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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.

National Geographic: These 20 women were trailblazing explorers—why did history forget them?

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BY NINA STROCHLIC

ARCHIVAL RESEARCH SARA MANCO

BE SURE YOU’RE the first woman somewhere,” an editor advised budding photographer Dickey Chapelle as World War II escalated. Chapelle took the advice and sneaked ashore with a Marine unit during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, flouting a ban on female journalists in combat zones. She temporarily lost her military press accreditation but went on to earn a reputation as a fearless war correspondent.

Since National Geographic’s founding in 1888, women have churned out achievements in science and exploration, often with only fleeting recognition. They mapped the ocean floor, conquered the highest peaks, unearthed ancient civilizations, set deep-sea diving records, and flew around the world. They talked their way onto wars’ front lines and traveled across continents.

“There is no reason why a woman cannot go wherever a man goes, and further,” explorer Harriet Chalmers Adams said in 1920. “If a woman be fond of travel, if she has love of the strange, the mysterious, and the lost, there is nothing that will keep her at home.”

Read the full article in National Geographic Magazine.

The Economist: The Glass Ceiling Index: Go north, young woman

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07 March 2020

To mark International Women’s Day on March 8th we have updated our glass-ceiling index, which ranks 29 countries on ten indicators of equality for women in the workplace: educational attainment, labour-force participation, pay, child-care costs, maternity and paternity rights, business-school applications, and representation in senior positions in management, on company boards and in parliament. East Asian women face a ceiling that appears to be made of bulletproof glass. In South Korea they earn on average 35% less than men and occupy only one in seven managerial jobs and one in 30 board seats. In Iceland, which topped the league table this year, women claim nearly half of all executive and board positions. As usual, Nordic countries perform best overall. America, which granted women the right to vote a century ago this year, continues to frustrate the ambitions of female workers. It comes a dismal 22nd on The Economist’s list, a little ahead of Britain and below the average for the oecd club of industrialised countries. Full results can be found at economist.com/glassceiling2020■

New York Times: A Cellist’s Tragic Tale, Told in Dance

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By Farah Nayeri

28 February 2020

LONDON — The stirring sounds of Elgar’s Cello Concerto rise from the orchestra pit in an opening scene of a new production by the Royal Ballet, “The Cellist.” The ballerina in the title role settles into position with her instrument: a male dancer, dressed in brown tones. She grips his upstretched arm as if it were the neck of a cello and makes sweeping gestures across his back, as if moving a bow.

This rapturous musical union is suddenly interrupted, as the cellist collapses onstage, then rubs her hands, trying to chase away the numbness. Soon, her hands begin to quiver intermittently, as do her legs. Playing the instrument becomes impossible. Her human cello tries to revive her musical powers, as does her husband, who has been conducting from a nearby podium. They wrap themselves around her in a desperate embrace. But her musical career is permanently over.

Choreographed by Cathy Marston for the Royal Ballet, “The Cellist” tells the story of two highly gifted musicians: the cellist Jacqueline du Pré, considered one of the instrument’s finest musicians, and her husband, the star conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim.

The two met in London in 1966 and married the next year, performing and recording together nonstop and forming one of the most memorable couples in classical music.

Read the full article here.

Dance Business Weekly: Why Arts Business Leaders Should Not Try to Do It All

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By Rachel Moore

Rachel Moore has the kind of deep background in the arts that compels people to listen when she speaks. After identifying as a dancer all her life and dancing professionally with American Ballet Theatre for six years, she found a calling in advocating for artists’ rights. Eventually she returned to ABT as executive director/CEO, a position she held for 11 years. In 2015, she became president and CEO for The Music Center in Los Angeles, the largest performing arts center on the West Coast. —DBW

While there are those who suggest that executive leadership requires you to have “all the answers,” I don’t agree. Instead, I believe that true leadership articulates where one wants to go; why the desired destination is important; and what the values are that those on the journey should embrace. The nuts and bolts of how one gets there is a collective process that requires the talents and skills of a diverse team of people. 

Rather than them trying to do it all, I offer this advice for leaders in our field:

1. Build a team that does not look or think like you, and be sure it represents a diverse set of skills.

As Doris Kearns Goodwin famously noted in her biography of Abraham Lincoln, “Good leadership requires you to surround yourself with people of diverse perspectives who can disagree with you without fear of retaliation.“ The point is not to get to your decision; but, rather, to determine the right decision. Research shows, time and again, that diverse teams are smarter, more productive and more innovative. (See “Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter,” by David Rock and Heidi Grant, for instance, in Harvard Business Review.)As you build your team, be honest about your strengths and weaknesses and hire people who are different from you and who have differing skills sets. Reach outside your comfort zone and curate your team to be strong and capable as one unit. 

2. Build a personal board of directors.

In my book, The Artist’s Compass, I suggest that one establish a group of personal advisors who will provide support and advice. I call this a “personal board of directors.” These advisors should be people who support you as an individual (rather than just your organization). They should have the skills or knowledge you lack, challenge you in different ways, tell you the truth no matter what, and understand your professional goals while bringing different points of view to the table. Having people with whom you can vent, strategize, brainstorm, etc., without having to worry about the politics of your workplace, is revelatory and a true stress reliever. 

Read the full article here.

New York Times: Harvey Weinstein Is Going to Prison. But That’s Just a Starting Point.

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By Manohla Dargis

25 February 2020

The Harvey Weinstein verdict is at once gravely disappointing and grimly satisfying.

Until the verdict, the only sliver of satisfaction came from the fact that the legacy he built had been destroyed. Now, though, because he’s been convicted of two out of five counts — rape and criminal sexual act — the first line in his obituary won’t be about his Oscars or “alleged” acts, but about his felony convictions. His name will also forever be synonymous with the worst excesses of the entertainment world, whose power brokers have too often acted as if they were above the law. Harvey Weinstein is going to prison, and that is profound. (He faces other, similar charges in Los Angeles.)

So, Weinstein is no more. Yet there are no silver linings here. Women were hurt and traumatized, and their lives and careers irreparably damaged. The verdict doesn’t change that. Yes, there was a surge in activism after news of his abuse broke in October 2017, but women were already angry, already organizing. The African-American activist Tarana Burke launched #MeToo in 2006; the first Women’s March took place in Jan. 2017, the day after Donald J. Trump became president. In the end, Weinstein is part of a far larger story about contemporary feminist activism, including in the entertainment industry, where women have been fighting sexism for decades.

That sexism is both systemic and symptomatic of the industry’s history of acting as if it is above the law. This has led to a wide range of exploitation including racism and on-set fatalities, exploitation that has been habitually rationalized as the cost those without power pay for doing business in a putatively glamorous industry. It’s hard to think of another business, outside of sex work, that has sexually exploited people so openly and whose abusive practices — emblematized by the casting couch — have been trivialized, at times with leering giggles. It’s well-known that the industry is a grossly exploitative of both men and women — why have we tolerated this?

Read the full article in the New York Times.

Daily Beast: Inside Female Directors’ Push for Better Parental Leave—in the DGA and Across Hollywood

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By Laura Bradley

When Flint Town director Jessica Dimmock first decided to urge the Directors Guild of America to change its parental leave policies, one dim worry crept into the back of her mind: What if she was starting this battle only for herself? What if she was the only person who had lost health insurance because having a baby made it impossible for her to meet the minimum income requirement to stay on the plan? “In my gut I knew this wasn’t going to be the case,” Dimmock told The Daily Beast in a recent interview. “But there was a slight moment where I was like, ‘Huh, maybe this doesn’t happen to people and I’m just super inefficient, or…’ I don’t know.” 

Once the campaign launched, however, a flood of responses confirmed Dimmock was not alone in this frustration—not remotely. “And they weren’t just the DGA,” Dimmock said. “They were also from the Writers Guild, they were also from producers, they were also from people that are part of [the Screen Actors Guild].”

For coverage under the DGA’s health insurance—a separate entity called the DGA-Producer Health Plan, which is jointly administered by the guild and producer associations representing the film, TV, and commercial production industries—members must surpass a minimum income threshold from directing guild projects within a 12-month period. Having a baby complicates that task for obvious reasons—and as a result, after Dimmock gave birth in 2017, she lost her guild insurance. She switched to COBRA, which carries higher premiums, at a time when she needed to visit the doctor more often than ever. Dimmock’s directing partner, the baby’s father, lost his insurance for a quarter but, she noticed, was also not as intensely impacted overall.

And so last summer, once Dimmock was back on her feet and directing once more, she decided to explore what she might do. By December, she had gathered dozens of signatures on a letter calling for new parents to be granted extensions to the time period required to meet their minimums, which she presented to the Eastern Council Board. The proposition extends to all new parents, including those who have adopted.

“They were receptive and they said, ‘We’d like to explore this,’” Dimmock said of the council’s reaction, “but there was nothing else that happened.” Dimmock took her campaign public in January ahead of the DGA’s national board meeting in the hopes of keeping the pressure on. But that gathering came and went. The path forward at this point is unclear; she has received no next-steps. 

Read the full article here.

The Cut: That Feeling When Another Woman Hypes You Up

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By Jenny Tinghui Zhang

4 February 2020

Feminamity: The warm glow you get when another woman hypes you up.

In sixth grade, right before the first school dance of the year, I had a fight with one of my best friends. We had been growing apart for a while in a way that can only be worsened by middle school. I was a shrimpy Chinese girl with glasses and a Les Miserables obsession. She came from a wealthy family that owned two dogs and could afford Juicy Couture tracksuits. I had to beg my mom to take me to Walmart for new clothes.

We were both in the girls’ bathroom when it happened. I was wearing a new outfit: a skirt, Dr. Scholl’s platform sandals, and a pink flower shirt with ruffle sleeves. For the first time in my young teenage life, I felt beautiful. But Emily S., with her new posse of girls who used curling irons and Wet ’n Wild lip gloss, was determined to nip that right in the bud.

“You’ve been nothing but mean to me since school started,” I told her. Outside, Usher’s “Yeah!” started to raucous cheers.

“Why are you sticking your boobs out?” she replied, sneering. The girls in her posse tittered.

“Stop sticking your boobs out! Jenny’s sticking her boobs out!”

That was the first time I experienced what Mean Girls coined as “girl-on-girl crime.” In that dingy bathroom, as Usher orchestrated 300 sweaty, hormonal bodies into dance moves we would all regret later, my body was used against me. That day, she left the bathroom victorious, and I stared at myself in the mirror, wondering if I had indeed been sticking my boobs out or if I was just trying to stand up straight.

Read the full article in The Cut.

Wall Street Journal: New York Philharmonic Begins Premiering Work of 19 Female Composers

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By Elizabeth Yuan

6 February 2020

Nina C. Young recalled a visit by her mother in September when a brochure from the New York Philharmonic arrived in the mail. “Oh it’s you! Next to Haydn and Mozart.”

She is among 19 composers whose works will have their world premieres as part of the Philharmonic’s Project 19, billed as the largest women-only commissioning initiative, in celebration of the centennial of women’s suffrage. Ms. Young’s “Tread softly,” which references a W.B. Yeats poem and thwarted dreams, on Wednesday kicked off the first of six this month. Two more world premieres will follow in May and June, with the other 11 in coming seasons.

Read the full article in the Wall Street Journal.

Orchestrated Sex: The Representation of Male and Female Musicians in World-Class Symphony Orchestras

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By Desmond Charles Sergeant  and Evangelos Himonides

16 August 2019

This study examines the representation of male and female musicians in world-class symphony orchestras. Personnel of 40 orchestras of three regions, the UK, Europe, and the USA, and distributions of men and women across the four orchestral departments, strings, woodwind, brass, and percussion, are compared. Significant differences in representation between orchestras of the three regions are reported. Practices adopted by orchestras when appointing musicians to vacant positions are reviewed and numbers of males and females appointed to rank-and-file and Section Principals are compared. Career patterns of male and female musicians are also compared. Increases in numbers of women appointed to orchestral posts in the last three decades are compared with increases in the proportion of women in the general workforce. The data of orchestral membership are then compared with the numbers of young people receiving tuition on orchestral instruments retrieved from a large national database (n = 391,000 students). Implications for the future of male and female representation in orchestral personnel are then considered.

Introduction

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, acquisition of musical skills by women was applauded, but social conventions prevailing in Europe and America approved their display in private but not in public. Except for the piano and the voice, women were severely limited in their access to musical training, witness the difficulties suffered by the English composer Ethel Smyth (1858–1944) and by other women (Smyth, 1987; Wood, 1995; Gillett, 2000; Vorachek, 2000; Kertesz and Elizabeth, 2001; Meling, 2016, p. 188). Conventions of respectability and appropriateness regarding feminine manners and appearances and attitudes to the female body decreed that some instruments were “unsightly for women to play, interfering with appreciation of the female face or body” or judged their playing positions to be indecorous (Gillett, 2000; Doubleday, 2008). Female cellists, for example, were obliged to adopt an impractical position sitting alongside the instrument in order to avoid a scandalous indelicacy of placing an instrument between their legs1 (Cowling, 1983; Tick, 1986; Doubleday, 2008, p. 18; Baker, 2013).

As a consequence of these social attitudes, women were excluded from professional music-making, and until the second decade of the twentieth century, membership of professional orchestras was restricted to male musicians (Fasang, 2006). The first appointments of women to tenured positions in a major orchestra in the UK were made by Sir Henry Wood, in 1913, by his engagement of six female violinists to the Queen’s Hall Orchestra. The loss of male musicians during the 1914–1918 war brought more women to Henry Wood’s orchestra. By the end of that conflict, their number had risen to 18, but acceptance of women was neither universal nor rapid. Early photographs of major orchestras dating from the 1940s show their membership as resolutely male. Examples from the archives of the London Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1904, show no women until 1942, at which date one lady is visible seated among the 2nd violins2,3.

It was not until 1930 that the first woman was appointed to a tenured fully professional post in an American orchestra, when Edna Phillips joined the Philadelphia Orchestra as its harpist4. Ellen Bogoda also made history in 1937 as the first woman brass player to be hired when she was appointed as principal horn player by the Pittsburgh Orchestra (Phelps, 2010, p. 36).

Read the rest of the study on Fronteirsin.org.

Hyperallergic: Hundreds of Philadelphia Museum of Art Workers Call for Institutional Accountability on Sexual Harassment

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By Hakim Bishara

15 January 2020

Fallout continues from Joshua Helmer‘s departure from his job as executive director of Pennsylvania’s Erie Art Museum. Hundreds of current and former staff members at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), Helmer’s workplace prior to the Erie, signed a petition in support of the women who came forward with allegations of sexual misconduct against Helmer in a New York Times article. The signatories call for a structural change in the museum’s sexual harassment policy.

Helmer worked at the PMA as assistant director of interpretation from 2014 to February 2018. During that period, he engaged in several romantic relationships with women in the workplace in violation of the museum’s policy while dangling promises of professional advancement and favorable treatment. But the revelations brought by reporting by the New York Times and Philadelphia Inquirer “barely scratch the surface” of abuses committed by Helmer, the signers say.

“Former and current staff of the Philadelphia Museum of Art listed below wish to express solidarity with our current and former colleagues who so bravely spoke out in the New York Times and those in Erie who did the same,” the petition, which has garnered 365 signatures as of this writing, reads. “We believe their stories and admire their courage.”

The statement will be shared publicly with the hashtag #MuseumMeToo

Read the full article on hyperallergic.com.