Sunday
Jan032010
PACT Equity in Canadian Theatre
Sunday, January 3, 2010 at 8:27PM Thanks to the folks at Praxis for this:
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Women making and attending theatre up.Women in charge of theatre still down.
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by Lindsay Schwietz
When Rina Fratticelli’s report came out in 1982 revealing the amount of women in power positions in Canadian theatre to be shockingly low, the gender inequality issue was exposed. Yet, twenty-seven years later the PACT Equity in Canadian Theatre report on gender shows that very little has changed. In PACT theatres in the 2008-2009 season, women accounted for 29% of the artistic directors, 36% of the working directors and 29% of the produced playwrights. Primarily men are still running theatre companies across Canada. And the larger the theatre company, the less women in artistic leadership positions.
This is true despite the fact that there are more women in theatre schools and more women in audiences. According to the same report, almost 60% of the theatre-going audience in Canada is thought to be female and women account for 68% of student enrolment in the performing arts, communication and technologies fields. Yet, these percentages don’t match the employment opportunities for women.
Why is this happening? Why has very little changed in over twenty years? And what is being done about it? Are we going to be looking at these same statistics twenty years from now?
Kelly Thornton is Artistic Director of Nightwood Theatre, and co-head of the national advisory committee of Equity in Canadian Theatre: The Women’s Initiative, a group of activists whose aim is to formally investigate the status of women in Canadian theatre and develop plans to change existing barriers. She believes the lack of females is not something done on purpose, but created through subconscious choices by the male artistic directors that run 71% of the theatres in Canada.
“I don’t think they’re actually saying ‘we’ve got to keep women out’ – I just think there is a gender bias to the way we program seasons. I always use the analogy of a man and a woman walk into a bookstore. The two will both buy a novel and they will come out with totally different novels. And it’s based on their gender. Think of a male and a female AD – they’re gravitating towards stories that speak to them. And often that has to do with gender.”...
Click here to read the rest of this article on the Praxis Theatre blog.
Reader Comments (6)
I'm curious how Calgary compares to these National stats. With the new female ATP, Quest, and Lunchbox AD's now in place we seem to be ahead of the national curve.
I emailed Nightwood and they were kind enough to send me the 2008/09 figures for Alberta and the rest of the provinces, though I'm afraid I don't have Calgary's figures separately. I'll post these figures this week!
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