Raising the Curtain on Emily Glassberg Sands, Part IV: Questions for Julia Jordan

Playwright Adam Szymkowicz has an interesting interview with playwright Julia Jordan (at left), the true begetter of the Emily Glassberg Sands study, up at his blog. The "interview" is all softballs - and essentially an impromptu soapbox - so I couldn't resist leaving the following comment:

This isn't so much an interview as it is an advertisement. Here are some follow-up's you might have asked Julia, Adam:

Q: Given that the Sands study found no evidence for your claims of male sexism in theatre, one might expect you to revise or adjust your opinions on the subject. Yet you seem to be digging in your heels. Indeed, you insist that not finding evidence for your assertions "means little or nothing." So I'm curious - what sort of evidence could dissuade you from your current beliefs? Would anything less than exact parity between men and women in terms of theatrical production (which is nearly what Sands found anyway, outside of Broadway) do the trick?

Q: And as a follow-up, I'm wondering if you're concerned about the widespread perception that your advocacy of women playwrights is also an indirect form of self-promotion. If more female playwrights reached Broadway, but you weren't one of them, would there be a new socio-economic explanation for that gap?

Q: Do you worry that your "sponsorship" of Sands might have compromised the objectivity she should have had as a researcher? In particular, I find it odd that she called you in the middle of the night (according to NPR) when the results of her survey didn't work out as planned, and I even wonder if pressure from you might have influenced her decision to fudge her data in her final chapter. Many people feel that Sands wouldn't have made the erroneous statements she's on record as having made without some sort of pressure coming from someone. Can you assure us that you didn't pressure her in that way?

Q: And btw - did you understand the statistical issues in Sands's paper? And if so, did you ignore them on purpose? And if so, why?

Q) I'm also confused by the strange contradiction between two of your contentions. On the one hand, you say that female artistic directors believe "that audiences wouldn't buy tickets [to plays by women] . . . and that the theater would suffer financially if they produced scripts by women." Yet at the same time you declare that it's a "simple fact that though less that 20% of the productions are by women, around 40% of the most successful plays in the past ten years were by women." Why are female artistic directors unaware of this "simple fact" (because it would allay any fears about the financial success of plays by women)? Also, could you cite a source for that statistic?

Q: I also wonder about your implied contention that the quality of a play can be judged by its box office. For example, you state that the statistic above could be evidence that women are "vastly better playwrights than men." But this kind of thinking should be problematic, it seems to me, for anyone fighting prejudice of any kind. If, for example, plays by women were indeed not selling as well as those by men (but were of equal quality), wouldn't your seeming position be an argument for keeping that bigotry in place, as long as it sold tickets?

Q: Finally, I'm wondering how you parse the interesting issue of artistic quality vs. political equity. Do political values trump artistic values for you, at least as far as your own gender is concerned? For instance, if a male and a female playwright were both in contention for a single production spot, and the man's script happened to be of higher quality, would you advocate producing the lesser play anyway, for political reasons? And just to push this hypothetical a bit further, if the male playwright were African-American, would you still feel the same way? Just wondering.

Opening the curtain on Emily Glassberg Sands, Part I

Emily Glassberg Sands puts over her presentation. NY Times photo by Chester Higgins.

What felt like my personal "gotcha" moment with Emily Glassberg Sands (above, late of Princeton, now at Harvard) came halfway through my phone conversation with her a week or two ago. I'd just finished reading her study, "Opening the Curtain on Playwright Gender, etc." and I was in two frames of mind about it. I was greatly impressed by the thoroughness and forethought of its central portion (the much-discussed "script experiment"), but I was confused and uncertain when it came to the vague methodology of her final conclusions, in which she seemed to find that Broadway producers had closed female-written shows early, despite their above-average weekly revenues.

Now the ultra-articulate Sands had been in high gear from the very start of the conversation, but as I got closer to my concerns, she began to power-chatter at a nearly alarming rate. I kept trying to steer the conversation to what I thought should be the central question of her final chapter - were those closed shows actually more profitable than the male-written shows she was comparing them to? (Because profitability, or the lack thereof, is the reason producers close shows.) But every time I tried to phrase this question, Emily deflected it by claiming that I wouldn't understand her even if she explained her method, that I wasn't trained enough in statistics to comprehend what she was doing, etc., etc. Finally, I managed to blurt out the full question:

"Emily - do you or do you not have valid data on profitability?"

And suddenly the chatter ended abruptly; a long silence ensued. And ensued. For what seemed like minutes. "Emily? Emily, are you there?" I asked. "Yes, I'm still here," she answered quietly, but said nothing more. "Can you answer my question?" I then ventured. "I'm still here," she repeated. And again fell absolutely silent.

Then she began trying to end the call. "Look, I don't really have time for this," she said. "I've been working on this for more than a year, I've talked about it to a lot of important people!"

"Yes, but Emily - do you have valid data on profitability?"

She then let me know that the paper had been accepted for publication by the MIT Press; she'd already told me she would soon be on The Colbert Report. "I've been told that people like you would be calling me!" she said (which I took to mean people had predicted lonely, gay bloggers would soon be on her tail). "You're just going to write something scathing, aren't you," she went on bitterly. "I have to go!"

"But - "

"I have to cook, I have to clean! I have things to do!"

And so we went back and forth for awhile, during which time I just managed to sneak in my final question:

"But Emily, if producers are ending profitable shows, can you speculate as to why? If a producer were sexist, he wouldn't produce a show by a woman to begin with, would he? Why would he produce it, then shoot himself in the foot by killing his own profits?"

There was another long pause.

"Because there are always costs to taste-based discrimination," she finally offered.

"And that's what you think this is."

"Yes. I'm signing off now."

And that was that. I followed up with an e-mail (posted below) to try to tease out a more credible answer, but she hasn't replied, and somehow I don't think she ever will.

Because, of course, there is no reply. There's a gaping hole in the final chapter of her study, and smart girl that she is, Sands knows this as well as I do. And you don't have to be a statistics whiz to see it; indeed, I'd like to point out to all the dazzled liberal arts majors out there that Sands doesn't actually do anything too mathematically sophisticated in her study (although yes, its design and administration are admirably complex) and I had no real trouble following it until she suddenly began to fudge things to come up with her "profitability" proxy. Of course if you don't understand regressions and don't know what natural logs are, her equations look like some form of indecipherable magic. To someone like me, with a rusty knowledge of statistics and college-level math, they were at first heavy going, but after some glances back in the old textbooks, they pretty much came clear.

Because, of course, this is an undergraduate thesis, and functions in the same way undergraduate theses always have: it covers the techniques it's supposed to cover to demonstrate that the student has been paying attention and has a command of the material. I had to write one of these myself years ago (although it was nowhere near as complicated or impressive as Sands's!), and so I soon recalled the essential problem of all undergraduate papers on statistics: finding a data set appropriate to the techniques you know you have to apply.

What happened to Sands was that she wandered into the sights of a very high-powered crew with an obvious agenda. Her mentor was none other than Steven Levitt (looking geeky at left), co-author of the pop economics phenomenon Freakonomics - who was friends with Julia Jordan (looking sexily persecuted, below right), a fairly successful stage and television writer who had long told anyone who would listen that sexism must be holding back her career. Jordan wanted back-up for her personal theory of grievance; Levitt was no doubt looking for another public forum for the methods of Freakonomics, which had begun to seem a little irrelevant since its micro-analyses had served as a distraction from the macro-problems that had been brewing during its heyday (and about which it had little or nothing to say).

Of course the appeal of Freakonomics hadn't been hard to understand - its methods seemed to validate policy decisions while transcending traditional political biases. Not that it doesn't have an implicit libertarian/liberal bias - it does; indeed Levitt's first, eye-opening finding was that access to abortion correlated to later lower crime rates (since crime rates have risen recently, however, while abortion rates have remained stable, I'm not sure where that particular debate stands now). This of course, wasn't actually a political or moral argument - but its pure (if unspoken) utilitarianism seemed just as good as a moral politics to a lot of people. And to be fair, Levitt always reported his unexpected results - indeed, that honesty is central to the pleasure of reading Freakonomics, and its elevation as a kind of economics-lite substitute for political thought. No doubt that badge of honesty was also part of what lured Jordan to pursue a Freakonomics-style analysis to vindicate her claims of sexism in the theatre.

Enter Emily Glassberg Sands, in her own words "a young economist in the making" who is also rather clearly on the make. Only I'm sure Sands soon found the freaky catch in Freakonomics - it's quite hard to find data samples that match the requirements of its methods; indeed, the search for such data, I've read, has become a kind of cottage industry among economics grad students and post-docs. So Emily did what any smart undergraduate would do who'd already invested who-knows-how-many hours in a thesis topic:

She began fudging.

Only Sands eventually had to fudge a lot. Ironically enough, the "controversial" audit survey portion of her thesis seems pretty air-tight; the problem was that it had come up with contrarian results - it seemed to indicate that women, not men, were discriminating against other women. (OMG, Julia!) Still, if Sands had stopped there, she'd have already done enough to attract a considerable amount of attention.

But she went on to attempt to tease out evidence of sexism on Broadway - only to discover that she really couldn't do that with the data available. Sands says in her text that she's trying to apply Chicago price theory to the Broadway scene, but that requires marginal analysis, and she just doesn't have the numbers for that - indeed, she openly admits she has to infer marginal values from average values (a technical no-no). And frankly, even those average values are flawed, as Sands could never find actual data on production costs and profitability. So what we're looking at is a simulation of marginal analysis based on proxy variables (from a possibly flawed sample; see post below).

What's more, she's conceptually high and dry. One even begins to wonder whether "Chicago price theory" could ever be applied to as anomalous an economic scene as Broadway. Indeed, Sands herself wonders aloud at one point, "How would one define the 'marginal' male-written or female-written play on Broadway?" Good question; I've no idea either (Sands ponders 'an examination of plays just off-Broadway,' but that would bring up a raft of new problems). But I can tell that her entire final analysis is a kind of charade - a charade done while dutifully lifting the curtain over and over, and pointing out to her professors that she's using averages and dummy variables and proxies; but a charade nonetheless.

So is Ms. Sands guilty of fraud?

Well, when it comes to her auditors at Princeton - no. She clearly covers her ass in the text of her study - like so many undergraduate theses, her final chapter operates with an understood subtext of "I can't really do this with the data I could find, but if I could, I would do it this way, just like you showed in class!"

When it comes to the rest of us, however - yes, Ms. Sands has been a bit fraudulent. Or at the very least has allowed herself to be manipulated into giving a misleading impression. Because somehow all the provisos and explanations of her study have been dropped in her public presentations. In her initial public foray in New York, she even put up slides (one is reproduced below, note headline) that seemed to indicate that she actually had data on profitability, and every discussion I've read of her work in the press has implicitly or directly repeated that false claim (and she's had plenty of chances to add comments on these posts clarifying her position).



But if Sands did clarify her position, she'd be left saying the last thing that Julia Jordan wants to hear - that she found hard evidence indicating women believe sexism exists in the theatre, but no actual hard data proving that it does exist.

And what should we make of that possibility? More to come in Part II of this (at least) three-part series.

Of Top Girls and girls on top

Playwright Theresa Rebeck (at left) raised a small kerfuffle in the theatre blogs when the Guardian published a tantrum from her called "Broadway's glass ceiling," in which she bemoaned the paucity of plays by women on Broadway:

One might put this trend down to something like, hmm, discrimination. But actually what we're told is that the plays that are produced are just the plays that were worth doing, and that playwriting is in fact a Y-chromosome gene. So women should just back off, because putting plays written by women into production because maybe audiences might like a really well-written play that was well-written by a woman would be pandering to ideas of political correctness. And art doesn't do that . . . What art does is celebrate the lives and struggles of men.

Unpacking this little rant is something of a challenge. Rebeck's screed may have spawned many arguments, but in and of itself it could hardly be called an argument at all; it's more like an angrily sputtered non sequitur. Her statement, for instance, that "what we're told is that the plays that are produced are just the plays that were worth doing, and that playwriting is in fact a Y-chromosome gene" doesn't actually make sense - there's no logical connection between its two clauses; one could quite reasonably believe the plays that were produced last year were indeed the only ones worth doing, and yet also snort at the idea that "playwriting is in fact a Y-chromosome gene," whatever that means. And honestly, playwriting is now a gene? Who, exactly, is saying this?

Well, we get a better idea of who the real author of this "argument" may be as she keeps going, and keeps getting stupider:

There's some feeling in rehearsal halls and writers' retreats and drunken dinner parties, that maybe the American theatre participates rather too enthusiastically in the supposed gender bias that the American media tosses about willy-nilly while discussing candidates for higher office. Mostly it is women playwrights who feel that way; male playwrights think the system is really, really fair and that women playwrights who raise these questions are whiners or dirty feminists. After all, everyone is discriminated against! It's show business! Nobody's happy! We're all narcissistic egomaniacs, you can't expect it to make sense! This is about the work. Which means, apparently, that any woman who cares enough to raise her voice about the fact that women's stories are not reaching the stages for which they are intended is a whiner, a dirty feminist and a lousy artist too - because a true artist wouldn't care.

Honestly I am not making one word of this up.

Okay - she is not making one word of this up. So . . . we're supposed to take this whole diatribe, I assume, as what came out of some male asshole playwright at a "drunken dinner party," probably one in which Charles Isherwood's NYT feature on the 2008 theatre season came up in conversation. That's the idea I get, at any rate. But whether or not what comes out of male playwrights at drunken dinner parties reflects the actual attitudes of the people producing plays is never pondered. Instead, we get the outraged observation that only about 13% of the shows on Broadway last year were by women - the same percentage as a century ago! - which obviously proves there's discrimination afoot on the Great White Way.

But does it? I mean, a century ago, women couldn't vote, or hold office. It does seem odd, doesn't it, that sexism could have given in on those counts, yet still hunkered down for a last stand on the Broadway stage. But perhaps that's because sexism has never given up on what really counts - "the culture"; for as Theresa insists in her final statement:

"Who owns the stories, owns the culture." For the life of me I can't remember who said that, but by God it is true.

Just btw, I'm not sure who said that, either, besides Rebeck; when I googled it, I came up with zip. But what's suddenly obvious is that Theresa doesn't want simple equality and opportunity for women; she wants to own the culture, not share it. (This cry against sexism is from a woman, by the way, who is in fact a very successful writer and television producer, and whose one play on Broadway was rather obviously an imitation of a male playwright's best-known work.) In fact, one senses suddenly that feminism in its pure sense doesn't really mean much to her; for Theresa, feminism - or rather sexual politics - is simply a springboard, a steppingstone, to owning the culture (after Mauritius, she probably imagines she 'owns' American Buffalo). And by God, she is being frustrated in her objective!

Well isn't that too bad - although I have to confess this is where things get a little troubling for me. Because, you see, I don't want Theresa Rebeck to own the culture - in fact I'm very, very glad she doesn't. I could be down with a woman owning the culture in principle - just not Theresa. Because to be honest, I don't think she's a very good playwright - and not because she's a woman, but because she's superficial and derivative (though, I admit, clever and funny and certainly a craftsman - uh, craftsperson - in her way). I suppose she has as much of a right to be on Broadway as Neil Simon did - only I didn't want Neil Simon to be there, either! And I certainly didn't want him to own the culture.

But never mind. The thing is, other women seem to feel the same way as Ms. Rebeck - that feminist posturing could serve as a means to getting produced. And they're working on doing something about it. For instance, there's a note that playwright Julia Jordan has been circulating to theatre professionals, which reads in part:

Already there has been a meeting of over 150 female playwrights in New York and the Dramatists Guild is announcing that it will no longer give grants to theaters who discriminate against female writers.

(Leonard Jacobs also reports there will be a "Town Hall" held to address the topic in New York in late October.)

Discrimination against female writers is of course indefensible, but somehow Jordan's note is a bit Stalinist in its cadence, don't you agree? You get the distinct impression that to Jordan - and the Dramatists Guild - female writers are now more equal than others. I mean, couldn't you write a similar protest letter on behalf of African-American writers, and Asian writers, and Native-American writers (funny, if you carved up the Broadway season by minorities, white college-educated women might only get a little more than 13% of it)?

It's also a bit troubling that Charles Isherwood's piece, which seems to have started the whole kerfuffle, is actually being so obviously misrepresented by both Rebeck and Jordan. Rebecca asserts that "The New York Times tells us this week that this is the Year of the Man;" Jordan says that the article, "puts forth the premise that this is the year of the 'male' play, unlike every other year." But where, in the article, does Isherwood use the phrase 'Year of the Man,' and where does he calls this 'the year of the male play'? Somehow I can't find either phrase in this rather ordinary feature, and indeed, it's rife with irony and obvious jabs at the male gender: "most of the news-media glare will soon rest once more on the flaws and strengths, the goofs and the gaffes of the two men leading the tickets . . . a handful of productions, probably converging by coincidence, will provide a season-long seminar on the subject of the male animal under pressure . . . men behaving badly may be a dispiriting spectacle in the public sphere (see Edwards, John), but it almost inevitably makes effective theater." That's how the article goes (just try to imagine a woman writing about 'the female animal under pressure', or opining about 'women behaving badly in the public sphere (see Palin, Sarah)'!)

So the whole tempest seems to be have been kick-started by a willful misrepresentation of an ironic article by a gay man, and a drunken riff by some competitive jerk at a dinner party. Still, legitimate conversations can arise from misunderstandings, drunken quarrels, and the sudden expression of long-held prejudice. But on that note, I'd like to throw a few further thoughts into the discussion.

I'm worried, for instance, by what "discrimination against female writers" could be construed to mean. Are Julia Jordan, the Dramatists Guild, and those 150 female playwrights seeking a 50/50 parity in play production? Because I certainly can't think of a great play written by a woman to match every great play written by a man. Or are they only speaking about new play production? Even this is a bit disturbing, because it seems to me that many (not all, but many) of the weakest plays I've seen this year (Dessa Rose, Eurydice) have been awash in some form of identity politics; I rather doubt they'd have been produced without some consideration of the fact that they were written by women. Indeed, it's hard for me to believe that Rebeck, Ruhl, or Suzan-Lori Parks would have enjoyed the careers they've had if they weren't women. Ruhl, in particular, has been lauded as a "genius" by the MacArthur Foundation, and been short-listed for a Pulitzer, for a body of work that has been judged over-rated by many critics (mostly men).

Ah, but there's the rub. Am I simply unable to see the quality of these plays because of my own subconscious biases? Am I the kind of sexist lout Theresa Rebeck and Julia Jordan decry?

Whenever I ponder this question, though, I find myself asking myself the following - if I'm sexist, then why do I adore so many female authors? Why do I perpetually tend little shrines in my heart to George Eliot (or rather Mary Ann Evans) and Jane Austen and Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf? Why do I worship Caryl Churchill? It seems that if I were indeed prejudiced against women, I should reject all women authors, and not simply ones I judge inferior.

Then again, it's worth noting that most of the women I just cited were novelists, not playwrights. Indeed, Churchill is the only female playwright I can think of whom I consider great, and even she, of course, has never written a work to compare with the greatest masterpieces written by men. Why is this so?

It would be easy - and hardly entirely wrong! - to reply that sexism is the main reason. And I notice that in many of the arts, there is a gender gap. There is no great symphony by a woman in the classical canon, and indeed few lesser works, either - although the earliest composer with a biography was a woman, Hildegard von Bingen - and while there are many female virtuosi on many instruments, there is no great female conductor on the planet. It is also hard to think of a major painting by a woman (although there are many wonderful minor ones), or a major sculpture, either. In some artistic fields, however, women have lately made major names for themselves: Twyla Tharp is clearly one of America's great choreographers, and Louise Bourgeois has achieved a formidable reputation as a sculptress (as Louise Nevelson did before her).

How to explain that women have reached leading roles in some artistic fields, but not others? Was sexism stronger in the social structures of certain modes of expression? Or do some modes of expression tend to interest women more than others? I don't have answers to those questions, but I don't find it hard to believe that sexism continues to exist in many artistic fields (I've heard comments from classical musicians that you wouldn't believe).

But I also think it's worth noting that among the art forms, theatre seems to have been among the friendliest to women. Not as friendly as fiction, but still friendly. There are plenty of female playwrights with careers, and several major female directors and designers. I support that - indeed, I hardly feel that Rebeck, Ruhl, and Parks don't deserve productions; I'm simply not that impressed by their talent.

And therein lies my rub. I'm confident that eventually there will be more great female playwrights - maybe we'll even reach that 50/50 parity I get the impression Julia Jordan dreams of. But I have my doubts about Rebeck's and Jordan's methods for getting there. I don't much like agitprop, and I'm highly aware that the springs of artistic talent tend to spurt from unlikely sources; talent is, to be blunt, by definition a kind of statistical anomaly. Rectifying statistical injustices may even exacerbate artistic ones, in my experience; in other words, simply producing more plays by women may not in the short run give us better plays (and this in an art form that is all but on financial life support). And in the meantime not seeing some of the great plays could slowly induce a kind of acceptance of mediocrity in the theatre, as we see now in pop music and film (and the stage is already mediocre enough!). So I suppose I'm opposed to sexism, but for artistic reasons I'm also opposed to quotas, which is where I worry Jordan's proposal might lead. I may be wrong; there may be a great many scripts out there by women that are better than what is currently on the boards; but Rebeck, Ruhl and Parks don't give me much hope.



But Caryl Churchill does. I'll say it again - it's shocking she's only just seen a major production of Top Girls (above) on Broadway, and has never gotten one in (wait for it) Boston! If Theresa and Julia want to get out the torches and pitchforks to rectify that injustice, count me in. But if their opposition to injustice is really a form of service to their own careers, well, I may take a pass this time, and wait for the next Churchill to emerge.