – I’ll stop talking about it.

Adrienne Mackey is the founder of Swim Pony, dedicated to works that are loud, strange and never seen before on earth! She has directed SURVIVE! – a 22,000 square ft installation exploring the universe and LADY M – an all-female take on Macbeth. Most recently, Adrienne directed THE BALLAD OF JOE HILL at Eastern State Penitentiary boasting a completely sold out run and a profile on NPR’s Radio Times. She has received two Knight Arts Challenges, an Independence Fellowship, a Live Arts LAB fellowship and New Edge Residency. Adrienne also sings backup vocals as “The Truth” for Johnny Showcase and the Mystic Ticket.

Jacqueline E. Lawton received her MFA in Playwriting from the University of Texas at Austin, where she was a James A. Michener fellow. Her plays include Anna K; Blood-bound and Tongue-tied; Deep Belly Beautiful; The Devil’s Sweet Water; The Hampton Years; Ira Aldridge: Love Brothers Serenade, Mad Breed and Our Man Beverly Snow. She has received commissions from Active Cultures Theater, Discovery Theater, National Portrait Gallery, National Museum of American History, Round House Theatre and Theater J. A 2012 TCG Young Leaders of Color, she has been nominated for the Wendy Wasserstein Prize and a PONY Fellowship from the Lark New Play Development Center. She resides in Washington DC and is a member of Arena Stage’s Playwrights’ Arena. jacquelinelawton.com

Can we talk about canon for a minute?

I’d like to talk honestly about the canon for a second.

There’s a tiny moment I recently saw a production of The Tragedy of Julius Caesar.

First off, for the record, I’m not writing about the particular production. I’ve seen it a bunch and it’s been in there every time. And so while the moment that struck me was indeed performed in this particular version of the play, but my guess is that the lines I’m wondering about are with all likelihood in almost every production of this play.

What struck me was this series of lines:

Brutus. You are my true and honourable wife,
As dear to me as are the ruddy drops
That visit my sad heart

Portia. If this were true, then should I know this secret.
I grant I am a woman; but withal
A woman that Lord Brutus took to wife:
I grant I am a woman; but withal
A woman well-reputed, Cato’s daughter.
Think you I am no stronger than my sex,
Being so father’d and so husbanded?
Tell me your counsels, I will not disclose ’em:
I have made strong proof of my constancy,
Giving myself a voluntary wound
Here, in the thigh: can I bear that with patience.
And not my husband’s secrets?

Can you see them? Can you see the ones I want to write about?

I didn’t. Or rather, I didn’t really hear them initially, while I was watching. I just saw the scene for what it was – a woman asking her husband to unburden himself of whatever it was that was bugging him. But then, I started talking about the scene to someone and I was trying to summarize what Portia had said. It was when I did that, and had to put her words into my own, put Shakespeare’s words into modern parlance that I suddenly said, “What the hell?”

Right? Now it seems really obvious.

Portia begs Brutus to tell her what’s wrong and he says he can’t and in trying to argue with him that he should she says, “Look I know I’m a girl, and by my very nature that means I’m not as good as you. But you did marry me. And my dad is pretty important. Isn’t that worth something of value?”

Can you imagine a female character saying this in a modern play? You’d better have contextualized that character out the wazoo to be able to say something like that and not have an army of actresses beating down your door. But here? Nothing. No reaction. No one thinks its weird.

Brutus responds by saying, “O ye gods, Render me worthy of this noble wife!” He clearly holds Portia in high regard. He thinks she’s the best kind of woman that a woman can be.

But the implicit assumption in this world is that the best a woman can be is never going to be as good as any kind of man.

That’s what’s super f-ed up about those lines in that scene.

So I’m asking: Are we ok with this?

Are we ok with presenting not only the antiquated language of these works but their antiquated morals?

(Sidebar: Can we all be honest too, that though there are probably a freaking ton of women who would die to get into this role, it’s a pretty weird one? Who uses the argument, “PS I also happened to have STABBED MYSELF A LITTLE IN THE LEG to show you how reasonable it is to tell me things.” WTF? Just sayin’…)

The power of the canon is one I still have trouble buying into. I don’t doubt the validity of aspects of these works. But I am not sold that these aspects justify some of the stuff that comes along with them. If we don’t remark on these things, we quietly, gently perpetuate them.

A huge part of the reason I don’t often engage with canon is that I tend not to feel like the roles and stories told about women align with my personal politics or with my sense of equity for women in the artistic workplace. Usually, rather than fighting that system I often find is set up to place women in a disadvantaged position, I prefer to spend my artistic energies on creating new works, stories that I DO believe in, that have the potential to become the canon of the future. While I can see the value of these works from the past, and understand why people pursue this study, that value ultimately doesn’t add up to enough for me to choose a classical work unless it can also be a part of my artistic code of ethics be that in terms of morality presented, absence of obvious and unquestioned sexist or racist attitudes, stories that not only offer women interiority and emotional depth but a sense of agency over their surroundings, etc.

Why are those Portia lines still in a modern interpretation of the play? Just because they might have said something like that back then, is that enough reason to keep saying it now?

For me, the answer is no. For me, a passive presentation of such language is also a tacit complicity. For me, ALL the plays I present have to support my sense of a female character as fully formed a human and narratively important as a male character. And when I have engaged with the classics on occasion, it’s only when those works either already do that, are tailored in small or large ways so they eventually can do that, or are re-shaped to point out the lack of this quality in an actively examined way. If none of those things can happen, for me it’s just not worth doing.

In the past few years, I’ve required that women re at least 50% of the cast in a canon work. That’s true from massive Swim Pony retellings of classics like LADY M, to more traditional takes like this past summer’s The Tempest, to academic productions like my Midsummer at Arcadia this past fall. And in all of those pieces I also made a conscious effort, especially with student productions, to carefully comb the text for language that might include morals from the past that I find presently repugnant. We need to talk about why certain parts of text are (and should be) cut so that it’s clear we don’t agree as a cast, as a creative space, as a community with these statements if they are left unquestioned and unexamined.

Why this past summer did I cut massive portions of Prospero’s language about the importance of Miranda’s virginity and warnings to Ferdinand to preserve it?

Because even though I see that this is clearly written into the character, I personally find that patriarchal kind of dominance based solely on a women’s sexual purity pretty unacceptable. And I think there are plenty of ways to create a deep and complex parent/child relationship without it.

Because in the context of Prospero’s journey, neither Prospero or anyone else remarks on this as a possibly invalid way of valuing his daughter. And because I don’t value that value system, I’m not willing to support that viewpoint onstage.

If I HAD to keep it in there, because of a producer or purist’s objection, I wouldn’t do that play.

It’s the same reason I cut the classic Lysander line about Hermia being an Ethiop and Sebastien’s about Claribel being loos’d to an African. Because I would never allow those kind of casual and unremarked upon racist statements in a play I was making in the present, so I don’t include them in these plays from the past either.

And look, I understand the historical context in which they are made, but that just isn’t enough for me to justify continuing to say them. When such language is discussed or remarked upon, or featured in a new contemporary understanding, as say, many newer productions of Titus Andronicus do, or are explored or exposed in some way to unseat the assumptions they are based on (as we did often in LADY M) then I believe that the audience will see that my take on this work is different than the attitude of the character. But when such language is left in and is left un-examined or un-remarked on, I believe it creates a tacit assumption that othered identities ARE these things that the characters say they are.

So my rule is always, if I wouldn’t tolerate it from a modern playwright, I won’t tolerate it from a classical one either.

I think that there are a lot of folks who will never want these works modernized and clearly, cutting to change a character’s attitude in this regard or cross gender casting IS a modernization: A modernization to reflect the idea that women or people of color can indeed occupy the kinds of positions and embody themes that were only allotted to white men in Shakespeare’s time. And I think that those who chide cross gender casting for not being “real” or corrupting the text in some way are just refusing to see that argument from the side of the people it most affects.

So lately, I just tell myself that they’ll all die out and I will become the lord-ess of the Philadelphia art scene.

Not really.

Ok maybe a little bit.

– A

3 years and $300,000 and I’ll fix it, for realz…

Alright, enough moping.

So remember how I said that the tough thing about talking about the issue of gender parity, the problem, wasn’t intentions, but a lack of culpability for outcomes.

In other words, how do you get people to not just think about doing the right thing but actually motivate them to do it?

Guess what?

Yesterday, I figured it out.

You just need some money.

You need a funding program that has nothing to do with intentions, because we all have the best intentions. What you need is a reward system that is entirely based on outcomes.

So.

Without further ado, I give you:

SWIM PONY MASSIVELY OVERHAULS THE STATE OF WOMEN ARTISTS IN THREE YEARS AND WHO KNEW IT WOULD BE THIS FLIPPIN EASY GRANT PROGRAM

Also known as:

AWESOME LADIES GETTIN’ WHAT’S DUE (ALGWD for short)

(With support from Pew Charitable Trusts

Or maybe William Penn

Or maybe The Wyncote Foundation

Or The Knight Foundation

Really who cares, someone has to fund this, right?)

Here are my proposed guidelines:

1) The ALGWD team announces to the Philadelphia-area theater community that starting next season any company, of any size, with access to their own non-profit status or a fiscal sponsor is eligible for an award at the end of a three year period.

2) The funding awards will be made in two categories:

$25,000 will be awarded to 5 companies with the highest percentage of women artists represented across three artistic categories (see below).
Any company that achieves 45% female representation across all three categories is eligible to receive $10,000.
PS – You have to hit the minimum in all three. No exceptions.

3) Female artists represented will be calculated based on a statistics over three categories:

Number of women playwrights
Number of women directors
Number of women actors

4) Other rules and guidelines:

Companies will submit their statistics and then have them validated by the grant committee in order to be eligible.
The statistics must include all artistic output by a company.
Artistic outputs included must be open to the public.
A company must meet a minimum of three public works to be eligible for consideration.
Funds are string-free. You can use them for whatever you want.

5) And maybe we could also add this as a bonus:

A $1,000 in additional funds are available for any company that can also show an equal parity across all categories of theatrical design regardless of whether they reach the above minimums.

This means for three years there’s a looming pile of cash incentivizing the choice to bring women artists in. It’s not the only consideration, but it’s enough to help counteract a tiny bit of that un-intentional push away from a female artists in the other direction.

And happily, unlike calling someone out or making a stink, this grant doesn’t hurt anyone who decides they can’t or won’t be able to meet the gender equality minimum. You can do all the dude heavy, dude written, dude directed plays you want. It just means you’re missing out on the free money party.

Of the 12 companies I surveyed numbers on last year, a few were pretty darn close – Flashpoint, Simpatico and Azuka – but not one would have hit this minimum requirement across all three categories. But if there were $10,000 at stake, how much do you want to bet they’d tweak their selections just a tiny bit to nudge them over the line? If the next time the AD’s of these companies looked at their numbers and knew that hiring one more female director got them $10,000 do you think they’d think as hard about whether or not to do it? Do you think that the choice between a female playwright and a male one would be quite so agonizing if one picking the former meant they might be one of those companies competing for the top 5 slot?

For most companies, $25,000 or $10,000 in funds that aren’t project ear-marked would make a huge difference. That’s an entire person’s salary in some cases. That’s the budget for an entire show for the really small ones. And even if you’re a bigger dog, one where the scale you’re operating on won’t be totally transformed by this kind of cash, think about how hard you chase donors on this scale. You could just do the work you’re already doing AND save women artists from inequity while getting money handed to you.

The way I see it there are something on the order of 30 – 40 companies in Philly and the surrounding areas who’d be eligible. If I had to guess, right now, there are probably only a handful – 5 maybe – that potentially meet those guidelines already. From rough estimation it seems like about half those companies could probably hit those numbers with just a bit of effort to add a few female directors or playwrights or plays with more female roles. If I were a betting woman, I’d guess the same half of those 30 – 40 would come out the other side of three years with hands outstretched for their $10,000.

Think about the impact that would make in this community:

5 companies at the top x $25,000 = $125,000
~16 more companies at the minimum x $10,000 = $160,000
~15 that also hit the design minimum x $1,000 = $15,000

That’s $300,000.

This is really not that much money.

Think about that Philly funders… For a single upper limit Pew organizational project grant:

You could have an incredibly concrete means to measure the impact of your efforts by surveying the stats on gender before the award period and after.
You could incentivize not promises or discussions but measurable, quantifiable outcomes.
You could reward those companies already employing positive gender parity practices.
You could send a message that your organization cares deeply about the status of women artists and is able to take steps to do something about it.
You could create an art-making environment in Philadelphia that can be nationally recognized as the most female friendly in the country.
You could massively shift everything about the way this city works for women artists.

No hemming or hawing. No yelling or fighting. No pipelining. No apologies for what we intended to do but couldn’t quite make happen. Just three years to make it happen or not.

Some folks will ask you for a whole new system and ten years or more to implement it.

I’m just asking for three years and $300,000.

Let’s do it now Philly before some other city snatches up our good idea.

– Adrienne

PS – Shout out to Brad Wrenn who dreamed this up in the car with me when I was having a shitty morning yesterday.

Tired

How best do you root this shit out?

I have been seriously trying to think on this one in the past couple days.

I keep thinking about #thesummit and I’m still not sure how best to proceed, both when it comes to talking with folks who are semi-anonymous AD’s I don’t personally know and with my close friends and peers. There are a couple of recent specific incidents that have sparked this post’s train of thought, but it’s also an issue that I’ve struggled with for a while, and, based on convos from the Awesome Lady Squad, a phenomenon that I think is much much bigger than just me.

It’s easy to make a list of female directors. I’m glad I did it. But it’s harder, by a lot, to actually get people who are making artistic choices, to take that list and hire them. I really believe that almost everyone, in theory, supports that list. Is there anyone in this community who would admit they don’t want women to hold an equal place? But somehow, seasons get chosen, shows are cast, and it continues to happen. If we all agree it’s bad, how and why do such inequities persist?

The problem, I think, isn’t that any one choice is particular misogynistic or horrifying. I think that’s actually pretty rare in this community. What’s more likely and perhaps far tougher to solve, far more problematic, are singular well-reasoned, well-intentioned choices across many many companies that still add up to a gender inequity in the community as a whole.

The problem, I think, isn’t intentions, but a lack of culpability for outcomes.

Which is why trying to tackle such a thing is so tricky. You don’t want to feel like you’re attacking any particular person or company, any particular choice, because of course those people have well reasoned and thought out plans for why they’ve chosen the way they have. It feels mean. It feels punitive. But then what exactly are you supposed to do about the fact that women are still vastly under-represented on and off the stage in almost every theater in this city? How in particular does one try and make a dent in this?

I’m trying. I’m trying to throw darts at what I think might be the board. I’m trying to initiate conversations with a fair number of different people on both the very tiny and very large scale of company sizes to see if I can get them to engage. I’ve been having this conversation everywhere, from theater lobbies to parties and even in my own home with my own fiancée who has his own company.

But I’ll be honest, right now, I think I’m failing. Right now, this morning, it’s feeling like a real uphill battle. And at this moment, it’s feeling a little defeating. Because despite trying to be intensely careful about my wording, despite continuing to reiterate my respect and admiration for folks, it still feels a little like I’m the one who has to constantly justify what I’m seeing. That if I perceive an imbalance that I want to unpack or converse about, I have to ensure that I’m completely grounded in my observations before we can engage. That it is my job to make sure I don’t put people on the defensive, even if my aim is to provoke and question an aspect of their work. That I better walk in knowing an awful lot about the person or company and their reasons for doing what they’re doing or I’m doing something wrong. It feels like I’m the one with the onus to prove there’s a bias.

And that’s hard to do. And it feels a bit like an impossible task at this moment. It’s hard to know everything about why someone selects a season, why someone has picked a particular play. It’s hard to be sure that under intentions, there are less obvious things that still might be worth addressing.It’s hard to know exactly how the issue is feeding into the situation, especially the closer in you zoom.

What I do know is that as I’ve looked at a few companies, I still see that fewer actresses will get cast and fewer female playwrights will be produced next year. That’s what I wish I could fix.

When I talked about this conversation with my fiancée he said this:

“The thing is, I just think it would be sad if people felt inhibited to talk about things. Or if their imaginations were squashed because they were trying so hard to be careful.”

I thought, “I feel that way so much of the time.”

I feel that way whenever I try and bring this up. That if I’m not so terribly careful, I’ll make people feel unfairly labeled and then I’m the bad guy. That I’m not giving them a chance to show their side of things. Sometimes I so get tired of always having to hear the other side of things first. Because my aim is never to put people on the defensive but it feels like regardless of my tactic this is always the result. And many times, the risk of alienating someone doesn’t feel worth it in a given moment and not bringing it up is the only way I can ensure someone won’t get their hackles raised.

So sometimes I don’t.

And sometimes when I do, the result doesn’t always feel that I’ve been able to communicate what I’d hoped. More times than I wish, I’ve walk away feeling further from the person I wanted to engage than when I started. And this in particular makes it harder to do the next time.

This must be part of why these things persist, no?

I don’t want to squash the imagination of others. But it sometimes feels to me, and I hear from other women that they feel this too, that this problem squashes us all the time. And it’s hard to know what to do when I don’t think people aren’t trying to do it. It’s hard because it feels like for me to ask for what I think is fair, I’m also punishing or taking something away from someone else.

We’ll have to think on this one a bit more…

– A

The Means To Manifesto

Hey all,

After a couple of mammoth posts past, and a few I’m working on to come, I’m keeping things short and sweet today, if still terribly important.

Instead of sending tons of my thoughts out to you all, I’d like you to send me your thoughts so that I can compile them in time to undertake a task for the next Awesome Lady Squad meeting.

Here’s our first official creation mission: A re-framing of how we look at each other as female artists. Replacing the model of scarcity and competition to a model of abundance.

In other words? An Awesome Lady Lady-festo.

I want to create a code of ethics for how the Awesome Lady Squad will function. This document should contain clear and simple guidelines that underpin the way Awesome Lady Squad members promise to work with each other and the world around them. It is an agreement that details the ways we can model the behavior we want to see around us.

So you tell me: what does it mean to be an Awesome Lady creator? How do we define what kinds of working models we want to hold up?

Think specific, think concrete, and ideally concise.

Throw thoughts in the comments or on facebook or by email (swimponypa@gmail.com). I’ll be compiling and setting up a committee for this soon.

– A

PS – for some initial inspiration look to the Core Principles of Artist U

A penchant for ladies designing

Last week I put up a post listing female directors in Philadelphia so that next time someone is having trouble coming up with some they know exactly where to look.

Today I’m doing the same for designers. These are folks that live and work here in the city (with a couple folks recently moved that folks I polled felt super strong about including anyway) and are ordered only by alphabetical last name. I’ve divided the list up by category and put people in multiple places when they are multifaceted designers.

I’ll keep updating this, so feel free to send me more names.

And if you want a link to your portfolio or site, send that along too.

– A

Set:

Erica Hoelscher

Meghan Jones

Mimi Lien

Maiko Matsushima

Sara Outing

Cory Palmer

Maura Roche

Lisi Stoessel

Lights:

Kate Beutler

Madison Cario

Angela Coleman

Oona Curley

Alyssandra Docherty

Janet Embree

Lily Fossner

Shelley Hicklin

Amanda Jensen

Leigh Mumford

Maria Shaplin

Robin Stamey

Laila Kjørsvik Swanson

Jessica Wallace

Sound:

Susan Adelizzi

Elizabeth Atkinson

Tina Brock

Karin Graybsh

Ren Manley

Ashley Turner

Props:

Jen Burkhart

Ginger Dale

Natalia de la Torre

Amanda Hatch

Alisa Sikora Kleckner

Ren Manley

Amy Radbill

Gwen Rooker

Alice Yorke

Puppets:

Alisa Sikora Kleckner

Lorna Howley

Gina Leigh

Sara Outing

Martina Plag

Gwen Rooker

Robin Stamey

Danyata Ta

Video:

Janelle Kauffman

Costumes:

Ameera Ansari

Becca Austin

Meredith Boring

Marie Chimet

Kelly Cobb

Katie Coble

Rachel Coon

Natalia de la Torre

Kate Edelson

Mary Folino

Katherine Fritz

Jamie Grace-Duff

Colleen Grady

Millie Hiibel

Erica Hoelscher

Marla Jurglanis

Rebecca Kanach

Jillian Rose Keys

Alisa Sikora Kleckner

Maiko Matsushima

Rosemary McKelvey

Fiona Mulligan

Lauren Perigard

Julia Poisze

Regina Rizzo

Alison Roberts

Robin Shane

Susan Smythe

Janis Stefanowicz

Jennielynn Streed

Laila Kjørsvik Swanson

Charlotte Chloe Fox Wind

Amanda Wolff

Abbie Wysor

For the love of ladies, think of the children…

First, an admission:

Last night I gave myself a small break on the blog to close WELCOME TO CAMPUS at Drexel University.

Second, a short diversion:

I like the final product of CAMPUS for a lot of reasons. I’ve loved the process even more. I could go on a lot about this piece, why I feel like it’s the personal, intimate kind of work that theater ought to be doing in the digital age. If you haven’t seen any of the press for the show, it’s is a traveling campus tour that tells true stories exploring what the college experience is actually like in the spaces around campus that a traditional tour might not take you to. We went into dilapidated dorms, anonymous classrooms, cram into elevators, and stand in the stunning atria of the campus’s spaces. Students emerged from background landscapes to blend the lines between what is real and what is the play. I built it over 16 weeks with the students of Drexel, turning every day students into secret, highly trained public performance ninjas.

There’s a big part of me that just wants to spend this space today rolling around in the wistful sad fact of finishing a process so dear to my heart.

And now back on target:

But it’s gender parity month here at Swim Pony and so I’m taking the proud teacher vibes o’erflowing from me this Monday afternoon and sending them in a slightly different direction.

2013-2104 has been the Year Of Teaching for me. It’s the first year the training of theater to others has become the majority of my day job income. Teaching, though, has always felt like a kind of performance – one in which my class’s material ought to be as thought provoking and meaningful as any play I might make, one in which my persona ought to be as interesting as any lead character.

I use personal stories a lot in my directing and teaching work. I talk about aspects of the way I live and see the world to try and help myself relate to the material at hand, and hopefully in the process, hear and learn how my students do so as well. It’s a theory based in a kind of lemming bravery principle: if you see me jump off a scary cliff into the action of the scene or the idea from the reading and dive into the messy complexity of my own life, you are likelier willing to do the same.

I try to be honest with them. I try not to only paint in the nicer aspects of myself. And in this vein if we’re doing something that seems weird or silly or just plain not working, I usually will acknowledge the feeling. I try to explain to them why I make creative choices, to not only get them to execute an action but to understand why I am aiming for this particular choice and not another. I do this because when it works well, I soon find myself with students who are able to think about and question those choices. And sometimes offer new ones that are even better than the initial ones I’ve proposed.

This past year, I’ve also become particularly aware of things like this:

A book I use for my voice class (a book I love and use all the time) has a couple weird sentences about how women place their voices

A scene in a classical play I’m staging with students offhandedly mentions a woman as the weaker sex

I might know that a couple of paragraphs in the voice textbook are problematic but find the book still worth using. I might realize that there’s a historical context for the scene I’m directing but still think it important enough for other reasons to include. But I’m realizing that unless I say that, I run the risk of not communicating those caveats. And by not bringing it up, by not pointing it out, by not having the conversation I have in my head out loud with the little people in front of me, it’s possible that I’m passing along a tacit complicity with the aspects material that I don’t subscribe to.

It’s the same questions from a couple of days ago:

Are we aware?

Are conscionably contextualizing?

Take a classical work where a female character’s whose worth is hugely determined by her virginity status.

The reason for reading this text might be the beauty of the language or the significance of the author and play to theater history or possibly to see the first emergence of a theatrical device that occurs in the play. This might be why you want them to read this work.

Is the reason also that you agree with the implicit moral assumption that young women must wait until marriage to have sex or they are tainted and less valuable?

It might seem obvious that the outdated gender morals underpinning the action of the play are contained to the world of that play, that obviously you as the professor don’t feel that a women should be stoned or banished or shamed for being a sexually active adult. It might seem obvious that the trope of the tragic heroine undone by her loss of innocence isn’t something you actually think about the real young women sitting in the room with you.

When you say it out loud it seems obvious. This is exactly my point. You need to make sure that it’s obvious. Because if you don’t say it, how can they know?

I try to pass on the sensibility that every artist actor, director, playwright alike, is the author of his or her own artistic experience. That we all have choice and agency and therefore responsibility in the material we present and engage in. That whether we are in the position of learning versus expertise, it is still incumbent on us to have thoughts and opinions about the work they engage in and that we must examine and decide if we accept into ourselves and how we do so.

If we don’t, we run the risk of perpetuating the same things we’re frustrated by.

If we don’t share all the lessons we have to offer our students, we risk passing on others we never intended.

– A

Talking about talking

So I’ve been thinking a lot in the hours since my last post about how to have this conversation.

I’ve been thinking about how we can best begin to discuss issues of unequal representation in a way that both is honest and straightforward and is also productive and provokes dialogue instead of defensiveness?

In other words, I want to start by talking about how we talk about this.

I find it easy to provoke and push when the target seems large and imposing. I find strength in feeling myself becoming a David in the face of a Goliath. My guess, without having been there, is that this was the awesome power of what happened at #thesummit. It was a moment where the folks on the stage, the ones with some degree of sway and power and perhaps a degree of unknowing complacency, had to take in the might of opinion and feeling of the voices sitting on the other side.

But in a business as tiny as this, in a community where community is key, when networking and positive relationships determine your ability to get a job or a grant next week, month or year, it is easy in the micro-moments of inequity to excuse the tiny things. Too often any one moment or choice or thought seems isolated or small enough to swallow. And as the distance between we and the “giants” gets smaller, the harder it is to see them as the Goliaths they once were. Little things amass because it’s sometimes hard to know what is and isn’t a battleground.

And let’s also point out that these are really hard conversations to have.

Because so often I see an cry to battle dissolve when it has to translate into the daily implementation of such ideas on the nitty gritty detail level. Based on the conversation in our few meetings of the Awesome Lady Squad I hear female artists find the balance of when and how and where to try and bring these issues up the biggest barrier to change. “Do I really want to make this tiny line or scene or interaction a soapbox?” “Do I want to be that actress today, tomorrow, through this whole process.” “Am I really seeing this or am I being overly sensitive?”

It’s exhausting constantly trying to parsing it out in the moment.

And even if you are sure and you do know it’s an issue, it is so so so so so so so much more difficult to say things that are tricky and sticky to people we know and care about. It sucks to be a watchdog. To be a nag. To feel like you’re stopping everyone’s fun. To put people on their guard. It can feel like the opposite of the artistic impulse, where we want to feel open and accepting of each other. And I think it’s so hard because to have that conversation is also to acknowledge that the ills of our culture, the biases and darknesses that float around us all the time, also make their way into our brains. That we are sometimes making choices with little pushes from beliefs or stereotypes we’d never support if we said them out loud.

I wrote a while back about a study that showed how academic scientists displayed preferential treatment of men when filling a position for a lab manager.

In that post I explained how candidates in the study were never seen in person and scored based on identical applications save for the gendered first name of the potential employee. I underscored that this bias was shown in both men and women assessing the candidate. And I made a particular point of noting that none of the decision makers felt their choice had been affected by the applicant’s gender in any way. They all felt they were being totally gender objective in their assessments.

In other words, you can display bias and stigma and stereotype even when you don’t subscribe to them, EVEN when YOU are the negative recipient of them.

It is scary to think that stuff is in us. Even scarier to come to terms with the fact that it can affect our actions despite the best of our intentions. And when confronted with it, defense is natural. From the outside it seems ignorant and bigoted. But my guess is that the real cause is that no one wants to find in themselves dark things they didn’t ask to be in there. So sometimes it’s easier to believe they aren’t.

And it is here I want to point out the latent superpower we are missing: Yes, this is hard. Yes, It is tricky to talk David to David rather than David to Goliath. But. The closer we are, the more potential impact we are likely to have. The closer we are to them, the more likely we can get people to let that guard down. The closer we are to the offending source, the more likely we are to find a safe space to excise these demons with their hosts intact. And if we can win them to our side we grow our army of soldiers. The less it looks like a war and the more it looks like a conversion, I think the faster the battle will be over. If we have to kill them all, we may still do it, but I bet we lose much more time and resource and energy.

So I think we should begin with two assumptions, even if it may seem idealistic or naïve:

1) No one intentionally wants to make harmful choices to women artists.

2) Everyone imbibes some level cultural crap that will predispose him or her to doing so.

So when we look at the choices of a company, or another artist (or in our own work for that matter) and we see something that makes us feel squicky, our goal should be to remind them of #1 and help them see where they might be displaying the crap of #2 (pun by the way, totally intended).

To do that I think we start by asking these questions:

Is it conscious? – i.e. Does the person or company know and realize what they’re doing? Do they identify their behavior as a problem or are they truly unaware of it and its effect?

And

Is it conscionably contextualized? – i.e. Have they passively presented potential problematic material/decisions or have they taken steps (even if imperfectly) to justify them through dialogue or contextualization? In other words, do they balance a guy heavy Glengarry Glen Ross with another play with mostly female cast? Do they perform a problematic cannon text in context of a conversation series about historical representation of women in history to point out the potential in conflict with the morals we have today?

How we assess the answers to these questions will help set the stage for the modes through which we express our concerns and I think also help start to identify the solutions. And in tailoring it in this way, I think we get closer to coming to real understanding of what’s at play in each specific case. Because the devils really are in these details. And if we don’t treat all offenses alike, I think we’re likelier to find specific tailored solutions, likelier to find and commit the people who are ready and wanting to change but may not yet be brave enough or know how on their own to do so.

#thesummit

Look.

I am bad at twitter. I don’t tweet much or well. Call me twit-illiterate. It’s also been a heinously busy couple of weeks. Which is why it’s taken me a bit of time to catch up on #thesummit.

More than a few people have passed along thoughts about this. More than a few have asked my opinion. But I wanted to wait until I felt like I’d really read enough about it to have an informed opinion before responding. If you haven’t caught up check out this for an overview. And this for the much commented on tweets in-situ. And here’s the quote from Ryan Rilette quoted from the DC Theatre Scene article:

“It’s really hard, and here’s why it’s hard. I think it’s hard because there’s not enough in the pipeline right now. …There are a lot of new plays that are getting produced by small theatres that are by women.”

He went on to discuss how there are not enough plays by women produced in New York City and not enough in London (although he credited London with doing a great job), and said that a theatre needs something that’s going to help sell any play they put on. He said one can’t choose a total unknown, and that to find three plays a season by female playwrights would require them to have name recognition or something else to draw audiences, if one is not going to go the route of using star actors.

He said there are “not enough yet in the pipeline” and that “it’s gonna take a couple of years… a decade… before it’s going to shift, but it’s going to shift.”

A decade. Wow. I’ll be in my 40’s then.

That would be awfully… depressing to have to wait that long for more opportunities to arise. Probably depressing enough to just stop entirely. Something I see an awful lot of my female counterparts begin to contemplate around this age. It would be something I’d contemplate if I actually believed it would take that long. If I really thought my female peers had to wait around for these folks to use that whole decade’s worth of time to see some progress.

But I don’t buy this. And I also don’t feel like waiting.

Which is why what’s far more interesting to me, and what seems to have shifted this forum out of the standard and unremarkable bias women artists see and deal with all the time, is the final provocation of the night from Elissa Goetschius from Strand Theater that included a series of statistics:

At Signature, since the 2005 season, only 10 of 90 credited writers have been women, with women directing 2 of 54 productions.
Since Ford’s reopened after renovations, 2 out of 29 productions have been directed by women – the same woman.
At the Shakespeare Theatre, since opening the Harman in 2007, they have produced 51 shows – none of which have been written by a woman. 3 were adapted by women, and 9 were directed by women.
At Arena, since the 1998 season, 44% of productions have been directed by women. However, three women account for over half of those woman-directed productions, while 49 different men have directed here. The plays and lyrics that have appeared on Arena’s stages reflect the work of 110 men, but only 35 women.

When I read that and I thought, “Sounds familiar.”

I’m guessing, like myself, she’s been having this conversation for a long time. And as I went digging into her online presence I found this from March 2013.

I went back and checked my own blog for my statistics project on representation of women in Philly theaters. The dates of these posts? January 8th, 2013 AND February 7th, 2013 AND Febraury 8th, 2013.

Just about a year… Just about a year those facts have been out there. Hard numbers that do not lie about the state of the art we are in. Mine in Philly and Ms. Goetschius’ in DC. As a former student of chemistry, I really thought when I threw my info out there it would set something off in other people. But it’s been a year now and not enough is different. I still think numbers and data are useful; they are a tool to wield. But they are not, as it turns out, enough on their own. I admire Elissa Goetschius for going to #thesummit with numbers but I believe it is her fortitude to require their presence in the conversation that really started the firestorm.

Is it odd, do you find it strange, that within weeks of my post about gender parity in Philly theaters last year that another female director in another large America city was taking up another numerical compilation project in much the same way?

I do not think this is incidental. This means that it is clearly time to be having this conversation. I think it’s a sign we are gearing up for the real deal fight. I think it means the troops are gathering the tools we need to start taking this on. The numbers are a beginning. And now it’s time for all of us to make the response to them a necessity.

Elissa, if you happen to be reading this, I want you to know we are having this conversation in Philly too.

Like you, I am not waiting 10 years. I’ve already waited one, and not enough has changed.

So, like you, I’ve decided we’re having it now.

Which is why in honor of last March’s statistics project, I’m devoting this entire March’s blog to this issue. Every day a new article.

Every. Day. A few hours of time devoted to thoughts or actions to tackle this shit.

Cause it is shit.

Which why it stinks so badly.

You can expect more updates from The Awesome Lady Squad soon.

You can expect more thoughts about how we can critique and work with critics to change the way we frame women in theater to our audiences.

You can expect more observations about the myriad of ways we undercut women in subtle and unintentional ways.

You can expect more on what we can start doing NOW to make next year look different.

And hopefully by the end of March, by the time my 3/30 birthday rolls around, I’ll get a big fat present in the form of some actual movement and change.

I’m not giving it a year to start moving.

I’m giving it a month.

Are you ready?

I am.

– A

PS – Also worth reading is the fateful final question-er Elissa Goetschius’ thoughtful response and Brett Steven Abelman‘s as well.

The Ballad of John and Jen

When I started writing on this blog, it felt like I was pouring out a lot of the things that I had been feeling for a long time. The first posts were thoughts and arguments I’d been having a lot – internally with myself and externally with others – and were pretty well formed in terms of their reasoning and logic by the time they went onto (virtual) paper.

In the last few months, however, things have slowed. That’s partly (perhaps largely) due to my busier schedule of work. But I think it’s also because I’ve started to dig deeper into some of these things, I’ve begun to get at the stuff under that stuff. I’ve started to get at the things way down that one may not really realize. When you really start to pull apart your choices you start to see the unnammables that work on you, the things that you didn’t totally even realize were there. When you get down into the real muck of it, this stuff is less formed and harder to parse out. You start to pull apart shit that is often much much trickier to unravel and reason through.

I think this might be where some of the real scary stuff is.

I think this is where the less polite stuff is.

I think this might be where people could get a little upset.

But I think this might be where some of the real work is. And I think this might be the place where you start to tackle the issues that really might make a difference. All of which is to say that this post is coming back around to some of the women in theater/gender parity stuff. This is a first step at trying to dig into the muck.

Let’s begin with the truth: we have some major work to do. Even those of us with the best intentions aren’t really fixing this problem. Those of us with cursory intention are likely perpetuating it. We can blame the theaters that continue to produce plays with way imbalanced seasons. We can bemoan the writers that continue to create the plays. We can lament the market for having a glut of women. We can do all these things. But it isn’t going to get us anywhere. And if we actually want to get somewhere we have some “money where our mouths are” choices to make.

Backing up a bit: I had an argument back in mid-April, right around the time I wrote this post slamming a few Philly reviewers for their presentation of women in Shakespearean roles. This argument, one that had seven months ago is still picking at me and has been ever since I had it. It would randomly surface in my head in the middle of rehearsal, while driving, watching TV, I just couldn’t let it go. Couldn’t let it go because at the time I had it I was trying and failing to say something, something that I felt with incredible force and vigor and anger and fullness, something that felt like it implicated me and in the way I make choices about my work, and frustratingly was also something I felt totally unable to articulate.

The argument was a sweeping one, the kind that starts with a couple offhand comments and ends up gobbling up an entire afternoon. It was the kind of argument you can only have with someone that you really trust, because you actually start to uncover defenses. It was the kind of argument where you talk about the things you believe deep deep down inside about yourself and the world around you. And my sole caveat here is that it’s totally impossible to try and reconstruct all the things we said. But basically, it came down to this hypothetical:

If you have a slightly better male artist and a slightly worse female one, should you pick the worse one to help achieve better representation of female artists?

In the moment of the argument, it felt like I had no choice but to argue for the latter. It felt like a mission from on high. Like my entire life depended on making the case for that female playwright. That there was something deeply stacked against her. That I was the only way she was going to get a chance and if I couldn’t find a way to make that choice seem reasonable and obvious to my argument partner that she and no female writer after her would ever get it.

Which of course I failed to do.

And of course there are (and were) many reasons one could counter the position I took. Rational, reasonable, intelligent and thoughtful positions that we went back and forth and back and forth about. I almost ended up in tears because sitting there I felt so torn between the opposite side’s reasonableness and some kind of irrational deep down feeling that said there was something very wrong about taking a side other than the one I was on.

Neither of us could be moved. We left it unfinished.

But as I said, this question and the debate that ensued has continued to stick, continued to hang out in the back of my mind, needing to come to completion. It’s been this nagging incomplete thing trying to resolve itself for seven months now.

Over time, small details begin to accrue:

An review for a work of my own in which women played “men’s” roles

Writings from the dear Katherine Fritz

A book on the virtues of affirmative action

And then finally this: a study in PNAS about gender in the sciences that both control for and show statistically validated evidence of bias from Corinne Moss-Racusin and her colleagues at Yale. It was this last one cracked something open that I can hopefully finally start to put into words.

Here’s an intro from Sean Carroll’s blog for Discover:

Academic scientists are, on average, biased against women.

I know it’s fun to change the subject and talk about bell curves and intrinsic ability, but hopefully we can all agree that people with the same ability should be treated equally. And they are not.

What the researchers did a randomized double-blind study in which academic scientists were given application materials from a student applying for a lab manager position. The substance of the applications were all identical, but sometimes a male name was attached, and sometimes a female name.

With me so far? I swear, this comes back to the arts.

So half of the applications were Johns and half of them Jennifers. What the findings showed were that the faculty members rated John significantly more “competent and hireable” than an identical female applicant named Jen. These participants also selected John to receive a higher starting salary and offered more career mentoring to this male applicant.

And the real kicker? It didn’t matter if the faculty member was male or female. Both were “equally likely to exhibit bias” against Jennifer and viewed her as “less competent.”

A depressing graph:

How about another?

In her great Scientific American blog post about this study, Ilana Yurkiewicz appropriately writes:

Whenever the subject of women in science comes up, there are people fiercely committed to the idea that sexism does not exist. They will point to everything and anything else to explain differences while becoming angry and condescending if you even suggest that discrimination could be a factor. But these people are wrong. This data shows they are wrong.

The thing that stuck with me about this study, maybe even more so than the disturbing results themselves, is that, as Yurkiewicz points out, the scientists didn’t view gender as a factor in their decision-making. They thought they were using objective data for their assessments – rationally reasoned, non-gendered arguments – to determine the strengths of this particular candidate for this particular job.

I’d bet my house that were I to get into argument with those interviewers of Timon of Athens that the points they would have countered with would been rationally reasoned, non-gendered arguments. And my point is that just because you don’t obviously act like a sexist or consciously espouse anti-female philosophy doesn’t mean it isn’t working on you. And even the benefit of experiencing that disadvantage is no shield from inflicting it on others.

Does anyone want to guess about whether I think this pattern might be found in other contexts?

If it can happen so sneakily in something as cut and dry as the representation of skills on a job application with the exact same credentials but a difference of –en versus -ohn at the end of a J…

If there are forces that bias us against thinking that a woman is as capable and intelligent as a man in doing a job in such a carefully crafted scenario of objectivity…

If that can happen in a field whose express purpose is to remove bias from its methodology…

How can we possibly imagine that we can create object assessments in all the incredible number of variances and nuances and details about what makes a better work of art?

So of course if you knew for one hundred percent sure that you were absolutely judging the work objectively then yes yes yes yes yes you should absolutely pick the “better” play. But I what I’ve come to finally articulate these seven months later is that I just don’t believe there is anyone in the working world that can honestly say that they can do that.

If you have a slightly better male artist and a slightly worse female one, should you pick the worse one to help achieve better representation of female artists?

The problem isn’t your answer to this question. The problem is that this is how the question seems to always be framed. And I don’t buy this scenario is really the one that any of us is objectively encountering.

So when I hear “It just turned out that way,” I’m calling bullshit. When I hear, “The season line-up just ended up male heavy,” I’m calling foul. When I see foundations that just “happen” to be given to a majority of male-driven companies, I’m not going to say “Well that must have just been the applicant pool this year.”

We all know the odds are already stacked against women because we see it manifest all around us. And while the scientist in me wants to document and collect all the evidence I can to try and display this finding to the world, the maker in me says I need to find a way do something about it now. I don’t have time to wait for a fix. I don’t have time for more research. I’m making my work right now. And there’s no thinking theater artist I know who would truthfully declare gender wasn’t an issue on the general scale. Where we break down is whether we are willing to acknowledge that it’s happens in our own personal choices.

Intentionally or not, like it or not, we are all making a million tiny anti-women decisions and justifying them with million other reasons. The troubling implication from that PNAS study is that we not only judge women’s past work less fairly but that the bias impedes the potential for future opportunity. And without opportunity we are less likely to create new examples in which people can start to see anything different. Every performer or writer or director knows without a chance to make anything you can’t get better at making things. Even if you wanted to work way harder to achieve the same perception of success it’s going to be way harder to find the opportunity to do so.

And here’s where I’m going to get honest with you all.

I think a lot about this. I try very very VERY hard to root this shit out at the source. But I know I do it too. I wish I didn’t. But it’s just… in there. And were I able to somehow analyze my seemingly objective rational non-gendered artistic decisions I bet I’d find that I too have subtly undercut women in my process or in the field as a whole. Though I might not see exactly how those predisposed biases slip in, I know am not immune. And neither are you.

And in knowing that, I have felt myself at a cross roads where it seemed like I was asking this question:

If you have a slightly better male artist and a slightly worse female one, should you pick the worse one to help achieve better representation of female artists?

And increasingly, over the last decade of my career I’ve forced myself to do the thing that felt, in some vague and hard to define way, the slightly less artistically “right” choice because I believed it was the better moral one to make.

Just so that I’m totally clear about this:

I’m saying that I have steered projects in artistic directions that I might not have otherwise had I not cared about making a less imbalanced world through my theater. I have often picked the slightly “worse” artists because I believed it was the morally right thing to do.

And I do it constantly. I do it on projects ALL the time. Not just on the ones where it seems obvious. I make myself go against my gut in lots of choices because I think it’s better for theater as a whole.

I don’t often don’t say that out loud.

In fact, I don’t know that I’ve said it to almost anyone before now.

And part of the reason for my artistic public persona – my warrior-queen-who-get-all-the-grants-and-deserves-them-because-I’m-a-badass-take-no-holds-creator stance – is to show that despite doing this you cannot impeach my creative process. I want to demand that people acknowledge my artistic worth. And I do that because I secretly fear that people will see what I’m doing and think less of the work. Because deep down in the muck I fear that most people think women are not as artistically capable or that their stories are not as interesting.

In the past I’d get really hung up about it. I’d worry that I was losing my sense of artistry in order to make a point. And though I still believed it was worth it, I fretted about the cost.

I used to think that I was trading quality for principle when I did that.

Now I’m just going to think, “Jennifer.”

Perusing the outcomes of those choices here’s what I find: way way way more often than not, the person I picked was able to bring something to the table that was tangibly better. For obvious reasons, I am not pointing out specifics here but suffice to say, when I went with that slightly non-gut choice, I was often rewarded back in spades. And even when I wasn’t, if I could remember to view the failure in context of the qualities of the artist’s work and not simply their gender, I almost always saw that the real issue had little to do with them as women.

I’m not saying you have to pick terrible performers. I’m not saying you can never work with who you want. But I am saying that creative worth is totally squishy. I’m saying that we make artistic assessments for all kinds of totally ridiculous reasons. I’m saying that the way it’s usually is done is a massive amount of momentum pushing you towards a choice. I’m saying that we’re probably wrong as often as we are right about how a collaboration or an artistic impulse is going to work out. That failure is built into our creative growth. I’m saying we might as well start being “wrong” for the right reasons.

I’m saying that if you do this for a living, you have to know that so much of the time the difference between two options in the scope of a whole process doesn’t mean that much in the long run. I’m saying the difference between “really good” and “just a little bit better” is likely negligible. And perhaps not actually there. And even if it might be, at a certain point, the artistic benefit no longer justifies the outcome.

I’m saying if you’re at all considering a chance to give the opportunity to a female voice or person or story you should do it.

I’m saying if you actually care about doing anything about it, you have to do it. Even if something is pulling you away from it. Maybe especially then. Because that thing that’s pulling is ugly and dark and mean. And it hides in reasonable arguments’ clothing, it hides in gut reactions we don’t quite unpack. The only way to exorcise it is push in the opposite direction. Even when it seems strangely hard to do so. Even when it makes you feel a little funny. Activist-y. Moral high-ground-y. Like you’re doing the wrong thing-y.

Trust that you’re an amazing artist. Trust that this small push in the other direction will not harm your work. Know that it is a better thing for the world to have done. And see that your work is no worse off for it.

And then perhaps we can start actually getting this shit fixed.

– A