How this Study Began
Valerie Weak
By Valerie Weak, November 2019
In June 2011, when I was feeling frustrated by a stalled-out acting career, I started tracking the gender of actors, directors and playwrights in the shows I was seeing in the San Francisco Bay Area, and sharing the results via a blog I had been writing about my acting career. I named this the Counting Actors Project.
As Counting Actors grew, I moved my monthly post from a personal blog to a more visible blog/website called Works by Women San Francisco, run by Christine Young, a faculty member at University of San Francisco. In 2014 WomenArts and Martha Richards commissioned the report Not Even which used data from the project’s first 500 shows to examine trends in gender representation in the region. And in January 2019, seven and a half years and over 1000 shows later, I published my last post and stopped counting.
Over time, the energy needed to amplify and share the monthly post was growing. As more and more voices have joined the conversations around gender parity and other facets of equity, diversity and inclusion, my methods of distributing the monthly blog post were becoming less effective. I reached the limit of how loudly I could ‘shout’ what I was sharing.
Also, through working on this project, I’ve become so much more aware of the systems and structures that are keeping us from parity. And this awareness has shifted my interests towards wanting to address those systems and structures more directly.
Data Collection Challenges
In 2011 when I started counting, I was much less aware of gender as a spectrum, and only saw the binary. In creating this project, I’ve always relied on folks who were watching shows to report what they saw onstage and in their programs as the method for data gathering. I knew at the time I started that I wouldn’t be able to count racial/ethnic data in this way. Asking someone to guess about another person’s race based on how they looked or what name was in a program was inherently problematic.
And as my understanding of gender has moved beyond binary, I’ve come to see this as a flaw in my data collection on gender as well. In order for this kind of counting to be truly accurate and representational, I believe it needs to be self-reported by the artists involved, and this mostly volunteer project just didn’t have the bandwidth for that.
Gender Issues Persist
I am afraid that local theater makers may think I have stopped counting because the community has ‘solved’ or ‘fixed’ the issue of gender parity. Let me be very clear: gender parity is in no way solved, fixed or done in the Bay Area Theater community. Some of the data in this report will show that we are trending towards parity, and some of the data is less conclusive.
This report examines the data from the 605 shows counted between November 2014 and December 2018, and also compares the more recent data to the data covered by Not Even. After reading it, I hope you will have a clearer understanding of the ways in which the Bay Area theater community is Still Not Even.
About Valerie Weak
VALERIE WEAK is an actor, teaching artist and gender parity advocate. She has performed at San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, CenterREP, Word for Word and Shotgun Players, and many other SF Bay Area Companies.
Her on-camera work includes 13 Reasons Why as well as industrials and indie films. She teaches for American Conservatory Theater in their Young Conservatory and Studio programs. She is excited to be part of the Instigator team for the inaugural Bay Area Womens’ Theater Festival (Spring 2020) and grounded by recent participation in the CalShakes Transformative Justice Training cohort. She speaks frequently about her research on gender parity in San Francisco Bay Area theatres, and in October 2019 she was a featured panelist at the StateraArts national women in theatre conference in New York.