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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.

SMU DataArts: Joint Study in Gender Disparity Shows Gap Persists Despite Gains in Art Museum Directors

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The Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) and the National Center for Arts Research (NCAR) at Southern Methodist University in Dallas today released findings from the second iteration of their gender gap study, which was designed to deepen understanding of the gender disparity in art museum directorships to help AAMD member institutions advance towards greater gender equity. Through a combination of quantitative analysis of 2016 data collected from AAMD member institutions and interviews with female museum directors and executive search consultants who specialize in recruitment for art museums, NCAR and AAMD researchers – led by Zannie Voss, director, NCAR, and Christine Anagnos, executive director, AAMD – examined the ongoing and historical factors of the gender gap in art museum directorships, and compared their findings to those of the previous study, conducted in 2013. While incremental gains have been observed in the last three years, the study found that the gender gap persists: women still hold fewer than 50% of directorships and, on average, earn less than their male counterparts. The study also found that museum type and budget size were influential factors on representation and salary differentials.

In 2016, AAMD conducted a survey of its members, collecting data from 210 respondents that included each institution’s operating budget, endowment, the salary of the director (or top leader), the director’s gender, and the self-reported museum type (e.g. encyclopedic, contemporary, etc.). Of these 210 museums, 181 also participated in the 2013 survey, allowing for examination of trends. The study sought to answer three main questions: What is the current state of women in art museum directorships? How has the gender gap in art museum directorships shifted in the past three years? What are some factors that may drive the gender gap? The NCAR and AAMD study had several key findings:

  • While men continue to outnumber women in director roles, there has been a 5% increase in female directorships from 2013: women represented 48% of art museum directorships in 2016 (compared to 43% in 2013).
  • There are clear disparities in gender representation depending on operating budget size: the majority of museums with budgets of less than $15 million are run by a female, rather than a male, director. The reverse is true for museums with budgets of over $15 million, where female representation decreases as budget size increases.
  • Women are at a salary disadvantage: on average, female directors earned 73 cents for every dollar that male directors earned.
  • When segmented by operating budget, the gender disparities are more nuanced:
  • For museums with a budget of over $15 million—roughly the top quarter of museums—female directors earned 75 cents for every dollar a male earned, an improvement from 2013, when women earned only 70 cents per dollar earned by a man.
  • For the other three-quarters of member museums (those with budgets of less than $15 million), female directors on average earned 98 cents to every dollar earned by a man. This represents a reversal from three years ago, when female directors at these same museums earned an average of $1.01 for each dollar earned by their male counterparts.
  • Women hold the majority of directorships in College/University museums (60%) and Culturally Specific museums (57%). Men hold the majority of directorships at Single Artist (67%), Encyclopedic (59%) and Contemporary (54%) museums.

Read the full summary on SMU DataArts’ blog.

Women’s Media Center: A few cracks in the Baby Bump Ceiling

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By Rosalind C. Barnett, Ph.D. & Caryl Rivers

In recent months, three exceptionally prominent female journalists with large TV followings appeared on the air visibly pregnant and worked right up to their delivery dates. 

Margaret Brennan of Face the Nation, NBC News correspondent Katy Tur, and Kasie Hunt — a political correspondent and host of MSNBC’s weekly program Kasie DC — did not leave TV when their pregnancies became very evident.

Perhaps most remarkably, Face the Nation, the largest of all Sunday public affairs programs, which in 2017 had an average of 3.538 million viewers, broke all the rules. The network hired Brennan, a CBS News senior affairs correspondent, to replace John Dickerson as anchor while she was expecting. Just two months after her hiring was made public, Brennan announced that she was five months pregnant with her first child.  

Until recently, viewers almost never saw visibly pregnant women broadcasting news on television — much less heading up a major Sunday network news show. The Baby Bump Ceiling was very real for women. Will these three cracks in that ceiling put a dent in a harmful stereotype? Maybe so. 

Read the full article on Women’s Media Center.

Wall Street Journal: ‘We Were White and Sleepy Before’—The Baltimore Museum of Art’s Radical Makeover

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By Kelly Crow

A new director shakes up the institution with moves such as showing only works by women and acquiring overlooked artists.

Read the full article in The Wall Street Journal.

The Guardian: Hollywood’s gender divide laid bare by analysis of this season’s Oscar contenders

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By Katherine Purvis and Catherine Shoard

15 November 2019

Striking contrasts in the choices of male and female awards contenders – and their potential impact on gender parity in Hollywood – have been uncovered by the Guardian.

The three youngest men likely to be in the race for next year’s best actor Oscar have never worked on a film directed by a woman, while the category’s frontrunner, Joaquin Phoenix, has worked with a female director only once during his 34-film career.

The picture is flipped for the female actors, with the youngest of the possible nominees working with female directors up to 75% of the time.

Meanwhile, Phoenix’s director on Joker, Todd Phillips – one of the youngest up for this year’s best director award – was found to be the only filmmaker likely to win an Oscar nomination who has never made a film with a female lead or co-lead.

The findings arrive as this year’s awards season prepares to begin, with the fight for the best picture Oscar in particular shaping up to be a battle of the sexes.

Proudly post-#MeToo female ensemble films Bombshell (about the sexual harassment of news anchors Megyn Kelly and Gretchen Carlson by Fox boss Roger Ailes) and Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women are expected to vie for the top prize with two male-dominated frontrunners: Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman and Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Read the full article in The Guardian.

Harvard Business Review: The Trillion-Dollar Opportunity in Supporting Female Entrepreneurs

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By Shalini Unnikrishnan and Roy Hanna

31 October 2019

There is much discussion and debate about how to support female entrepreneurs — and rightly so. Currently, women-led businesses are less likely to survive, despite evidence that their startups are often highly successful. New analysis by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) shows that if women and men around the world participated equally as entrepreneurs, global GDP could ultimately rise by approximately 3% to 6%, boosting the global economy by $2.5 trillion to $5 trillion.

So how do we support female entrepreneurs? The focus is often on improving access to credit (financial capital) or providing training to help women build new skills (human capital) — two areas critical for improving the success of women-led businesses. However, another key factor in the success of these businesses tends to be overlooked: access to networks.

Working with public, private, and social sector clients around the world, we have seen first-hand how potent such networks can be. And we have also come to understand that these supportive mechanisms are in short supply.

The good news is that action in all sectors can address this gap.

Read the full article in the Harvard Business Review.

SF Gate: Berkeley Ballet says dancers disinvited from performing in show after concerns about brownface

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By Alyssa Pereira

5 November 2019

Some students with the Berkeley Ballet Theater found themselves out of an exciting opportunity to dance with a major international ballet company last week, following an uncomfortable exchange the East Bay dance company says it had with the Mariinsky Ballet over the latter’s staging of “La Bayadère” in Berkeley.

After the Mariinsky Ballet announced it would be performing “La Bayadère,” a 140-year-old ballet classic at Zellerbach Hall on the UC Berkeley campus, some dance students were invited to perform alongside the professional company in two scenes.

One number caused some concern for the families of the young dancers. This part of the performance, called the “Golden Idol” dance (added to “La Bayadère” in 1941), has historically and notoriously included dancers wearing skin-darkening makeup, dark sleeves and tights to appear as “native fan bearers.”

When the BBT’s dancers were invited to take part, the theater agreed on the condition their students would not be painted in brownface.

Read the full article in SF Gate.

Bloomberg: Sunday Strategist: How to Promote More Women

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By Claire Suddath

20 October 2019

If you’re an American corporation—or a woman who works at one—I have good news for you. OK, also some bad news.

The good news is that all those diversity targets and unconscious bias training seminars are slowly paying off. According to McKinsey and Lean In’s annual Women in the Workplace report, 44% of companies now have three or more women in their C-suite, up from just 29% in 2015. Women still account for only a fifth of top executives and 30% of senior vice presidents, but they’re being promoted at a faster rate than men, which is narrowing the gap.  

Now for the bad news: At the vice president level and below, female employees are still treading water in their careers. Women hold nearly half of all entry-level positions at the 590 companies surveyed, but only 38% of positions just one step up. For some reason, they’re just not being promoted. For every 100 men offered their first career promotion, only 72 women move up. Black and Latina women have it particularly hard; they’re promoted at just 58% and 68% the rate of men, respectively.

Read the full article on Bloomberg.

The Guardian: Smashing the patriarchy: why there’s nothing natural about male supremacy

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2 November 2019

Fathers are happier, less stressed and less tired than mothers, finds a study from the American Time Use Survey. Not unrelated, surely, is the regular report that mothers do more housework and childcare than fathers, even when both parents work full time. When the primary breadwinner is the mother versus the father, she also shoulders the mental load of family management, being three times more likely to handle and schedule their activities, appointments, holidays and gatherings, organise the family finances and take care of home maintenance, according to Slate, the US website. (Men, incidentally, are twice as likely as women to think household chores are divided equally.) In spite of their outsized contributions, full-time working mothers also feel more guilt than full-time working fathers about the negative impact on their children of working. One argument that is often used to explain the anxiety that working mothers experience is that it – and many other social ills – is the result of men and women not living “as nature intended”. This school of thought suggests that men are naturally the dominant ones, whereas women are naturally homemakers.

Read the full article in The Guardian.

The New Yorker: The Women Who Helped Build Hollywood

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By Margaret Talbot

28 October 2019

ne of the stranger things about the history of moviemaking is that women have been there all along, periodically exercising real power behind the camera, yet their names and contributions keep disappearing, as though security had been called, again and again, to escort them from the set. In the early years of the twentieth century, women worked in virtually every aspect of silent-film-making, as directors, writers, producers, editors, and even camera operators. The industry—new, ad hoc, making up its own rules as it went along—had not yet locked in a strict division of labor by gender. Women came to Los Angeles from all over the country, impelled not so much by dreams of stardom as by the prospect of interesting work in a freewheeling enterprise that valued them. “Of all the different industries that have offered opportunities to women,” the screenwriter Clara Beranger told an interviewer in 1919, “none have given them the chance that motion pictures have.”

Some scholars estimate that half of all film scenarios in the silent era were written by women, and contemporaries made the case, sometimes with old stereotypes, sometimes with fresh and canny arguments, that women were especially suited to motion-picture storytelling. In a 1925 essay, a screenwriter named Marion Fairfax argued that since women predominated in movie audiences—one reason that domestic melodramas, adventure serials featuring acts of female derring-do, and sexy sheikh movies all did well—female screenwriters enjoyed an advantage over their male counterparts. They were more imaginatively attuned to the vagaries of romantic and family life, yet they could write for and about men, too.

Read the full article in The New Yorker.

Philanthropy Women: Male Domination Prevails: Detailing Media’s Gender Imbalance

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By Laura Dorwart

10 March 2019

Despite decades-long efforts from female journalists, broadcasters, writers, editors, and other media professionals, a gap persists in the representation and employment of women across all forms of media. The imbalance is even starker for female media professionals who are otherwise marginalized, like women of color, women with disabilities, and women who identify as part of the LGBTQ community.

The Women’s Media Center, a feminist organization that aims to close the gender and racial gaps in media with pointed research and training, recently released its annual flagship report on women’s media representation, including both the inequalities that haven’t been addressed and the progress that’s been made over the past year.

The 2019 report, “The Status of Women in the U.S. Media 2019,” aggregates and analyzes the results of over 94 studies about the current status of women in media. The report identified a number of persistent inequalities in media representation across print and online media, radio and television, film, gaming, and engineering. The report includes original Women’s Media Center research, as well as academic and industry surveys and reports from organizations like newsrooms, media nonprofits, and labor unions.

Read the full article on Philanthropy Women.