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July 31st: Community Engagement Artists and Creatives Grant, December 31st: New England Presenter Travel Fund, December 31st: Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet Scholarship, December 31st: 24 Seven Dance Convention, December 31st: National Theater Project Presenter Travel Grant, December 31st: Breck Creek Artist-in-Residence Program

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DDP Talks To

"The Devil Ties My Tongue" by Amy Seiwert performed for the SKETCH Series, 2013. Photo by David DeSilva. Courtesy of Amy Seiwert's Imagery

DDP will cover stories from the corporate, for profit world regarding issues surrounding pay equity and transparency where relevant, such as other industries with low representation of women: tech, the sciences, venture capital, the entertainment industry, etc. to examine parallels between these male dominated spheres where informal hiring and word of mouth is the norm.

New York Times: A Woman’s Guide to Salary Negotiation

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By Kristin Wong

The first time I negotiated a raise, I had no idea what I was doing. A co-worker whispered that she’d gotten a slight pay increase, so I took a deep breath and approached my boss, making the case for a raise of my own. 

The results were not great. My boss suspected that I had compared notes with a colleague about our pay and reprimanded me for doing so. My stomach dropped and I wanted to cry, but by the end of the conversation I got the raise I’d requested. 

Women face unique challenges when it comes to negotiating, beginning with the fact that we are often viewed as “unlikable” when we do it. Women also have a tendency to underestimate their professional value, and we have been socialized to avoid assertiveness, an essential quality for a successful negotiation. These obstacles make negotiating more difficult, but no less important — which is why you’ve got to be extra prepared. Here’s how.

Read Wong’s full guide here.

New York Times: Want to Close the Pay Gap? Pay Transparency Will Help

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By Kristin Wong

20 January 2019

Here’s what we know about salary transparency: Workers are more motivated when salaries are transparent. They work harder, they’re more productive, and they’re better at collaborating with colleagues. Across the board, pay transparency seems to be a good thing.

Transparency isn’t just about business bottom line, however. Researchers say transparency is important because keeping salaries secret reinforces discrimination.

“From a worker’s perspective, without accurate information about peer compensation, they may not know when they’re being underpaid,” said Emiliano Huet-Vaughn, an economist at U.C.L.A. who ran a study in 2013 that found workers are more productive when salary is transparent. Without knowing what other workers’ salaries look like, “it naturally becomes harder to make the case that one is suffering a form of pay discrimination,” Dr. Huet-Vaughn said.

Read the full article in The New York Times.

New York Times: How a Common Interview Question Hurts Women

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By Claire Cain Miller

1 May 2018

Aileen Rizo was training math teachers in the public schools in Fresno, Calif., when she discovered that her male colleagues with comparable jobs were being paid significantly more.

She was told there was a justifiable reason: Employees’ pay was based on their salaries at previous jobs, and she had been paid less than they had earlier in their careers.

Ms. Rizo, who is now running for the California State Assembly, sued. In April, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in her favor, saying that prior salary could not be used to justify a wage gap between male and female employees.

It’s the latest sign that this has become the policy of choice for shrinking the gender pay gap. Several states, cities and companies have recently banned asking about salary history. They include Massachusetts, California, New York City and Chicago, as well as Amazon, Google and Starbucks.

Read the full article in The New York Times.

Ballet Black: FREED POINTE SHOE COLLABORATION

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This year Freed of London have teamed up with Ballet Black founder and artistic director Cassa Pancho MBE and Senior Artist Cira Robinson to create the first skin tone pointe shoes, handmade in the U.K. for black, Asian and mixed race dancers.

After over a year in development, Freed of London has introduced new colours ‘Ballet Bronze’ and ‘Ballet Brown’ to their core collection. The Freed of London ethos has always been to develop shoes to meet the needs of each generation of dancer and these new colours continue to reflect this.

“This wouldn’t of been achievable without the help of everyone involved, especially “Ballet Black” whom we collaborated with to create these beautiful new colours.”
– Freed of London

“I am beyond delighted that Freed have launched these two new colours. Although it may seem like a very small change to the outside world, I believe this is an historic moment in British ballet history and another step forward for culturally diverse dancers across the globe who wear the iconic Freed brand of shoe.

I would like to thank Freed for using their platform to help instigate change, and Cira Robinson, Senior Artist at Ballet Black, for her unending dedication to making this possible.”- Cassa Pancho MBE, Founder & Artistic Director

Read about the collaboration here.

HuffPost: Behind The Tutus, Ballet Is A Boys’ Club. This Ballerina Wants To Fix That.

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By Chloe Angyal

15 March 2017

Ballerina Ashley Bouder is crying. She’s standing alone in a rehearsal studio in front of 20 or so dance journalists and several funders of her small self-titled ballet company, and she’s crying. And I’m pretty sure it’s my fault.

She’s just finished showing us a snippet of pas de deux that she choreographed, and that she’ll perform in just over a week’s time with her fellow New York City Ballet principal dancer Andrew Veyette. The entire evening of dancing is devoted to women choreographers and to women composers. In over 15 years of dancing with City Ballet, Bouder tells the assembled crowd, she’s danced works by about 40 choreographers and can count only seven women among them. She can’t name a single woman composer whose music she’s danced to ― not a single one.

Which brings us to why Bouder is crying. I’ve asked her why it matters to her that more women be allowed to choreograph ballets. What does gender have to do with it?, I ask, channeling the purportedly gender-blind proponents of pure, context-free meritocracy. Ballet is ballet, right? Does it really make a difference if it’s made by a man or a woman?

She takes a deep breath, and begins to answer, her voice breaking before she can get more than a few words out. “I think a lot of it is about telling little girls that they can. I have a daughter. As a kid, I was told that I can’t, a lot. For me, to have my voice be relevant, and for people to listen, is really important. To say what I have to say, even if they don’t like it. I get to say it.” The room erupts into applause, and Bouder wipes her eyes and nods, her short brown ponytail bobbing.

Read the full article on HuffPost.

New York Times: Caught in the Middle of #MeToo: Unions That Represent Accusers and Accused

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By Michael Cooper

17 May 2019

When New York City Ballet fired the star dancer Amar Ramasar eight months ago for sharing vulgar texts and sexually explicit photos of a dancer with a colleague, it said it needed “to ensure that our dancers and staff have a workplace where they feel respected and valued.”

But Mr. Ramasar will return to the stage with City Ballet on Saturday afternoon. To the dismay of some women in the company, he won his job back with help of their very own union, which persuaded an arbitrator that Mr. Ramasar’s firing had been too severe a punishment.

From the shop floors of factories to ballet’s grandest stages, organized labor is struggling to balance a set of competing and sometimes conflicting interests as it grapples with the sharp uptick in #MeToo-related cases in recent years.

Unions work to protect members from harassment, but they also have a duty to protect the rights of members accused of misconduct. The most difficult conflicts arise when one union member accuses another of harassment: Several unions, including the United Automobile Workers, have come under fire for seeming to do more to protect the jobs of the accused than the women who were their targets.

Read the full article in The New York Times.

Arts Professional: Is it time for quotas?

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By Cath James

2 May 2019

Gender equality and quotas. It’s nothing new, right? It’s a conversation that has been going on for decades. Back in 1985 I was performing in an all-female choreographers dance programme in Brisbane – the work commissioned and presented specifically to address the lack of the female perspective on dance stages in Australia.

In 2013 dance critic Luke Jennings gave us a well thought through assessment of the UK dance scene, from which I quote my good friend, the late great choreographer Janis Claxton: “It’s a nightmare for those of us who watch as men get given chances they are simply not ready for while we graft away at our craft and take smaller-scale opportunities…. Women quit because they don’t get the support that their male colleagues get, and having to push constantly against this outrageous gender inequality is infuriating.”

Then we had a UK first in 2015 in The Bench, a programme established by Tamsin Fitzgerald, Artistic Director of 2Faced Dance Company. It was a direct response to serious concerns about the lack of equality faced by female choreographers within the dance sector.

Has anything changed since then? Is it time for 50/50 quotas? This is a question I posed to a panel of dance industry programmers, creative directors and independent artists and choreographers in March, as part of a debate at Brighton Dome during International Women’s Day celebrations. What was immediately clear is that this is not a simple issue. Many points came across, but three really stood out for me:

Read the full article on Arts Professionals.

Ashley Bouder at The Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU

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As a 2019 Resident Fellow at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU, Ashley Bouder will be exploring gender fluidity in the pas de deux. The Center wrote:

Gender Fluidity in the Pas de Deux

At The Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU, Bouder will create choreography for a film that will showcase ballet’s potential to demonstrate gender fluidity. Although we associate the pas de deux with a male/female identity, Bouder wonders what would transpire if we stripped away gender and made the dance about the connection of two people in a specific place and time.

Bouder, a strong advocate for women in dance, founded the Ashley Bouder Project, which “actively recruits women and marginalized individuals to give them voices in creative and leadership roles in the dance and arts world.”

Learn more about the Ashley Bouder Project here.

Learn more about The Center for Ballet and the arts at NYU here.

Philanthropy Women: Helping Women Dancers Take the Lead in Choreography

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By Julia Travers

26 April 2019

While women fill most of the shoes in ballet, leadership positions are still dominated by men, especially in choreography and artistic direction roles. A nonprofit called the Dance Data Project (DDP) aims to help more women in dance keep up to date with choreographic opportunities and ascend the ballet leadership ladder. With this goal in mind, in April 2019, DDP released a reporton contemporary opportunities in choreography, along with monthly spreadsheets and calendar reminders of global deadlines. Earlier in 2019, it also published research on salary by gender for leaders in ballet, finding notable imbalances in favor of men, especially in artistic direction.

DDP’s overarching goal is to raise gender equality awareness in ballet through research, advocacy and other programs. It also serves as a resource for other “artists of merit,” including photographers, lighting and costume professionals, set designers, and composers. DDP founder and president, Liza Yntema, is also a personal sponsor of the American Ballet Theatre’s project to support female choreographers called Women’s Movement and a similar initiative from the Boston Ballet called ChoreograpHER.

DDP’s new calendar of opportunities includes ballet choreographic scholarships, fellowships and competitions, which it explains are training pipelines for lucrative choreographer and artistic director positions. As part of its related research efforts, DDP conducted a listening tour of ballet companies in the U.S.

“We heard from ballet company artistic directors and senior staff that women just don’t apply in the same numbers as men, often because they are unaware of what is out there. They do not have the network that men enjoy,” Yntema said in a statement. The directors also said men tend to be more forward and self-promotional during the application process.

Read the full article on Philanthropy Women’s blog.

The Problem With the Informal Referral System for New Choreographers – Men “Asking Around” = More Men Are Hired

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TulsaPeople: Remember our song

By Anna Bennett

“It’s 1940, and you just took a boy home.”

In reality, it’s 2018, an early afternoon in a Tulsa Ballet studio. Choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler is probing for the meaning behind a moment of movement that’s not quite working.

“Who should make the move? Who has the power?” Blankenbuehler asks Daniel Van De Laar and Maine Kawashima, the Tulsa ballet dancers cast in this duet.

The dancers look at each other, unsure of the right answer. But Blankenbuehler doesn’t have the answer either — it’s something they’ll all have to figure out together, from the top, once more.

Everyone resets to the beginning of the phrase, does it again, shifting the emphasis, pausing a little longer on this moment or that. The second cast for the duet, Minori Sakita and Jonathan Ramirez, shadows the action.

For Blankenbuehler, creation is a conversation, one that takes place over hours and days in the studio with the dancers, and continues even after he has left. At that point, his assistant, Cindy Salgado, stays to continue working and polishing the piece while he jets off to his next commitment (in this instance, off to London to choreograph the upcoming film adaptation of the classic musical “Cats”). But the Tony award-winning choreographer, whose credits include “In The Heights,” “Bandstand” and a little show called “Hamilton,” has never choreographed for a ballet company before.

Read the full article in TulsaPeople.