 Not for very long though, I'm sure. A couple announcements before we get started. Sean Eves, if you have lost your wallet, it is at the front desk at the conference center. Sean, did you get it? Okay, good. Now you know this was going to happen. You know this was bound to happen, but you know I got to swag, sell you guys and swag now. They were like, can you go out and push it? I was like, yeah, sure, okay. So, you know, there are T-shirts for sale at the conference. Let me just hold this up for you. You know, there are coffee cups and there are greeting cards and there are pens. There are these lovely, lovely pens, you guys. I pull it all out and show it to you anytime. They said, just do your best carameral thing. I'm like, oh yeah, right, okay. So the greeting cards, the cup. Here's what's so cool about this. The pens have the cartons. I could be writing. See a play, save a playwright. And they say, 1,000 workshops. They were like, push the sticky. Would you push the sticky? Okay, I'll try. I mean, how hard can you push a sticky? We'll be on sale in the lobby of the hotel until right up to the national conversation. For those of you who don't know, there is, for those of you who paid for this, there is a breakfast brunch tomorrow morning at 10 o'clock a.m. in the ballroom. So that is happening if you've paid for it. And also tonight, the dinner after the national conversation is at about 9 o'clock. We just want to remind you. But I think there will be tickets on sale for those of you who have did not purchase it ahead of time. After Julia's speech, there will be about a 15 minute intermission. And then we'll come back for the Q&A, allowing people to get up to their other sessions and for this person. Our final keynote speaker of the conference is one of her own. She is a teacher, a playwright, a council member, a thinker, a visionary. And as you've heard me say at least twice now that I can think of, a tireless advocate for every single one of you in the room. As we've seen with Molly Smith and Todd London, she's beyond her own world and her own career to consider and recognize the needs of artists struggling right along beside her. Last year when the New York theater community announced its roster of annual awards, she was struck by the lack of women represented in all disciplines. In short order, she and Marcia Norman and Theresa Reback created the Lilly Awards, named after the playwright, Lillian Hellman, and recognized in a very, very public way in a ceremony, writers and directors, designers and producers who had remained unrecognized anywhere else. Forge and deperity in the theater may be near and dear to her. I can promise you unequivocally she represents the needs of each of you in her committee and her council work at the drama skill. It is with great pleasure that I bring to the stage Julia Jordan. The place for gender parity in the theater is not something that I was cut out to do. I have this speech and I called my teacher, theater mom and friend Marcia Norman to beg her for advice. She's good at this kind of thing. She's Marcia Norman. I can possibly tell you that it would be worth 45 minutes of a hot Saturday. She said, okay, here's our guest. Like that, straight to the point, boom, boom, boom, done. So here's our guest. This is who I am, a regular nice girl from Minnesota, just writing my plays, very nice and whatever, because there was this one little problem I just kept pushing under the rug, but then I heard the voice of God, told me thou shalt face the problem under the rug, go forth and do good work, and so yeah, this is what I did and this is what happened, conflict, conflict, conflict, and then here we are. So what are we all, Minnesota, who's always looking for a better story, and my grandmother has a better story than I do. So I'm going to tell you hers. True, I'm going to go on. She's intact at the age of 100. She had just finished her exercises, which meant slow dancing to Roy Orbson. He was a singer that she discovered in her mid 90s. Whenever she heard his falsetto, she was a 100-year-old girl with a crush on a pop star. She called Mr. Orbson, quote, that young man with the beautiful voice. That's how old 100 is. At 100, you'd think Roy Orbson is a young man. He was not happy with Maverick, forming her that he wasn't exactly young or alive. In 19th town on the farm in Minnesota. The land wasn't very good. It was part leech-infested lake, part rock, and her dad had an actor buying dry dairy cows, which is to say they were dirt poor. The five children of the family and my grandmother's mother ended up working the farm while her father picked up jobs as a janitor in Minneapolis to supplement their income. My grandmother hated the farm. She would tell stories about the itchy wool stockings her mother would make the girls wear in their arms so while they were out in the field in 100-degree heat, all in an attempt to keep their skin white so people in town wouldn't think they were country. Hating farm life, my grandmother never understood the concept of pets. Animals inside a house disgusted her. She never learned any of our pet's names. So we heard to them all as that damned cat, or that damned dog, or that damned rodent, or damned fish, basically damned. And then the designated, she designated the species of the genus that the creature belonged to. Animals belonged in barns and if you didn't have a barn, fantastic. You don't have to take care of or clean up after animals. She also didn't understand farmer's markets or why would anyone want to shop outside? What if it rained? And she would never sew. She would refuse to sew a button back on her own blasts. I remember as a kid, I wanted one, a little pink plastic sewing machine. I'm not quite sure why. I think my friend had one on her mom's sew. My mom, my grandmother's daughter, definitely did not sew. In any case, I must have told my grandmother that I was hoping for a sewing machine for Christmas because I clearly remember the lecture she gave me. I was not to learn how to sew, because if I did, people would take advantage and have been fixing every little tear for them and not paying me to do it. If your shirt tore, what you did was you went to work in an office, behind a desk, you wore nice clean clothes, a skirt that fell to just below the knee, no higher because that looked cheap, and no lower because you never know when someone might want to take you dancing, and you wore lipstick and heels, always heels. And in that nice, shiny office dress like that, you earned the money you need to buy a damn new shirt. This is to say that my grandma was poor, she was country poor, she was girl country poor, and she was determined not to be. My grandma's two brothers were said to free public schools but afraid that his daughter's virginity would be in jeopardy and the wilds of public schooling served in 1920, my great-grandfather managed to enroll his three daughters in Catholic school. Exactly how he managed that was revealed on the graduation days. Rolled up inside their diplomas was a bill for their entire grade and high school educations. After she graduated, Mary Hytale did out in Minnesota for the big city of Chicago, learned how to type really, really fast, got a job in an office, cut her hair short, went out dancing a lot, and paid up every step of her schooling. She met my grandfather, fell in love with depression and the depression hit. My grandfather lost his janitor job, her brothers were unemployed, and the farm was as unproductive as ever. They couldn't pay the mortgage, so my grandmother did. For six years, she paid for the piece of land she hated, the one she couldn't wait to get away from. For six years, she put off her marriage to my grandfather because she would have lost her job if she married him and her family would have been homeless. A woman couldn't keep her job if her husband had one and times that hard. And she scored me that she did not sleep with my grandfather in all that time for six years. She was a nice Catholic girl from Minnesota. So the McCauley's kept the farm, the depression ended, my grandparents married him and had five children, and then one day, one of my mom was 16. And the youngest was six. My grandfather dropped the children off at school on the way to take my grandma to her brand new office job. And he suffered a massive heart attack and death. Leaving her with five kids, no insurance, no savings, and only partially paid for her house. Meanwhile, back in Minnesota, that crappy old farm line was about to become one of the wealthiest suburbs of Minneapolis. And a few years later, when Mary was struggling her hardest to get my mom into college and get food in the other children's mouths, her father passed away, one third to each of her sons in the room, and the third, the unbuildable swamp land, he willed to his three daughters to split. A few years after that, my grandmother's older brother died and left the great land and all that money to his wife, so a woman got it anyway. A Swedish woman, and my great-grandfather was sexist and racist, against Swedes for some reason. So, she's logged on to all our kids to college and one scholarship or another, and their children have attended nearly every like Ivy League institution in the country. Somewhere in his 70s, my grandma married the boss of her last office job. He was a sweet, funny man and a great salesman, but he made some crazy investments with his larger paycheck, and she made some extremely wise ones with her smaller ones, so by the end of his life, she was financially supporting him. She does make you wonder who was really running the office all those years. Because it's not unique. I think about what it must have been like for her to look into the faces of five children and have to get up and go to work and be underpaid, as we all know she was and women still are. If she was a man, she would have been a salesman, not a secretary, and things would have been hard, but not as hard, not nearly as hard. Never mind starting her adult life with debt that her brothers didn't incur, never mind the land, never mind the will. So that's who I am, the granddaughter of that woman. And I'm complaining that my career, my theater career isn't exactly where it should be. It really does seem unseemly. That's sad. I am never getting an interview to promote a play where the headline and the bulk of the article didn't focus on the fact that I was a female writer who was actually getting a production. I've had artistic directors of Tony Award-winning regional theaters tell me to my face that they'd be more likely to produce my work if I wrote a play with a male lead because that's what audiences prefer. There's ample evidence that the opposite is true, by the way, but as Charlotte Isherwood just pointed out in the New York Times, Broadway producers haven't yet noticed. I've watched my male and female contemporary forge extremely different paths. I've been out of school nearly 20 years now and I look around at the writing group we started so long ago. These members have come and gone and been added to, but we're all about the same age and we all have been writing about the same time and we all started with the same credentials. We've all won awards and we all respect each other as equals. We drag ourselves out on Wednesday nights year after year to hear what the rest of the group thinks about what we slogged out the night before. But it's impossible not to note that the majority of the male writers are actually making a living writing scripts in theater, TV and film. They often have productions lined up for work they haven't yet finished writing inside of their money jobs and they're often worried about whether they can continue to afford their apartments and they have piles of scripts and drawers that no one will read. The careers of male writers seem to be relatively impervious after a series of plays received not-so-hot reviews. Female writers' careers seem to end before they begin if they don't have a great big, huge juicy hit in the first few years of their careers. And these are your privileged Juilliard and Yale grads with fancy agents. It's one kind of stuff we women have been bitching about in private for years and it has felt very good to bitch in private. It felt really good to have others tell me that I wasn't crazy. But I used to cringe when the subject came up with male writers around. I preferred the problem to stand in the rug to be pulled out only on a certain female centered occasions, preferably where cocktails are being served. But then I heard the voice of God. The voice of God if God is their shoulder. Sarah Facebook me three years ago saying that for her birthday she wanted to get a whole bunch of female writers together and I thought fantastic girl cocktail party let the bitching begin. We have different circles of friends she'd meet mine, I'd meet hers. But then she sent me a list of theaters that were producing zero women in their upcoming season and the list was longer than usual. Women were being produced in less than the one in five slots were accustomed. I'm so tired of the phrase but it was the tipping point for me. I firmly believed that the percentage of plays by women had stayed above the 17 to 20 percent mark I would have kept my mouth shut in public anyway. Sad but true. Before that year I listened and honestly considered and factored in all the arguments about established writers being overwhelmingly male that male artistic directors were simply more drawn to male work that male writers write more dramatically and drama in all bold caps is more commercial than poetry and flowering script. That things would get better in the future when more women were artistic directors and more girls had worked their way up through the ranks. That's what they were saying when I was a student at Juilliard. I'm now a teacher at Barnard in Columbia a lot of time has passed and the one in five slot has been standardized for all that time. There has been a jump in the numbers of female productions in the last two years in New York City but I have no reason to believe there was a jump nationally and frankly the New York numbers have already begun to wind their way down again. So after Sarah's Facebooking me I reread my 2001 NISCA report that put female writers at 17 percent of national productions and I found TCG's list of the top ten plays which should really be called the list of most often produced plays and I found that though women only wrote 37 percent of the plays that got first productions when you looked at the top two plays that received the most productions from the country the following year they held double that percentage. My date to my high school senior Valentine's Day dance just happened to have been a big economics economist student mother so I called him and I asked him if I had single-handedly proven bias in the American theater at my own kitchen table that morning and he said no but then he might be able to find someone with more sophisticated tools and a trained mind to take a look at the situation. Meanwhile I was googling away bias in the arts and I kept coming across Cecilia Rouse and Claudia Golden's Landmark study of blind auditions orchestrating impartiality which showed that when the orchestras concerned about allegations of racism began holding auditions behind screens not only did musicians of color begin to win seats but so did women and men and women who didn't have fancy schools and mentors behind them. Cecilia was a very easy defined professor at Princeton email on the university website I wrote her an email asking her if she would talk me through the finer points of her study over lunch she agreed to and we said a day but before we could even get together I got another note from her her star student Emily Sands had just returned from the University of Chicago where Steve Lovett was trying to persuade her to come for her grad studies instead of to Harvard or Yale or Princeton there was a huge war over this young talent. Steve had mentioned my little findings to Emily and suggested it as a possible thesis subject she had come back to Princeton and tackled pursuing it and Cecilia had put two and two together Emily, Sherry Wilner joined Cecilia and I and Sherry joined Cecilia and I for lunch a week later and Emily Sands then got to work. She did three studies in one thesis the first was about supply every time stats come out showing that women are underrepresented in journals, theaters, museums the question always comes up about supply. Are female artists applying? Are they even present in the same numbers as men? And almost always the answer is sorry ladies the answer is no at least they're not showing up in the databases in any numbers larger than the theaters of reporting they send in their scripts In a town hall that was held in New York City a few months before the artistic directors held forth that most received about 30% of their scripts from women Emily looked at Dooley the online database and the drama just filled membership and found that in and both only about 30% of the writers were female when Emily's thesis came out she said and she said exactly that there was a huge outcry for women the Dooley website is like Wikipedia produced plays are logged by others but unproduced plays must be logged in by the only people who know they exist the writers themselves maybe women don't go on Dooley maybe they don't join guilds if they aren't produced playwrights maybe Emily didn't offer proof she offered findings and the director's report was married almost exactly in Dooley and guild I do think it makes sense that people who actively log their unproduced plays at Dooley are the same people who are actively sending their unsolicited scripts to the theaters but a lot of women don't like that theory it doesn't match up with their observations and it seems to disprove their assertion that bias is at play but it doesn't they shouldn't even be surprised by it discouraged workers are always found when bias is in play women are human humans tend to make decisions in their best economic interest and at some point males and females have to adjust their playwriting dreams to the reality that they also need to keep roofs over their heads and food in their mouths and as hard as it is for men to do that as playwrights it's even harder for women and so the attrition rate is steeper than that of men therefore less supply the second part of Emily's work was the audit study of the first scripts read by artistic directors and literary managers across the country now I'm going to try to clear up something once and for all that the papers got wrong over and over again she found that whether scripts were purportedly written by men or women the participants judged them to be of equal artistic value there was no bias at all found on the subject of excellence but she also found that female respondents believed that audiences would buy fewer tickets plays would receive more negative reviews top talent would be harder to attract artistic directors would not want to produce and the ultimately plays by women that they believed were by women were not fits with their theater's mission if the exact same script carried a male pen name it was not thought to have any such challenges we're going to talk about this later in the panel as this finding caused the greatest focus amongst women interested in parody the simple answer it's impossible to prove a null hypothesis finding no bias on the part of the man means nothing if I sent you out into the world to find an undiscovered species and you returned a few days later and said I didn't find any you can't conclude that there aren't any out there and in turn if you did return with a strange new bug and the palm of your hand all that we can conclude that there was at least one undiscovered bug out there so what we can conclude from section B of Emily's thesis is that she found bias against female work a really interesting kind of bias that may suggest a self-fulfilling prophecy on the part of theater women or may suggest that women in theater are simply reporting honestly what they see and know to be true or most likely in my opinion some combination of the two I couldn't help but notice and all the angry postings and comments from female respondents that hit the blog sphere in the days after the study's release that they were they were not aware that they had given high artistic marks but predicted low economic return on what they thought were female written scripts they seemed oblivious to it and yes the sample size was big enough and the findings were so stark that they reached the highest degree of significance that the field of economics recognizes that you could redo that study over and over again under perfect circumstances you would get the same result at least 95 out of 100 times the third study of the sans thesis was the Broadway study this is the one that brought out all sorts of armchairs to statisticians basically like myself basically Emily looked at the last 10 years of Broadway plays throughout the outliers and plays whose entire runs were not inclusive and as the numbers were not publicly available as to the cost of mounting each individual production she judged plays against plays musicals against musicals and one person chose against the same and she found that works by women made an average of 18% more per week and yet still had shorter runs than plays by men this is the strongest evidence of bias in economic terms it's in the numbers producers do not act in their own economic best interest when they close shows that are more profitable than the ones that they keep open they are therefore acting on bias the complaint about this study was in the assumption that had to be made that all plays cost the same that all musicals cost the same of course they don't but remember that the female written plays made an average of 18% on average week by week the only way that finding is meaningless is if the average play by woman cost that more to mount this is where we might just want to take a look around and remember that it's been established many many times over and over again that work by women is generally preached on smaller stages and that plays by women that reach production have smaller cast than plays by men so Emily's findings paint a portrait of what happens to women's scripts bias and discouragement circling women dominate theater in high school and college about the same numbers graduate playwriting degrees agents 50-50, agents under 40% female clients those are the good agents who would give me those numbers theaters report 30% of the scripts are submitted by females and then theaters in turn produce just under 20% that's what happens to female writers attrition intelligent educated aware people are still talking about merit that artistic directors need to choose work based on their assessment of merit alone does that mean that if an artistic director is convinced that work by white artists is inherently superior to work by artists of color that he or she has the right to run a non-profit tax-free grant receding theater for white artists only can we not see through history how incredibly crappy human beings are at determining merit for years ago I didn't recognize one title and I recognized only one name and I'm a theater nut the wrong movie wins the best Oscar all the time we know this arguing about merit is silly my grandmother never complained about her history she never even told me about it my mother did the only anger I ever saw in my grandmother was over the six years that she lost with my grandfather she regretted not sleeping with him the money that learned the secretary salesman she overcame all that in the end but during must have been excruciating my mom cries when she remembers but I never saw my grandma cry about it never so here I am with a husband who's as good a change in a diaper as I am he's not with him right now and a bother who's done nothing but encourage and support me unconditionally and as far as my career goes most of my plays actually have been produced and I do make kind of a living so what do I have to cry about I remind myself constantly as we all need to that I'm not whining about my career I can't none of my statistics or any of the studies prove anything at all about anyone's individual career we're all combinations of talent advantage, right place at right time happenstance, luck, determination but a young female playwright who lives in New York City has a huge advantage in finding a production over a young male, oh sorry a young female playwright who lives in New York City has a huge advantage in finding a production over a young male writer and Boise but it both leave Boise and head for the big city to work as artists in any field, not just playwriting acting, directing, painting, dance, poetry, filmmaking, conducting, any field at all if you were to bet who would be more likely to make a career out of it you would be ignorant and foolish to bet on the woman in any field that is except for that of a musician in an orchestra which holds soliditions specifically to hide the race and gender of the applicant so is the flight of the female playwright really that epic or tragic and the great scheme of things the fact that one in five productions is written by a woman in a good year is well it's just a tiny little corner of a problem a small piece that in reality only a small number of people even think much less care about but it is a piece of an epic, tragic, contemporary problem a travesty that permeates the whole globe and it does seem that at this point in history forces aren't coming together from its many many corners large and small to address the state of women in the world the American theater is our corner our piece of the world and it's ours to fix and by working to put more stories by women on more stages we will help in the best way we can to redefine in the audience's mind what women have always been are and can be