Thing the first: This blog entry by one James Chartrand. The funny thing about James is that he's a woman. "James" is a pen name, an identity the writer assumed when she found she wasn't getting the work she wanted as a freelance writer. In this entry, James outs herself and explains the reasoning behind her decisions.
Thing the second: This NPR broadcast which features a study by Emily Sands, in which "surprising" gender biases are revealed in the theater community. Surprising is in scare quotes there because I'm not sure how surprising it actually is.
If you live on the planet Earth, you have had to think about gender bias. If you are a woman, you have had to think about it frequently. If you are a woman trying to succeed in male-dominated industry, you would probably give your firstborn in exchange for not having to think about it. So in some ways, a story like James' is not surprising. People do have biases, and they are in some ways unavoidable. Does it suck that one has to hide their identity in order to get more money for the same work? Yes, yes it does. But I'm not really sure what to do about it.
The premise of the study by Emily Sands was to send out identical script samples to male and female artistic directors throughout the country, with some scripts having a male playwright listed as the author, and others having a female playwright. (The samples were in fact written by Pulitzer Prize-winning Lynn Nottage.) But here's the interesting part: while all artistic directors rated the script's quality equally well, the females gave it lower marks on the sections that asked about how well the script would be received by the theater community. One is made to wonder whether the female artistic directors have less faith in women playwrights, or whether they are simply being more realistic about the chances that the work has. They, having faced the monster of gender bias, know full well that the script with the female author has less of a chance to be produced. To what extent these artistic directors are creating a self-fulling feedback cycle was not addressed in the study. I'd also be curious to know what sort of theaters were asked to rate these scripts. Does the bias change when the sample set is just major regional theaters? Do small groups like the Neo-Futurists have a similar bias?
After reading both of these articles, I began thinking also about how they relate to ethnic bias. I recall vividly certain blog entries from a playwright friend of mine who has had trouble finding the elusive "stable day job." Having a foreign name, he must constantly wonder if his reusme is being sent straight to the circular file because of ethnic bias. Would he get more responses if his name were Bill, or Sam? Would he feel awful sending out resumes with a false "nickname"? Would interviewers feel tricked when he showed up with a decidedly brown face? Possibly.
I do feel that ethnic bias is perhaps a more complicated beast than gender bias. It taps into the kind of in-group/out-group thinking that was a survival necessity for our recently evolutionary ancestors. When we consider working with someone, we want to be sure we can communicate with them, joke with them, that they have a similar work ethic, cultural values, etc. These are the things that are hard to put on a resume. Perhaps in the future we'll all have video resumes so that employers can put a face to a name and get a sense of personality. But that's a minefield all its own.
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