What's holding women back? A dirty little secret...

My recent post about why fewer plays by women are produced got me thinking about standup comedy, which I've been doing for 10 years now.

There are many more male than female comics. Based on my personal experience, the reasons match the results of those theater studies pretty closely. In other words, the leading causes for fewer women comics are 1) fewer women try standup in the first place, and 2) other women are much more judgmental about women comics than male comics. (A third reason seems to be that life on the road, away from freinds and family, sleeping in your car on off nights and in grungy club condos on gig nights, bothers men less.)

Of the women who try open mics, from what I've seen, a higher percentage go on to success. But very few try. Also, when they do, I often hear comments from women in the audience like "Why does she have to be so nasty?" I rarely see men react that way to a woman comic.

The why gets complicated. Part of it is that comedy is generally transgressive, and we have no problem culturally with men being transgressive, but get confused by women who are. Notice how rebellious women are almost automatically labeled as "sluts" regardless of what their rebellion is, or who they choose to sleep with.

But certainly, the role of women in all of this is one of the reason why I think complaining about "the patriarchy" is worse than a waste of breath. It confuses the issue, and takes us further away from making progress, by implying that "the man" is keeping women down.

Gender bias in theater? Yes, but it's complicated

3 rigorous new studies looked at whether there is gender bias in theater, i.e. whether plays by women get produced less often, or are not allowed to play as long (regardless of profitably.)

The results are striking and unexpected. Theatrical artistic directors defend the fact that most produced plays are written by men, by saying that men simply write more plays. The study actually confirmed this; there are twice as many male playwrights, and they're more prolific to boot.

BUT -- when the same play was sent out, half the time under a man's name and half under a woman's, the "woman's" play was rated significantly worse overall. Here's the twist: male artistic directors and literary managers rated them exactly the same, but female ADs and LMs downgraded "Mary's" play.

The third study looked at the 329 new plays over the last decade on Broadway, where we can roughly assume that money is the main criteria. Plays by men outnumber those by women 8 to 1. The plays written by women that were produced made 15-20% more money than men's plays -- but they weren't allowed to run any longer.

Conclusion -- there's money to be made by producing more female-written plays on Broadway. And this stuff is complicated.