Princeton Student's Study Says There's a Gender Bias. But I'm Still Celebrating.

A much-publicized study - Emily Glassberg Sands' Princeton University thesis - confirms that more plays are produced by men than by women, but here's the shocker - it's the fault of female artistic directors.

The New York Times reports that when the blame was laid, an audience member blurted out, "Say that again?" I would wager many of you did the same thing when you first heard the news.

The study says there are fewer female playwrights than male playwrights. This contention is not a new one. I don't think this means much, though. We're in an era in which gender roles are changing. That takes time. Women are slowly coming into their own as playwrights, led by such luminaries as Sarah Ruhl (my personal favorite), Theresa Rebeck, and Wendy Wasserstein. I have a feeling in the near future the number of women playwrights will significantly increase. No data to back that up, of course, but based on who populates the theatre community I've experienced and the college writing classes I have sat in on, we're doing just fine.

More data from the study even encourages me: work by female and male playwrights is produced at the same rate. So once more women are in the field, if all stays constant, we will actually achieve the 50-50 production rate people seem to clamor for.

It is Sands' second study that is the most concerning here: she sent a play with a male name on it to some theatres and with a female name on it to other theatres. The plays "by women" were rated lower than those "by men," despite having the exact same content. And all those doing that rating were women themselves. Sure, you can spin that as a "Mean Girls" phenomenon, which will only perpetuate the backstabbing stereotype that women already endure. It's tough data to refute, but I really want to refute it. Maybe women are sabotaging each other - but what if they're not? If we assume that women are to blame, isn't that continuing to worsen the lot of women in the arts?

Causality cannot be assumed on the basis of one study alone. We should not be making concrete conclusions about anything Sands found until the work is replicated, preferably many times. And I hope that when it is, the results are different. But even if they are not, we cannot go vilifying the women calling the shots in the theater, diminishing their credibility and furthering gender discrimination there. Women must take it upon themselves to improve their fairness - perhaps this can serve as a wake-up call. I applaud Emily Glassberg Sands for engaging in this work and starting a debate. Getting people talking is always a good thing for women struggling to achieve equality.

With the rates of actual production of work by men equal to work by women, however, it appears whatever gender discrimination Sands may have found is not actually having an overall effect on female success in the playwrighting world. Whether this is because men are overcompensating or not, I don't really care. Were I a female playwright, it wouldn't matter to me if the theater producing my work were helmed by a man or by a woman. What would matter is that my work was produced at all. And that is what I choose to focus on.

If women are discriminating against themselves, they better wake up and stop engaging in reverse-discrimination. But I'm not ready to accept that as a conclusion. And if it is true, the solution is simple: Women, wake up and stop it. Here's the bottom line: Women are produced at the same rate men are, and as female playwrights proliferate, so will female-written work. That is cause for celebration.