Broadway Leaving Money on the Table

Since I read this research paper by Justin Wolfers and Joseph price, I have had a keen interest in the use of formal academic tools to provide irrefutable evidence of biases that are difficult to observe. That paper used the calls by basketball umpires to provide evidence that black players are penalized by umpires more frequently than would be expected if calls were to be distributed randomly.

Now, a new story in the NYT here shows the advancement of this idea into the investigation of the existence or not of gender bias in the theatre industry. Emily Sands, a student at Princeton undertook three interrelated studies to answer the question by reviewing whether there is this bias in the industry. Specifically, she examined the number of scripts submitted by men and women, the returns on plays performed by each sex and the reaction of directors (male or female) to scripts produced b people bearing names that are characteristic of males or females.

Emily's findings are interesting to the extent that they confirm the existence of gender bias but also because they reveal the nature of that bias as expressed by directors of either sex. To start with, using data covering 20,000 playwrights obtained from Doollee.com, the study reveals that i spite of the production of scripts at the same rate, there are twice as many men as women. This proportional difference in the membership yields a higher number of scripts produced by male script writers.

Secondly, the study then conducted an experiment in which the same scripts were sent to artistic directors. The difference was that these scripts were marked with names that would betray the sex of the writers. This experiment revealed that men rated scripts presented by either sex the same way.

Thirdly, Emily turned to the Broadway stage to consider the relative number of plays performed on this stage considered the numbers of plays written by women and men in addition to how these performed. Considering 329 plays performed over a decade, the study finds clear evidence of bias. This bias in the sense that plays by women sold 16% higher tickets per week and delivered 18% greater profitability. To my mind, the curious fact is that while they constituted only one eighth of the total, plays by women earned more money but were not kept on stage for much longer.

Apart from the concerns about data quality, this study shows that biases can not only be demonstrated but that they actually occur in ways that are more complex than is conventionally spoken of. My enduring question though is that perhaps it is possible for rival theatre corporations to choose and screen plays written by women and earn the large profits being left on the floor due to the bias against women in Broadway.