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When Contest Winners Are Mostly Men—or Mostly Women

ON WOMEN'S ISSUES - by G.L. Horton

SH wrote: "RE: 'Maybe we need a letter for no females...' I suspect that's tongue in cheek. But, if serious, I noticed that my hometown theatre, Spokane Civic Theatre, also picked 7 plays by men out of only 35 entries. What's odd is that it's totally blind judging--I know it for a fact. How do you suppose this happens? Probably because most of the submitters were men. Thoughts?"

It isn't tongue in cheek at all.

I think some women as well as most men are convinced that male characters and themes and "issues" are more dramatic, important, better. It only takes one person who dislikes plays about or by women on each round of readers to screen out all but a few females by the final round. The report on Women In Theatre from NYC a year ago demonstrated the math. And once a contest posts a list of all-male winners, a prudent woman who has done her homework will not waste her money sending scripts to that contest-- every year the proportion of male-written scripts will grow, and the chances that the winners will be male will rise.

The opposite can happen too, of course. The Humana has been female-dominated for a number of years now: I bet every female writer in America sends a script to it. The critics who disliked this year's batch of plays came very near to saying that the selection process must be deeply flawed to result in so many women and such weak plays. (4/21/05)

 

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