If you’d have asked Peter Rowe, the artistic director of the New Wolsey in Ipswich, how many female designers he works with, he would have said it was about a 50/50 gender split. But that was until he took part in the latest six-month Advance programme, offered to arts organisations by Tonic Theatre to address gender imbalances in the industry. The figures don’t lie: the number is actually far smaller.
Focusing on the gap between perception and reality has been one of the challenges of Tonic’s 2016 Advance programme, a follow-up to the 2014 inaugural programme which found 11 theatres around the country – from Sheffield to the Young Vic to the RSC to Pentabus – pledging to change their artistic programmes to reflect the shockingly low numbers of female directors, writers and performers whose work is seen on British stages. Sheffield pledged to implement a 50/50 casting policy, while Headlong promised to commission equal numbers of male and female playwrights.
Despite those pledges, there is still a long way to go. A woman’s work is never done, but the great thing about the Tonic Advance programme, led by the indefatigable Lucy Kerbel, is that it makes arts organisations face up to how they decide about who writes, directs, designs and performs the work they produce, and offers ways of translating talk into action. In the long term it is hoped the concept of gender equality will embed itself and change the way organisations think and operate on a daily basis.
This year’s programme encompassed a broader range of arts organisations beyond theatre, including Sadler’s Wells, Northern Ballet and the Royal Opera House, alongside the National Theatre, Northern Stage and others. If the 2014 programme focused on how to get more women centre stage through commissioning and casting policies, this year’s programme has dug even deeper to look at women in creative freelance roles. The Royal Opera House specifically looked at how it might encourage more female conductors; Sadler’s Wells considered why is it that emerging female choreographers are less likely than their male counterparts to become mid-career choreographers; the National investigated whether their mode of business, with its emphasis on meetings, had a built-in unconscious bias that favoured male voices over women’s, and Northern Stage started to rethink its artist development policy, looking at how it serves women.
What’s clear is that there is no shortage of women working in the arts. But as organisations such as the New Wolsey discovered when they looked harder at their set-up, the volume of women masked inequalities in the roles they had within the organisation. Kerbel and others from Tonic are clear that it is not just about numbers, but about rethinking how organisations are structured in order to generate ways of working that allow everyone to reach their full potential.
That means paying special attention to the world of freelancing. Being a freelance creative in the arts is precarious, and arts organisations that have benefited from increased arts funding over the past 20 years have often not improved the fees they offer to directors, designers and others. That’s hard for all freelancers, but especially so for women who often encounter the unconscious bias and organisational working practices that ensure they earn less, progress more slowly and have lower profiles than their male counterparts.
Tonic is making arts organisations scrutinise themselves for how they work and who holds the privilege. They are helping to create the circumstances for a continuum of change and improvement, which as Kerbel says, makes them look on a “granular level at how they operate, as well as encouraging them to see the big picture of the change they – as leaders in their fields – have the capacity to initiate”.
This makes sense because arts organisations are invigorated when they diversify their talent pool. Any arts organisation so institutionalised that it remains reluctant to initiate change will be left behind and ensure its own eventual demise. That’s because diversifying talent pools isn’t just about equality, but about the quality of that organisation and the quality and creativity of the work it produces in every aspect of its operations, from participation to what happens onstage.