"The Devil Ties My Tongue" by Amy Seiwert performed for the SKETCH Series, 2013. Photo by David DeSilva. Courtesy of Amy Seiwert's Imagery
DDP will cover stories from the corporate, for profit world regarding issues surrounding pay equity and transparency where relevant, such as other industries with low representation of women: tech, the sciences, venture capital, the entertainment industry, etc. to examine parallels between these male dominated spheres where informal hiring and word of mouth is the norm.
DDP ally and choreographer Nicole Haskins shares her thoughts on what foundations and funders can do to better support female choreographers.
5 May 2021
By Courtney Connley
In the United States, mothers working full-time, year-round make an average of just $0.75 for every dollar paid to full-time working fathers, according to a new analysis from the National Women’s Law Center.
As a result, the average working mom has to work an additional five months into the new year to reach the same pay fathers earned the previous year, leading Mother’s Equal Pay Day to fall on May 5 this year. That’s nearly two months after equal pay day was reached for women on March 24, as full-time working women on average earn just $0.82 for every dollar paid to men.
This pay gap for working mothers leads to a loss of $1,275 a month and $15,300 a year in wages. For women of color, this gap is even higher with full-time working Latina, Native American and Black moms being paid an average of $0.46, $0.50 and $0.52, respectively, for every dollar paid to white fathers.
“This loss is depriving moms of their ability to weather this [Covid-19] storm,” NWLC Director of Research Jasmine Tucker tells CNBC Make It. “We know that about one in four women who are unemployed right now have been looking for work for a year…just imagine what that $15,000 or more could do if you had that sitting in the bank because you were paid what you were owed before this all happened.”
In front-line occupations like nursing, waitressing and housekeeping, full-time working mothers are paid just $0.84, $0.67 and $0.65, respectively, for every dollar paid to full-time working fathers doing the same job.
To read the full article, click here.
9 April 2021
By Kerry Reid
Back in 2019, I interviewed Chicago set designer Arnel Sancianco for a short Reader profile. In the course of our discussion, he mentioned that, while creating a sustainable career as a designer is never easy, he felt that his peers in costume design (a profession that tends to have more women in its ranks than other design fields) had a harder road. They frequently work without the benefit of full crews, leaving the designer to do a lot of the hands-on work of making and even sometimes maintaining costumes during a show’s run. And they tended to be paid less overall.
How much less they’re paid has come to light in recent years, thanks to the efforts of organizations like Costume Professionals for Wage Equity (CPWE) and the Chicago-based On Our Team. Elsa Hiltner, one of the founders of the latter, created the anonymous crowd-sourced Theatrical Designer Pay Resource spreadsheet to collect data on who gets paid what and where in American theaters.
When Reader freelancer Sheri Flanders spoke to Hiltner last October, she was celebrating the fact that Theatre Communications Group had agreed to list salaries for all jobs posted in ARTSEARCH, the job search engine run by TCG. Now CPWE and On Our Team have convinced two more major theater publications—Playbill and Broadway World—to require salary ranges to be listed for all industry job postings.
As Flanders noted in her article, “It is common practice for a job seeker to respond to a posting for a seemingly full-time or contract paid position, only to discover upon receiving a ‘job’ offer that the position is unpaid, paid in ‘exposure,’ or paid at a stipend rate that averages out to far less than minimum wage.” In 2018, OffStage Jobs began requiring salary information for listings, and the League of Chicago Theatres soon followed suit.
Genevieve Beller of CPWE and Theresa Ham, one of the cofounders of On Our Team, know that transparency in listings is just part of the battle for wage equity. But even getting that victory on the board took major effort. Beller notes that CPWE “reached out to Playbill with a letter in December of 2019 that over 800 people had signed. And we sent that letter to the editor in chief at the time, who is no longer with them, as well as every member of their board that we could find information for. So we received zero response. Which is pretty much par for the course.
To read the full article, click here.
07 April 2021
By Chloe Angyal
Today’s ballet teachers and company directors know that they can no longer simply instruct their dancers to lose weight. But that doesn’t mean they’ve relinquished their rigid, narrow vision of what a “good” ballet body looks like: They simply swathe that ideal in the gauzy, feel-good messaging of today’s fitness culture.
For decades, the prevailing attitude was to lose the weight, no matter how, says Harrison: “Lose it by ‘Nutcracker’ — and by the way it’s November 15 — and [do it] without getting injured and without passing out.” In her infamous memoir “Dancing on My Grave,” New York City Ballet principal dancer Gelsey Kirkland recounts an incident in the late 1960s when the company’s co-founder and de facto dictator, George Balanchine, stopped a class to examine Kirkland’s body and “rapped his knuckles” down her sternum. “Must see bones,” he told her. At the time, Kirkland weighed less than 100 pounds. “He did not merely say, ‘eat less,’ ” Kirkland remembered. “He repeatedly said, ‘eat nothing.’ ” Experiences like Kirkland’s (whose account has been corroborated by other company dancers) can be found throughout the ballet world. Balanchine’s preferred female body type — swan-necked, slim-hipped, long-legged, impossibly thin and capable of terrifically difficult footwork — became the enduring global standard for ballet companies and schools.
In the 1990s, ballet’s high-pressure and eating-disorder-friendly culture came in for some unwelcome attention. The press spread the word about anorexia and bulimia running rampant among teenage girls; gymnastics and figure skating also came under scrutiny. In books and press coverage, harrowing tales of dancers starving themselves, of smoking or snorting their appetites away, made for bad PR as the nation moved toward a new, tenuous “body positive” culture in which emaciation was no longer considered the height of feminine beauty.
The bad old days of American ballet teachers and company directors telling their dancers to eat nothing, or telling them exactly how many pounds they should lose, are largely over. The focus now is on optimum performance, on strength, on food as fuel. Companies encourage dancers to cross train at the gym, on top of their heavy rehearsal schedules and daily technique classes. They partner with nutritionists (Harrison, for example, was the in-house nutritionist at Atlanta Ballet for six years and now consults with the company) and team up with activewear brands to emphasize that their dancers are athletes as well as artists.
Company directors today commonly say they want “fit” dancers — provided that they also appear fit. That is, in addition to having the strength and stamina to dance a full ballet, they must adhere to the conventional understanding of what a fit person looks like. It’s not enough to lift your pas de deux partner over your head: You also need to have a six-pack while you’re doing it.
Read the full piece in The Washington Post here.
Note: Ms. Angyal was interviewed for DDP’s Global Conversations Round 3: The View from 30,000 Feet, which aired in the Fall of 2020. Her forthcoming book, Turning Pointe: How a New Generation of Dancers Is Saving Ballet From Itself, will be published May 4, 2021 and will feature DDP’s work.
05 April 2021
By Chloe Angyal
This spring, the Pennsylvania Ballet’s season will feature precisely zero ballets made by women choreographers. It will feature three separate nights of programming, combining 11 different ballets, all of them made by men, most of whom are white. This programming is, wait for it, a tribute to the company’s late founder, Barbara Weisberger.
The “Where are the women choreographers?” debate, also known as the “Did you know women also make dances?” discussion, or the “Is it really THAT HARD to hire women?” discourse, is decades old at this point. It was old in 2014, when New York City Ballet put together a program of works by five young white men and called it “21st Century Choreographers,” suggesting that in then-artistic director Peter Martins’ view, the 21st century was going to look an awful lot like the 20th, 19th, and 18th. (He then patted himself on the back for his purported daring and courage, telling the New York Times, “what can I say, I’m gutsy. I liked the idea of having all these people in their 20s, making new work. It shows the art form is really alive.”)
It’s old, but it’s clearly not over. And it’s exhausting.
The Pennsylvania Ballet spring season is a particularly egregious example, but not by much. It is not unusual to show up at the ballet (or on your couch, in this age of digital seasons) and see a series of short ballets, all of them by men. It’s totally normal to spend a night at the ballet — to hand over a sizeable sum of your hard-earned money — and not see a single piece of art created by a woman choreographer. In fact, according to the Dance Data Project®, in the 2019-2020 session in the US, that happened 62% of the time. In an art form where women make up 70% of audiences.
This is meant to be fine. This is supposed to satisfy us. This is not meant to bother us, or strike us as strange.
It is not fine. It does not satisfy. It does not merely bother, it confounds. It rankles, it insults. It is not strange, it is embarrassing.
To read the full piece, click here.
Note: Ms. Angyal was interviewed for DDP’s Global Conversations Round 3: The View from 30,000 Feet, which aired in the Fall of 2020. Her forthcoming book, Turning Pointe: How a New Generation of Dancers Is Saving Ballet From Itself, will be published May 4, 2021 and will feature DDP’s work.
24 March 2021
By Elizabeth “Liza” Yntema, For The Inquirer
Dance Data Project® Founder & President Liza Yntema wrote an OpEd for The Philadelphia Inquirer about Pennsylvania Ballet’s decision to honor their female founder with a three-program series of works choreographed entirely by men.
Read the full piece here.
25 March 2021
By Alisha Haridasani Gupta
— Caroline Criado Perez, author of “Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men”
Sarah Everard in London. Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Ae Yue, Delaina Ashley Yaun, Xiaojie Tan and Daoyou Feng in Atlanta.
Eight women, two continents apart, killed in the space of two weeks. The suspects in both cases are men.
In London, Ms. Everard disappeared while walking home from a friend’s house, and was found dead a week later. A police officer was charged with kidnapping and murdering her.
In Atlanta, a gunman stormed three massage parlors and shot and killed eight people — seven of them women, six of them Asian — raising speculation that the attack was racially motivated. A suspect was arrested that same evening.
While the details of the two cases differ significantly, experts suggest that the current available evidence points to a potential commonality: misogyny. And, in light of the two events, activists in Britain and in the United States have urged the authorities to treat misogyny as a greater threat to national security, even upgraded to the level of a hate crime.
In the days after Ms. Everard’s body was found and protests calling for deeper social change grew across the United Kingdom, the British government announced an experimental pilot program (though there is no fixed start date yet) that would categorize cases of gender-based violence and harassment motivated by misogyny as hate crimes.
“Across the country, women everywhere are looking to us not just to express sympathy with their concerns, but to act,” Baroness Helena Kennedy, a member of the House of Lords, the upper chamber of the British Parliament, said during a debate on the policy. “Stop telling them to stay at home and be careful, and start finding those responsible for the violence.”
To read the full article, click here. You can also get the In Her Words newsletter in your inbox, by signing up here.
24 March 2021
Francesca Donner and
— Megan Rapinoe, a professional U.S. Soccer player
Megan Rapinoe is a two-time World Cup champion who has played to sold-out stadiums around the globe; what she has in common with nearly every American woman is that she’s underpaid.
On Wednesday, Ms. Rapinoe testified during a hearing held by Representative Carolyn B. Maloney to examine economic harm caused by gender inequalities, particularly for women of color.
Today is All Women’s Equal Pay Day, Ms. Maloney said. But it’s not Equal Pay Day for all women.
Black women would have to work until Aug. 3, 2021, to earn what men made in 2020. For Latina women, the date doesn’t come until Oct. 2.
“This is a disgrace,” Ms. Maloney said. “And it has long-term consequences for women and families.”
Wage discrimination isn’t limited to any one sector or income level.
Take Ms. Rapinoe, whose fight for equal pay has become something of a calling card for the U.S. women’s team, and who played a central role in the team’s lawsuit on unequal pay filed in 2019.
“One cannot simply outperform inequality,” she said. “Or be excellent enough to escape discrimination.”
If it can happen to me, she said, “it can — and it does — happen to every person marginalized by gender.”
In Her Words looked at the history of Equal Pay Day, the reasons for the wage gap and what can be done to close it.
To read the full article, click here.
18 March 2021
By The Dance Edit
DDP was featured in on The Dance Edit Podcast specifically related to our AFTA ARTSblog post.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Well, I am sad to say that our next segment is not going to make us any less angry. It concerns another under-covered aspect of the pandemic’s effects on the arts world. Liza Yntema and Hannah McCarthy from the Dance Data Project®, more friends of the pod, they recently wrote an article about why the “shecession”—which is a maybe too cutesy, but we’ll go with it, term for the way COVID-related job losses have pushed more women than men from the workforce—that’s hit the arts community especially hard. And there’s been a lot of talk bigger-picture about the pandemic’s disproportionate effect on women. There’s been a lot of talk about how the arts and culture sector has been devastated by the pandemic. But we have to start talking about how those two problems are connected. Because women are overrepresented in our field. And if the arts are going to make a real comeback, post pandemic, securing and ensuring better support for women in the arts and particularly for women of color is going to be a really important part of the puzzle.
Lydia Murray:
The blog post pointed out that women are overrepresented in the working class of the arts world, and gave the example that 65% of lower and mid-tier employees in the arts and culture sector in New York are women. And men tend to be in leadership positions, and they tend to have better pay and better job security. And the burdens of home, elder and childcare tend to disproportionately fall to women. Without support, women’s careers are going to lag, especially given the effects of the pandemic. And this has been reported for some time now, but of the net 140,000 jobs that were lost in December of 2020, all were held by women. And the jobs in the arts that were most vulnerable to furlough or layoff were primarily held by women of color, typically making minimum wage with no benefits or jobs security. This is kind of a stats-heavy intro, but the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that two in four mothers, and three in four black mothers, are breadwinners for their families, which really underscores the importance of paid family leave.
Courtney Escoyne:
I think also, especially looking at the statistics in terms of men largely being in more leadership positions than women, it’s not just that that doesn’t make sense for the representation of our field—the fact that there is no comprehensive childcare leave, like paid childcare leave, that actually largely is going to be what is preventing women from being able to go into those positions. Not because they can’t do both, but because the people who are making the decisions about who to hire are likely to have these implicit biases that, Oh, someone who is male and doesn’t have a child that they’re responsible for caring for, is going to be able to devote more to the organization. Whereas women might go off and have babies. It’s like we’re 50 years ago in how this is being thought about.
And the solution is so obviously there needs to be comprehensive childcare made available just across the board to everyone, not just women, but men as well. Men need to be incentivized to stay home if they have a kid at home. There’s just so many things here that even though this doesn’t on the surface seem like an arts world story, this is affecting the way that our leadership is going forward, and continues to affect it.
To listen to the episode, click here. You can find a transcript of the episode here.
