Excluding costume design, dudes dominate theater’s design, production, and technical professions. Women represent just 37 percent of Broadway and touring stage managers, a 2017 study revealed. A report from the following year concluded that women are hired for only 29 percent of theatrical design jobs. Now the findings from a survey conducted by Millikin University are shedding light on why exactly theater has such a pronounced offstage gender gap.
According to American Theatre, gender discrimination and lack of support for working mothers are the two main barriers women face in theater’s design and production realms. Millikin surveyed 589 women-identifying theater designers and production personnel, and 533 respondents, or 90 percent, “reported having experienced a negative work environment, gender-based harassment, and/or pay disparity.” Women employed in sound design, lighting production, and lighting design were most likely to encounter gender discrimination: 93 percent of respondents working in those fields reported discrimination.
One of the respondents, a lighting designer and technician, recalled being addressed as “sweetheart, honey, chick, baby doll” on the job and being “asked out on calls, or even proposed to, given creepy gifts, and then when I politely refuse, they call me ugly names and then are impossible to work with.”
Nineteen percent of those surveyed were parents. Of that group, only 21 percent had ever been offered maternity leave by their theater or union. Fifty-nine percent say they had needed an ad-hoc babysitter during work.
Obviously, these conditions do not make the backstage theater world very welcoming to women. So it’s unsurprising that many women designers or technicians end up leaving — or being forced out. Fifty percent of those surveyed exited their jobs, “citing discrimination, workplace harassment, and lack of support for parents as their reasons.” One respondent said she was demoted because she was pregnant. “I lost my position after a very short maternity leave,” she continued. “I have been told straight up that I will not progress because I chose to have children over having my career be my main priority.”
In an interview with Women and Hollywood, Tony-nominated “Oklahoma!” set designer Laura Jellinek spoke about the specific struggles mothers and parents face in theatrical design and production. “It’s tricky. I have kids, two sons ages three and six. When we’re in tech, I’m doing 12-hour days for a few weeks,” she explained. “[Lighting designer] Jane Cox once told me that if you want to do this job and have kids, you have to find a partner who makes more money and is okay that your career matters more,” Jellinek added. “It’s really hard. If you look at the list of people who can do this with kids, they either have help or move. Most set designers I know have to leave New York because it’s unaffordable.”
As Caitlyn Garrity, who wrote about the survey for Theatre Design & Technology, put it, the onus for change is on the profession itself. If theater wants to be inclusive — and, socially and morally, that’s what it should want — it needs to reform its practices, now. “Technical theater has an obligation to uphold a positive workplace environment for all people and provide support for parents,” Garrity wrote. “Without this welcoming environment, we will lose countless artists and their skills, further shrinking the pool of theater practitioners to a select few.”
Read the full survey over at Theatre Design & Technology.
