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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.

USC Annenberg: Inclusion in the Director’s Chair: Analysis of Director Gender and Race/Ethnicity Across 1,300 Top Films from 2007 to 2019

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By Dr. Stacy L. Smith, Marc Choueiti, Kevin Yao, Hannah Clark & Dr. Katherine Pieper

January 2020

Annenberg Inclusion Initiative

Each year, we examine the gender and race/ethnicity of directors working across the 100 top fictional films theatrically released in the U.S. A total of 1,300 of the most popular movies were included in the analysis, from 2007 to 2019. Put differently, 1,448 directors were assessed across two inclusion metrics (e.g., gender, race/ethnicity). Given the recent conversation surrounding women directors in the press, we conducted 3 additional analyses: a slate analysis of director inclusion across all the movies distributed by 8 major companies from 2015-2019; a pipeline analysis of female directors in entertainment (e.g., Sundance Film Festival, episodic television, Netflix movies), and an examination of female directors’ award nominations across the last 13 years at 4 organizations (Golden Globes, Academy Awards, DGA, Critics’ Choice). Findings are presented below for each section of the report.

Key Findings: 1,300 Top Grossing Movies from 2007-2019

Female Directors

A total of 113 directors were attached across the 100 top movies of 2019. A full 89.4% (n=101) were male and 10.6% (n=12) were female. This calculates into a gender ratio of 8.4 males to every 1 female. Across 1,300 films and 1,448 helmers, only 4.8% of directors were women. Has the prevalence of female directors changed over time? Yes. 2019 had a significantly higher percentage (10.6%) and number of female directors than 2018 (4.5%, n=5) or 2007 (2.7%, n=3). Of the major studios, Universal Pictures had the most female directors attached to the films they distributed (15 women), followed by Warner Bros. (13 women) and Sony Pictures Entertainment (11 women). The company with the worst track record for distributing films helmed by female directors was Paramount Pictures, which had only 3 pictures out of 134 movies distributed from 2007-2019 directed by a woman. Critical reception of male- and female-directed films was assessed using Metacritic scores. The average Metacritc score for films with only male directors attached (Mean=54.2, Range=9-100) was virtually identical to those with a female director attached (Mean=55.8, Range=22-95). The medians across these two groups were also evaluated, and revealed no difference between male- and female-directed films. Despite receiving the same average critical review, female directors were given substantially less access and opportunity than male directors to helm these highly visible films.

Underrepresented Directors

Of the 113 directors of 2019, a full 83.2% were white (n=94) and 16.8% (n=19) were underrepresented. This is substantially below U.S. Census, which is 39.6%. The ratio of white directors to underrepresented directors is 4.9 to 1. Only 13.5% of all helmers across the 13-year sample were from an underrepresented racial/ethnic group. 2019 (16.8%) was not meaningfully different from 2018 (21.4%) for underrepresented directors nor was it Annenberg Inclusion Initiative — 2 significantly higher than 2007 (12.5%). 2019 was practically different only from 2008, 2010, 2011, and 2012. Of the major studios, Universal Pictures has the highest number of underrepresented directors attached to their distributed films (39 directors) followed by Sony Pictures Entertainment (34 directors) and 20th Century Fox (29 directors). Disney has the worst track record (10 directors) from 2007 to 2019. No differences in average Metacritic scores were observed between white (Mean=54.2, Range=9-100) and underrepresented directors (Mean=54.9, Range=11-99). Medians also did not differ, with both groups having the same Metacritic mid-point in the distribution of their movies (54).

Women of Color Directors

Only 13 women from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups have directed any of the 1,300 top movies from 2007 to 2019. This is less than 1% of all directing jobs (n=1,448) whereas white males held 82.5% of jobs, underrepresented males 12.6% of jobs, and white females 3.9% of jobs. The ratio of white male directors to underrepresented female directors was 92 to 1. Yet, this group of women represents 20% of the U.S. population. Only two underrepresented female directors – Ava DuVernay and Jennifer Yuh Nelson – have helmed more than one movie appearing across the 1,300 films and 13-year sample. Four of the women of color were added to the list in 2019 (i.e., Kasi Lemmons, Melina Matsoukas, Roxann Dawson, Tina Gordon). No company has distributed the stories of more than 4 underrepresented female directors across 13 years. The average Metacritic score was higher for stories directed by women of color (Mean=62.5, Range=44- 89) than those stories directed by white males (Mean=54.2, Range=9-100), white females (Mean=54.3, Range=22-95), or underrepresented males (Mean=54.3, Range=11-99). The medians in the distributions followed the same pattern. Clearly, there is a major disconnect between hiring practices in Hollywood and who has the cinematic heft to carry stories.

Read the full study here.

NPR: Enough Already: Multiple Demands Causing Women To Abandon Workforce

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By Avie Schneider, Andrea Hsu, & Scott Horsley

2 October 2020

Here’s a stunning stat: Women are leaving the workforce at four times the rate as men.

The burden of parenting and running a household while also working a job during the pandemic has created a pressure cooker environment in many households, and women are bearing the brunt of it.

It has come to a head as a new school year starts with many children staying home instead of returning to their classrooms in person because of the pandemic. And its forcing many women to make a difficult choice and drop out of the workforce altogether.

Just in September, 865,000 women over 20 dropped out of the American workforce compared with 216,000 men in the same age group, the Labor Department reported Friday.

“It was a really startling difference,” said University of Michigan economist Betsey Stevenson. “The child care crisis is wreaking havoc on women’s employment.”

Youli Lee is one of those women who hit the breaking point of working from home while caring for her children. She took a leave of absence from her federal job after finding it impossible to do her normal work from home while her three children — ages 8, 11, and 13 — were also at home doing virtual school.

Listen to the coverage or read the full article here.

New York Times: The Metropolitan Opera Won’t Reopen for Another Year

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By Michael Cooper

23 September 2020

The Metropolitan Opera announced Wednesday that the still-untamed coronavirus pandemic has forced it to cancel its entire 2020-21 season, prolonging one of the gravest crises it has faced in its 137-year history and keeping it dark until next September.

The decision is likely to send ripples of concern through New York and the rest of the country, as Broadway theaters, symphony halls, rock venues, comedy clubs, dance spaces and other live arts institutions grapple with the question of when it will be safe again to perform indoors. Far from being a gilded outlier, the Met, the nation’s largest performing arts organization, may well prove to be a bellwether.

The outbreak has kept the 3,800-seat opera house closed since mid-March, sapping it of more than $150 million in revenue and leaving roughly 1,000 full-time employees, including its world-class orchestra and chorus, furloughed without pay since April. Now, with the virus still too much of a threat to allow for a reopening on New Year’s Eve, as hoped, Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, is making plans to adapt to a world transformed by the pandemic, including by trying to curb the company’s high labor costs.

“The future of the Met relies upon it being artistically as powerful as ever, if not more so,” Mr. Gelb said in an interview. “The artistic experiences have to be better than ever before to attract audiences back. Where we need to cut back is costs.”

As he canceled the current season, Mr. Gelb announced an ambitious lineup for 2021-22 to reassure donors and ticket buyers that the Met has robust plans. An even more difficult effort will play out offstage: Mr. Gelb said he would ask the company’s powerful unions to agree to cost-cutting concessions that he said would be necessary in the post-pandemic world, and which a number of other prominent performing arts organizations have begun to implement.

The Met plans to return to its stage next September with Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” the first time it will mount an opera by a Black composer — a long-overdue milestone, and part of a new focus on contemporary works alongside the ornate productions of canonical pieces for which the company is famous. The Met will also experiment with earlier curtain times, shortening some operas and offering more family fare as it tries to lure back audiences.

Read the full NYT article here.

Washington Post: Ruth Bader Ginsburg gave her life to the country- and her heart to the performing arts

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By Peter Marks

19 September 2020

On a frigid night in January 2003, I darted out of Signature Theatre in Arlington after a performance of the musical “110 in the Shade.” I’m often the first person out of the theater — a critic’s habit — but on this night, I spotted an older man rushing ahead of me toward a limo and a petite woman on the periphery of my vision, carefully negotiating an icy patch.

“Ruth,” the man called out, “move your ass!”

As it sunk in that this was the esteemed associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and her husband, Marty, I felt that special twinge of Washington privilege: to have witnessed a funny, unguarded moment in the life of a revered public servant. She became a real person to me in that instant, just someone who, like me, loved the theater and was now trying to beat the post-show crush, though not at quite the pace her companion was setting.

On countless nights to follow over the years, I would see Justice Ginsburg in the theaters of Washington, on the occasions critics were invited to Arena Stage and Signature Theatre and Shakespeare Theatre Company. She was the most faithful patron of the performing arts in the upper echelons of officialdom I have ever known. Often, she was seated in front of me or just across the aisle, and I had to resist the temptation to watch her instead of the production. Or to lean over and whisper: How do you have time to sit on the Supreme Court all day and schlep in the evening to see “West Side Story?”

The answer was obvious. She couldn’t stay away. That’s what passion for the arts does to a person.

Read the full article here.

 

 

The Guardian: Side hustle essential: how Covid brought dancers to their knees

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By Lyndsey Winship

7 September 2020

When lockdown hit in March, it didn’t stop dancers dancing. The flood of online classes, short films and Instagram clips are testimony to that. But it did stop many of them earning. Outside the big ballet companies, most dancers and choreographers are freelance (81% according to One Dance UK). Some were eligible for financial support, others fell through the cracks. Ever creative, some have found new ways to make money, like Sam Coren, formerly of the Hofesh Shechter Company, who started fixing and building bikes. Or Daisy West, a dancer with Mark Bruce Company, who designs greetings cards on the side. But it turns out having a second job is nothing new to most dancers, in a competitive industry where contracts are often short and pay is poor. A 2015 survey by Dancers Pro found that more than 50% of dancers earned less than £5,000 a year from performing. The current ITC/Equity minimum fee for an independent production is £494 a week. “There’s always been a need for a side hustle,” says West.

The precariousness of the dancer’s life has come into sharp focus during lockdown, and many artists now want to see a change when we come out the other side. “The systemic injustices of the industry have been unveiled more than ever,” says dancer and Rolfing practitioner Hayley Matthews. “For too long there’s been a prescribed necessity for dancers to live precarious financial lives.” Lockdown has “exposed a lot that was really fragile and difficult about this industry”, says Rachel Elderkin, a dancer, writer and podcaster who also works front of house in the West End and has a sideline dressing as a Disney princess for kids’ parties. “Even though [as a dance artist] you’re the people who create work, the money goes to organisations and as a freelancer you have to apply for opportunities.” The funds don’t always trickle down.

Dancer, choreographer, writer and model Valerie Ebuwa was due to have her first solo project, Body Data, screened at the V&A in April, but coronavirus put paid to that. She released the film and accompanying talk online. Dancers are “always at the bottom of the pile”, she says in her talk on Instagram. “Why don’t dancers get paid as much as musicians, or any other [artists]?”

Read the full article online here.

 

Wall Street Journal: Remote Schools’ Hidden Cost: Parents Quit Work to Teach, Prompting New Recession Woes

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By Gwynn Guilford

7 September 2020

Clara Vazquez’s 7-year-old son, Kevin, asks her a troubling question before he goes to sleep each night. “‘Mom, who’s going to take care of me tomorrow?’ he asks me,” said the 27-year-old resident of Sunnyside, Wash. “I feel so bad because I have to say, ‘I don’t know.’”

She’ll have to come up with an answer soon, and it may cost Ms. Vazquez a big part of her livelihood. In two weeks, her son’s online-only classes start running from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. If she can’t find child care, she will give up at least one of her two jobs as a home health-care worker to help her son manage his studies.

“I don’t want to quit my job because it’s going to put us in financial strain,” said Ms. Vazquez, whose husband is a truck driver. “But I feel like I’m out of options.”

It is a trade-off that looms for millions of families across the U.S. whose children are returning to partial or completely remote learning at K-12 schools this fall, and the potential blow to the economy could be big enough to rival a small or medium-size recession.

Read the full article here.

Dance Magazine: This Former Rockette Is Now a Mars 2020 Engineer—and She’s Still Dancing

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By Madeline Schrock

31 August 2020

As the Perseverance rover heads towards Mars, back on Earth, a crew of engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are supporting the Mars 2020 mission. One of those people is systems engineer Heather Ann Bottom. With a bachelor’s in astrophysics and a master’s in space engineering, she certainly fits the bill. But Bottom has a few extra qualifications on her resumé: She was a Rockette in New York City and in the Broadway national tour of A Chorus Line.

Careers in the arts and engineering might seem like polar opposites. But Bottom, 32, sees the benefits of applying her dance experience to her current role. “I have been able to recognize, as a dancer, what my strengths are,” she says. “Things like picking up choreography really quickly, being a visual learner are important to recognize. Then I can take that into my job and say, ‘Oh, the reason I’m getting this so quickly is because I’m a dancer. I understand it. I can put the steps together in my head.’ ”

“Or many times, I’ve related these grand, large-scale tests in the engineering world to like a dance performance—you have all the different players and they need to be in their spots at the right time and read the script correctly and all of that. Wherever I can recognize, ‘Oh, that’s a part of my dance self or my performing self that is now coming into the engineering world’ has really helped me embrace both sides.”

But this balance of dance and science wasn’t always a constant in her life.

Read the full article from Dance Magazine here.

New York Times: The School That Camille A. Brown Built

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By Salamishah Tillet

2 September 2020

Camille A. Brown can’t remember the first time she danced the Electric Slide. She only remembers doing it. “It just was,” she said in a recent Zoom interview. “It’s the same thing with the Running Man or double Dutch. I don’t remember the first time I had a rope in my hand, but I remember the freedom.”

Ms. Brown, 40, a renowned dancer and one of the most sought-after choreographers of her generation, didn’t learn those social dances in school. She picked them up from family and friends — along with a host of other moves with roots in West Africa that African-Americans have passed down, from one generation to another, traded at family reunions and house parties or brought to pop culture and music videos.

Whether the Juba or stepping, social dance has always been a big component of Ms. Brown’s choreography. Her high energy, historically sweeping works are a powerful blend of modern, ballet, hip-hop, West African and African-American vernacular forms.

In recent years, Ms. Brown has expanded beyond the dance world. She was nominated for a Tony Award for her work on “Choir Boy” in 2019, and choreographed “Porgy and Bess” at the Metropolitan Opera. This year would have brought other new challenges: She was slated to make her debut as a theater director with “Ain’t Misbehavin” at the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Mass., in August; and was tapped to direct the Broadway revival of Ntozake Shange’s theater piece, “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” which would have opened this fall. (It is aiming for a 2021 premiere.)

When the pandemic hit, Ms. Brown was on a career high, but like everyone in the performing arts she had to pivot. And like many other dancers and choreographers, she turned to Instagram, where she has created a virtual version of a school she never attended, one in which social dance is the foundation from which everything else flows.

“When everything stopped and shut down,” Ms. Brown said, “it gave me an opportunity to process everything that I had been doing, particularly in the last two years.”

Read the full article here.

The New Yorker: In the Gendered Economy, Women Are Perpetual Debtors

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By Nora Caplan-Bricker

10 August 2020

Women make up nearly nine in ten nurses, more than eight in ten home health aides, and more than two-thirds of grocery-store cashiers. In other words, they perform the lion’s share of the vital care that we now call “essential” work. At the same time, since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, women have been laid off at an outsized rate (a reflection of their concentration within the country’s lowest-compensated, least-secure jobs) and have been forced to reduce their paid hours to look after children at nearly twice the rate of their male partners. As the kinds of labor that sustain life have grown deadlier, women have taken on more of the risk. As paid work and the time to perform it become scarcer resources, men are retaining the better part of both.

What conclusions can we draw from the gendered dimensions of the current crisis? Kate Manne’s “Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women” presents a paradigm that maps neatly onto life in lockdown. Manne, a professor of philosophy at Cornell, argues that women “are expected to give traditionally feminine goods”—including physical and emotional care—and “to refrain from taking traditionally masculine goods,” such as power and authority. These assumptions result in a society in which men “are tacitly deemed entitled” to much of what life has to offer, while women are perpetual debtors, their very humanity “owed to others.”

Once again, Manne’s work is speaking to a moment that she could not have foreseen. Her first book, “Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny,” was released into the gathering storm of the #MeToo movement, in November, 2017. It was uncanny timing, and the intuitive explanatory power of Manne’s argument attracted a broad, enthusiastic following to a demanding academic work. Manne proposed that misogyny “should be understood as the ‘law enforcement’ branch of a patriarchal order,” a system of punishment that swings into action whenever women violate the rules. Sexism, by contrast, is the set of ideas that justifies the power which men hold. “Sexism wears a lab coat; misogyny goes on witch hunts,” Manne writes in “Down Girl.” “Sexism has a theory; misogyny wields a cudgel.”

In “Entitled,” Manne turns her attention to the gendered economy that these forces defend. If sexism is a scientist and misogyny is a cop, then the system of entitlements is a suite of financiers forever seeking ways to profit off someone else’s debt. Manne applies her theory to a litany of lopsided situations, sorting them into one of three scenarios: first, how women can be punished for failing to provide sex, love, admiration, or anything else that the dominant sex considers its due (Manne points to mass murders perpetrated by incels, who kill in protest of perceived rejection); second, how women struggle to lay claim to masculine-coded powers and privileges, the Presidency being one prominent example; and, third, how women may be denied the feminine-coded forms of care—such as attention to their pain—that they are expected to supply, not demand.

Manne first posited this slanted system of goods and services in “Down Girl,” and her arguments in “Entitled,” her first book for a general audience, may at times feel overly familiar to readers already acquainted with her work. In some cases, the new book remedies the other’s omissions, especially by considering transmisogyny and misogynoir, the interlocking systems of oppression that affect trans and Black women, respectively. Manne illustrates her ideas with recent headlines and cultural touchstones, travelling smoothly from the Brett Kavanaugh hearings to the sentencing of Brock Turner, from the movie “Gaslight” to the short story “Cat Person.” Manne examines these stories in order to reveal what male entitlement costs women and non-binary people, and how we might begin to resist its demands, even as the invisible matrix of male power shapes every imaginable interaction.

Read the full article online here.

New York Times: In Her Words: For Three Suffragists, a Monument Well Past Due

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By Alisha Haridasani Gupta

6 August 2020

Across the country, monuments honoring racist figures are being defaced and toppled. In New York’s Central Park, one statue is taking shape that aims to amend not only racial but also gender disparities in public art: A 14-foot-tall bronze monument of Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, three of the more prominent leaders in the nationwide fight for women’s right to vote

Called the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument, it is to be unveiled Aug. 26 to commemorate the 100th anniversary this month of the constitutional amendment that finally guaranteed women that right, depicts the three figures gathered around a table for what seems to be a discussion or a strategy meeting. Anthony stands in the middle, holding a pamphlet that reads “Votes for Women”; Stanton, seated to her left, holds a pen, presumably taking notes; and Truth appears to be in midsentence.

“I wanted to show women working together,” said Meredith Bergmann, the sculptor chosen from dozens of artists to create the statue. “I kept thinking of women now, working together in some kitchen on a laptop, trying to change the world.”

Read the full article here.