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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.

ThinkProgress: Muffet McGraw is done hiring men

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By Lindsay Gibbs

30 March 2019

SOUTH BEND, INDIANA — Muffet McGraw will never forget the first time she called a timeout.

It was 1977. Her team, St. Joseph’s, was playing in a big tournament game. They’d just given up six unanswered points, the players were blowing assignments, missing shots, not even trying to grab rebounds. Something had to be done.

So, McGraw — then Muffet O’Brien — got the referee’s attention and called for play to stop.

The only problem? She was just a player at the time.

Her coach was not impressed with his point guard’s initiative. “He was livid,” McGraw recalled, laughing hysterically as she thinks back to her coach’s exasperated reaction. “I was like, I thought we needed it!”

McGraw, now the head coach of Notre Dame’s women’s basketball team, no longer gets questioned about her timeout choices — not with two national championships and 920 career wins to her name. Now, when McGraw tells you to huddle up, no one second-guesses her.

Read the full article on ThinkProgress.

Major Highlights

When Title IX was enacted in 1972, 90 percent of the coaches of women’s college sports were women. These days, it’s about 41.5 percent. The numbers are slightly better for women’s basketball, the most popular women’s collegiate sport. Last year, 59.3 percent of women’s college basketball teams were coached by women, down from 79.4 percent in 1977.

The number of women coaching in men’s college sports has remained below 3.5 percent since before Title IX. Currently, there is only one female assistant coach in all of NCAA men’s college basketball — Edniesha Curry of the University of Maine.

Altogether, women only hold one out of every 4.5 head coaching jobs in collegiate athletics. And that’s at a time when there are more girls playing sports than ever before.

There are only three out lesbian female coaches in all of Division I women’s basketball: Stephanie White at Vanderbilt, Colleen Mullen at the University of Albany, and Allison Guth at Yale.

In 2016, the Reveal Center for Investigative Reporting reported on the trend of Title IX retaliation lawsuits, noting that from 2006 to 2016, at least 29 female coaches and eight female sports administrators have filed retaliation lawsuits against their universities.

How is Ballet Like Soccer? – New York Times In Her Words: Abby Wambach’s Leadership Lessons: Be the Wolf

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By Maya Salam

9 April 2019

Abby Wambach has made a career out of pursuing goals. She’s scored 184 of them after all, the most by any soccer player, male or female, in international soccer history. But now, a few years into her retirement, Wambach, who led the United States women’s team to a World Cup championship in 2015, is focused on a new kind of goal: motivating women to become leaders.

“There has never been a more important, urgent time than right now for women to begin to fully lead our own lives,” she told me this week.

In her new book, “Wolfpack,” Wambach, 38, shares lessons she learned from decades of training, failure and triumph on the field. It is based on the commencement speech she gave at Barnard College in New York last year that quickly went viral. “If I could go back and tell my younger self one thing, it would be this: ‘Abby, you were never Little Red Riding Hood; you were always the wolf,’” she told graduates.

Read the full article in The New York Times.

The Boston Globe: At the theater, furious rebuttals in the age of #MeToo

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By Don Aucoin

4 April 2019

In a recent interview with Fareed Zakaria on CNN, author Rebecca Traister pointed to a large, gaping hole in the history books: Namely, that they have habitually minimized the intensity and the effectiveness of women’s anger as a force for social change.

“We’ve never been taught the story or given the view of women’s anger as politically potent,’’ said Traister, whose book “Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger’’ was published last fall. “Women’s anger, even when it has existed, has often been covered over by the people telling the story of it.’’

At this moment, though, that story is being forcefully told on stages from Boston to Broadway. The anger of women, and their determination to fight back against the role of systemic misogyny in making them feel undervalued and unsafe in the world, has formed the basis of recent and current productions as different as Lyric Stage Company of Boston’s “The Little Foxes,’’ Sleeping Weazel’s “The Audacity: Women Speak,’’ Flat Earth Theatre’s “Not Medea,’’ Also Known As Theatre’s “Extremities,’’ and the riveting “What the Constitution Means to Me,’’ at New York’s Helen Hayes Theater.

Even generally lighthearted classics like Lerner & Loewe’s “My Fair Lady,’’ George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion’’ (from which “My Fair Lady’’ was adapted), and Cole Porter’s “Kiss Me, Kate’’ now resonate differently, having been tweaked by contemporary directors to emphasize the defiance of their incensed female protagonists and the legitimacy of their grievances.

Read the full critic’s notebook in The Boston Globe.

CNN Business: Women are now running all three network morning shows for the first time ever

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By Brian Stelter

April 4 2019

New York (CNN Business)

For decades, the TV morning shows that are designed to appeal primarily to women have been produced mostly by men. But that’s changing.On Thursday, CBS named Diana Miller the new executive producer of “CBS This Morning,” filling a void that was left when Ryan Kadro exited the show three months ago.There was loud applause in the newsroom when new CBS News president Susan Zirinsky announced Miller’s promotion.For the first time, all three network morning programs have female executive producers. The E.P. is the day-to-day boss of the show.Roxanna Sherwood became the E.P. of ABC’s “Good Morning America” in July 2017. She reports to senior executive producer Michael Corn.

Libby Leist became the E.P. of NBC’s “Today” show in February 2018. She reports to NBC News president Noah Oppenheim.The gender dynamics of morning TV have gained more attention in recent years due to the downfalls of Charlie Rose at CBS and Matt Lauer at NBC.When Lauer was fired at NBC, Hoda Kotb became Savannah Guthrie’s co-host. When Leist took over the show a month and a half later, it was viewed by staffers as a break with the past.

Read the full article on CNN Business.

Bloomberg: Tech Giants Are Not Fixing Their U.K. Gender Pay Gap Problem

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By Nate Lanxon

4 April 2019

One year after U.K.-based businesses were forced to report their gender pay gap, there has been some change from tech companies, but not all of it in the right direction.

Facebook Inc. is now paying female staff less on average, but has hired more women in senior positions. Amazon.com Inc., which still employs about the same number of men and women in top jobs, has improved the gap in average pay, while Uber Technologies Inc. and WeWork Cos both revealed a sizable pay gaps.

In April 2018, employers with 250 or more staff in the U.K. were required for the first time to publish data on their gender pay gaps, including the mean and median difference in average hourly wages, bonuses, and what percentage of each pay quartile goes to women.

There were a couple of notable new entries into the report. Uber, which now employs enough people to make its gender pay gap reporting mandatory, revealed it pays women 8.9 percent less than men, and women occupy 32.9 percent of top jobs at the ride-hailing firm.

Read the full article in Bloomberg News.

ThinkProgress: Muffet McGraw is done hiring men

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By Lindsay Gibbs

30 March 2019

SOUTH BEND, INDIANA — Muffet McGraw will never forget the first time she called a timeout.

It was 1977. Her team, St. Joseph’s, was playing in a big tournament game. They’d just given up six unanswered points, the players were blowing assignments, missing shots, not even trying to grab rebounds. Something had to be done.

So, McGraw — then Muffet O’Brien — got the referee’s attention and called for play to stop.

The only problem? She was just a player at the time.

Her coach was not impressed with his point guard’s initiative. “He was livid,” McGraw recalled, laughing hysterically as she thinks back to her coach’s exasperated reaction. “I was like, I thought we needed it!”

McGraw, now the head coach of Notre Dame’s women’s basketball team, no longer gets questioned about her timeout choices — not with two national championships and 920 career wins to her name. Now, when McGraw tells you to huddle up, no one second-guesses her.

Read the full article on ThinkProgress.

Medium: What We Get Wrong When We Talk About Equal Pay Day

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By Amy Guth

2 April, 2019

Equal Pay Day, the day into the new year the average woman must work to equal what the average white man earned in the previous year, is, let’s be clear, fundamentally a good thing. But, we’re overlooking a key point when we talk about how to eradicate the wage gap.

For each dollar earned by the average white, male worker, white women are paid about 79 cents. The data around pay inequity for women of color is even bleaker: while for every dollar the average white man is paid, and his white, female counterpart is paid about 79 cents, this number drops significantly into the 62–54 cents per dollar range for Black and Latina women.

And often, when we talk about solutions to this inexcusable state, the main narrative quickly turns to negotiation. The AAUW website, for example, does a fine job of showing data points across gender, race and education, yet, there at the bottom of their robust data layout: a prompt to teach us how to negotiate.

Let us be clear, negotiation is not the issue. As a woman who works in print, online and broadcast journalism and filmmaking, has led a newsroom, runs a business, and serves as president of the Association for Women Journalists Chicago, I’ve been on both sides of negotiation tables in my career. And, anecdotally, I can tell you that there are as many powerful female negotiators as there are male, and just as many lousy ones.

Read the full article on Medium.

New York Times: Womansplaining the Pay Gap

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By Maya Salam

2 April, 2019

If I had a nickel for every time someone told me, “The gender pay gap is a myth,” I may have made back the income I’ve lost over the years for being a woman.

It’s not a myth. And yet the nuance required to explain what perpetuates these misconceptions is not the stuff made for 280-character sound bites on social media, where sweeping dismissals (Men work longer hours! Men pick higher-paying careers!) can quickly snowball.

Today is Equal Pay Day – created in 1996 by the National Committee on Pay Equity, a coalition of women’s, civil rights and labor groups, to draw attention to the gender pay disparities in the United States. The day marks about how long into 2019 American women would have to work to earn what their male counterparts already earned last year. (Though race factors into this as well. More on that below.)

I asked Jessica Bennett, The Times’s gender editor and author of the book “Feminist Fight Club,” to demystify some commonly misunderstood aspects of the pay gap. Here’s what she said.

Read the full article in The New York Times.

Wallpaper: Dior designs costumes for Philip Glass-composed ballet in Rome

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By Laura Hawkins

“Dance in all its forms and variations is a very important frame of reference for me; it fascinates and inspires me, because it gives the body and its possibilities a central role,’” explains Dior artistic director Maria Grazia Chiuri.

Dance has long had associations with the French maison. In 1955, Christian Dior designed the wedding dress of Royal Ballet star Margot Fonteyn, and his autobiography abounds with metaphors comparing the rhythm behind and performance of showcasing a collection as a ‘ballet’. 

Dior’s S/S 2019, featured in the Dior Magazine. Photography: Ken Browar

For her S/S 2019 collection, Chiuri celebrated the power, femininity and strength of the pioneering female dancers Isadora Duncan and Loïe Fuller, with a featherlight and ethereal offering of gauzy dresses in nude tones, pleated tulle skirts and ballet pumps. Her accompanying runway show featured a collaboration with choreographer Sharon Eyal. ‘Dance in all its forms allows me to explore the body and its performances in a way that is harmonious and beautiful, even unconventional.’

On Thursday 29 March, Dior’s couture-meets-costume design credentials took centre stage, when the designer debuted her creations for Nuit Blanche, a ballet dedicated to the composer and musician Philip Glass, performed at the the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma.

Read the full article in Wallpaper.

New York Times: Dance Luminaries Weigh in on the Conspicuous Absence of Female Choreographers

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Written by Gia Kourlas for The New York Times on June 23rd, 2016, this article highlights what leaders in the community thought of the inequity in ballet at the time. Notably interviewed and defensive of the field was Peter Martins, who left New York City Ballet last year following accusations of assault, leading the company into a year of scandal. “’Listen, I’ve lived in a women’s world my whole life,’ said Peter Martins, the ballet master in chief of New York City Ballet. ‘The last thing we are is sexist here.’ At the same time, the lack of female choreographers is glaringly obvious at City Ballet and other major ballet companies.”

Today, New York City Ballet has hired new leadership (including a woman as associate artistic director – Wendy Whelan). What would the comments be for the same article today, and who would weight in?

Read the article in The New York Times.