Find them here and they are excellent. One thing we learn is that women playwrights are more likely to write stories about other women. Women playwrights are also more likely to write plays with fewer major characters (slide 19). Outside evaluators are most likely to perceive the story's characters are less likable, if they believe a given script was written by a woman (slide 31). They also judge the economic prospects of a script to be poorer (slide 32). It is female artistic directors who have the harshest judgments of scripts submitted under female names (slide 34). Women writing plays about other women have the toughest time (slide 36). On Broadway, female-written shows are 18 percent more profitable than male-written shows yet they do not have longer running times (slides 44 and 45).
The original paper is here. She'll be on The Colbert Show on July 2.
Hat tip goes to the indispensable Literary Saloon blog.
Small nit. It’s The Colbert Report, with a play on the silent “t” in report.
I’m ignorant of what it takes to make the show go on on broadway, but I wonder if the playwright have to come to the table with a lot of financial backing to make it happen? (Is the quality of play the deciding factor in the show going on, or some other component – financial backing, risk taking characteristic, other?)
I say this in part because I’m an unsigned music fan and there are so many excellent bands that never get exposure and never see the light of day – for various reasons – but the quality of the band’s songs or performance often has nothing to do with it.
Small beef with slides 44 and 45: revenue /= profits. But if we assume they are equivalent, is the takeaway for female playrights that they should use male or gender ambiguous pen names?
And does this research make any of you think about opening or investing in an all female playwright theatre to take advantage of the superior revenue generation of female-written plays? (Not a rhetorical “obviously not” question…)
If you wish to signal how little teevee you watch, it is, in fact, the Colbert Show
Women economists are more likely to write papers with female protagonists (in this case, women playwrights).
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Why do people still find it surprising that women are the harshest judges of other women (I assume that is why you emphasized the ‘female’). Has there ever been any study of anything in which they are not?
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