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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

Examining other art forms with historic issues in hiring women: theater, symphonic/classical music, opera. Also including more contemporary fields: lack of women in country music, hip hop, contemporary pop music, and other genres.

Wall Street Journal: A Popular Women’s World Cup Raises Pressure for More Prize Money

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By Rachel Bachman

8 July 2019

LYON, France—FIFA president Gianni Infantino called the 2019 World Cup phenomenal, incredible, fantastic, the best Women’s World Cup ever. He added: “There will be a before, and an after, the Women’s World Cup 2019, in terms of women’s football.”

Such success has immediately raised a difficult question for FIFA: With record-setting TV ratings around the world, and a four-time U.S. champion whose players have made issue of pay equity, how much should the prize money be paid to women’s teams be increased?

Read the full article in The Wall Street Journal.

New York Times: The Dominance of the White Male Critic

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By Elizabeth Méndez Berry and Chi-hui Yang

5 July 2019

“It’s 2019 and we are in the middle of a renaissance in black artistic production. And you are telling me the best people to evaluate that are the same ones who basically ignored black artists for decades?” the art critic Antwaun Sargent tweeted in May.

He was referring to reviews of this year’s Whitney Biennial, which will close in late September. But he could have been writing about reviews of film, theater, dance, even hip-hop.

The curators were a black woman and a white woman, and a majority of the artists they featured were people of color. Half were women; many were young.

But in major media outlets, white critics wrote the reviews that defined the conversation about the country’s pre-eminent contemporary art show. But not without resistance.

When Peter Schjeldahl of The New Yorker described photographs by John Edmonds as “slang,” some readers wondered if he did so only because the artist and his subjects were black. After Deborah Solomon of WNYC called “white supremacy” a “tired academic slogan” in her positive review of the artist Nicholas Galanin’s “White Noise, American Prayer Rug,” he challenged her online.

Read the full article in The New York Times.

WHY AREN’T WOMEN ADVANCING MORE IN CORPORATE AMERICA?

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More than 40 years ago, the Harvard business professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter published a pivotal book, “Men and Women of the Corporation.” Kanter showed that the disadvantages women experienced at work couldn’t be attributed to their lack of ambition: Women aspired to leadership as much as men did. But organizations often funneled women into jobs that didn’t have much of a career ladder.

By understanding gender-based expectations at work, some women were able to overcome them. From the 1970s into the 1990s, women made serious progress in the workplace, achieving higher positions, closing the gender wage gap and moving into male-dominated fields. Then that progress stalled, especially at the top. Why?

To answer that question, I talked with two experts who direct centers for leadership: Katherine W. Phillips, a professor of organizational management at Columbia University, and Shelley Correll, a sociologist at Stanford. They’ve known each other for a long time; they went to graduate school together.

[Why are some of America’s wealthiest professionals so miserable in their jobs? Read more in our Future of Work Issue.]

Emily Bazelon: At this point in our history, what are the major barriers to women’s advancement, and how do we dismantle them?

Katherine Phillips: Let’s start with the double bind that women face. If they’re perceived as nice and warm and nurturing, as they’re expected to be, they don’t show what it takes to move into a leadership position. But when they take charge to get things done, they’re often seen as angrier or more aggressive than men. It’s like a tightrope women are asked to walk: Veer just a bit one way or the other, and they may fall off.

Shelley Correll: Yes, women in leadership positions are seen as less likable when they do the same things male leaders do. That was a problem for Hillary Clinton and now Nancy Pelosi.

Read the full article in The New York Times.

New York Times: Obama Signs Equal-Pay Legislation

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By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

29 January 2009

WASHINGTON — President Obama signed his first bill into law on Thursday, approving equal-pay legislation that he said would “send a clear message that making our economy work means making sure it works for everybody.”

Mr. Obama was surrounded by a group of beaming lawmakers, most but not all of them Democrats, in the East Room of the White House as he affixed his signature to the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, a law named for an Alabama woman who at the end of a 19-year career as a supervisor in a tire factory complained that she had been paid less than men.

After a Supreme Court ruling against her, Congress approved the legislation that expands workers’ rights to sue in this kind of case, relaxing the statute of limitations.

“It is fitting that with the very first bill I sign — the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act — we are upholding one of this nation’s first principles: that we are all created equal and each deserve a chance to pursue our own version of happiness,” the president said.

He said was signing the bill not only in honor of Ms. Ledbetter — who stood behind him, shaking her head and clasping her hands in seeming disbelief — but in honor of his own grandmother, “who worked in a bank all her life, and even after she hit that glass ceiling, kept getting up again” and for his daughters, “because I want them to grow up in a nation that values their contributions, where there are no limits to their dreams.”

Read the full article in The New York Times.

Inside Philanthropy: Gender Norms Don’t Get Enough Attention from Funders. Here’s How Philanthropy Can do Better

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By Riki Wichins

20 June 2019

In many ways, social justice funding stands at a crossroads. The field has traditionally been animated by a strong impulse toward racial equity, using philanthropy as a means to challenge the infinite ways that that opportunity in America continues to be stratified by race and class.

At the same time, funders themselves are increasingly aware that race and class are “not enough,” that to really address complex and intractable issues of equity, there must be more. But what might that be?

One buzzy answer to this question is intersectionality—to recognize that those living in disinvested communities often must contend with several different kinds of oppression that interact, and that one or even two-dimensional models are not enough.

An intersectional approach can be particularly important when addressing individuals who make their lives at the borders of identity—who are not just black or Latinx, but also low-income, gay or trans, living with a disability, or living without proper immigration paperwork.

And then, of course, there’s also gender. Some social justice funders interpret addressing genderto mean increased equity for women and girls; others to mean funding issues affecting LGBTQ and other gender-nonconforming individuals.

By either measure, the field has far to go. Funding specifically devoted to women and girls totals only about 7 percent of total U.S. foundation grants (about $400 million); to LGBTQ issues, less than 2 percent (about $180 million).

And then there are gender norms. While virtually ignored in the U.S. when it comes to social justice funding, major international donors have thoroughly embraced it. Institutions like CARE, PEPFAR, UNAIDS, UNFPA, USAID, WHO and the World Bank have all implemented “gender transformative” initiatives that challenge rigid gender norms, and found them effective.

USAID no longer funds new programs that lack a strong analysis of gender norms and the inequities they cause; PEPFAR has made addressing masculine norms its No. 3 priority worldwide.

Read the full article on Inside Philanthropy.

New York Times: Gender Stereotypes Banned in British Advertising

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When Can These Stereotypes Be Eliminated From the Stage?

By Valeriya Safronova

14 June 2019

Men unable to change diapers; women cleaning while men kick their feet up on the couch; women having trouble with parking: Scenes like these, which play on gender stereotypes, are now banned in British advertisements. Britain’s advertising regulator announced the changes in December, but companies were given a six-month adjustment period before they took effect.

The U.K.’s Advertising Standards Authority said in a statement that it will also ban ads that connect physical features with success in the romantic or social spheres; assign stereotypical personality traits to boys and girls, such as bravery for boys and tenderness for girls; suggest that new mothers should prioritize their looks or home cleanliness over their emotional health; and mock men for being bad at stereotypically “feminine” tasks, such as vacuuming, washing clothes or parenting.

The guidelines were developed after a report from the regulator found that gender-stereotypical imagery and rhetoric “can lead to unequal gender outcomes in public and private aspects of people’s lives.” The report came on the heels of a few British ads that perpetuated negative assumptions about women, including one for Protein World, a weight-loss drink, which paired a bikini-clad model with the question: “Are you beach body ready?” The posters inspired a Change.org petition with more than 70,000 signatures demanding the removal of the ads.

Read the full article in The New York Times.

ELLE: Hadestown Director Rachel Chavkin on the Story Behind Her Viral Tony Awards Speech

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By Bri Kovan

17 June 2019

Last Sunday night, Tony-winning director Rachel Chavkin’s acceptance speech set the internet ablaze with a call-to-arms about diversity on Broadway, asking theater producers (and their counterparts in other industries) to hire artists of color and women artists. “It’s not a pipeline issue,” said Chavkin, who was the only woman to direct a Broadway musical this season. “It’s a failure of imagination.” On stage, Chavkin championed Hadestown, which uses the mythological love stories of Orpheus and Eurydice, and Hades and Persephone as vehicles to discuss workers’ rights, climate change, and authoritarian leadership. (To dive into the show’s folksy New Orleans milieu, check out Hadestown‘s performance from the 73rd Annual Tony Awards, starring Reeve Carney.) The show won eight of its 14 nominations at the Tonys, including best musical, best director, and best original score for singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell. It’s the first musical by an all-female principal team to win best musical.

Next up, the Maryland native dives into her next set of projects: Lempicka, a feminist paean to the midcentury Russian artist Tamara de Lempicka, living in Paris between world wars; Annie Salem, an adaptation of Mac Wellman’s 1996 novel, which uses science fiction to understand racism in the post-industrial Rust Belt; and Moby-Dick, her next collaboration with Dave Malloy (of 2017’s Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, for which Chavkin earned her first Tony nod). “We’re trying to use the ‘great American novel’ to wrestle with twenty-first century America,” she says. “It deals with white supremacy—the whiteness of the whale takes on loaded significance in this adaptation—but also climate change. What’s our relationship to nature as hunters, consumers of nature?”

Read the full article on elle.com

The Guardian: Lack of sanctions ‘makes a mockery’ of gender pay gap reports

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By Caelainn Barr and Frances Perraudin

28 February 2019

Inaccurate figures and a lack of sanctions risk making a “mockery” of the gender pay gap reporting system, critics have warned following an in-depth Guardian analysis of submissions.

Amid concerns that a lack of transparency and inaccurate reporting is undermining efforts to address pay inequality, mathematically impossible gender pay gap data filed by companies for last year has yet to be corrected.

And with less than a month to go before this year’s reporting deadline, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) admitted that, despite those errors, no companies have yet been fined for failing to comply with legislation.

The deadline for companies to report their gender pay gap figures for 2018 is 30 March for public bodies and 4 April for private companies.

However, more than 30 companies are yet to file accurate data for the previous 2017 period with the Equalities Office, and a number have filed mathematically impossible figures this year. Analysis also shows a further 725 companies have filed or resubmitted their figures since last year’s deadline.

The shadow secretary for women and equalities, Dawn Butler, said: “Gender pay gap reporting was meant to provide transparency, but the fact that companies have given inaccurate data and faced no sanctions makes a mockery of the whole system.”

Read the full article in The Guardian.

The Guardian: Female BBC manager publicly declines promotion over pay inequality

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By Jim Waterson

22 May 2019

A BBC manager has publicly turned down a promotion after finding out she had been offered £12,000 less than a man doing the same job, threatening legal action against the broadcaster and suggesting the corporation is still struggling with equal pay.

Karen Martin emailed hundreds of BBC staff to announce she would no longer be taking up her role as one of the two deputy editors in the BBC’s radio newsroom, which produces material for broadcast to hundreds of millions of people on both UK radio stations and the World Service.

The experienced radio producer’s new job, in which she would oversee global radio news output, had been announced in February. But Martin said she could not accept the role after discovering the other newly appointed deputy editor, Roger Sawyer, had been offered a substantially higher salary.

“Despite being awarded the same job, on the same day, after the same board, during the same recruitment process, BBC News asked me to accept a considerably lower salary than my male counterpart. A lot less,” she wrote in the email sent to all BBC radio newsroom staff.

“I’ve been assured our roles and responsibilities are the same. I’ve also been told my appointment was ‘very well deserved’. It’s just that I’m worth £12,000 less. Over the past four months I have asked BBC News to think again. And they’ve inched their offer up by addressing historical ‘under payments’. Now the gap is nearer to £7,000. But for me it has never been about the actual salary. It has been about equal pay.”

Read the full article in The Guardian.

New York Times: Despite #MeToo Glare, Efforts to Ban Secret Settlements Stop Short

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DDP is a firm supporter of the elimination of the nondisclosure clauses and similar policy keeping victims from sharing their stories and seeking justice. Read the following related article from The New York Times.

By Elizabeth A. Harris

14 June 2019

Harvey Weinstein used them. So did R. Kelly, Bill O’Reilly and many less famous men.

When these men were accused of sexual abuse or harassment, they would use a legal tool that was practically magical in its power to make their problems disappear: a nondisclosure agreement. That, along with a substantial payment, would be enough to ensure that no one outside a handful of people would ever know what they had been accused of.

Such agreements have been a requirement for years in virtually every out-of-court settlement for sexual misconduct. But after the #MeToo movement took off in late 2017, there were calls around the country to restrict or ban such agreements, and thunderous outrage over their secrecy.

Read the full article in The New York Times.

Learn more about the NDAs in the Harvard Business Review.