Has the good fight been lost? The representation of women in creative leadership roles in the theatre has hardly improved since anti-discrimination and affirmative action policies began 30 years ago. More depressingly there’s now evidence that in the past decade things have actually gone backwards.
Last week the Australia Council for the Arts released the Women in Theatre report commissioned in July last year to bring research on the issue of women in creative leadership in Australia up to date, after well over a decade of apparent neglect. The lack of work being either directed or written by women on Australian stages, particularly our mainstages, crashed back on to the agenda in late 2009 when the 2010 programs for Company B and the MTC included astoundingly few women. Since then, there have been a number of forums and roundtables to restart the conversation on gender equity, culminating in this report.
