Given these findings, The Royal Opera’s decision to join the Keychange initiative is both timely and strategic. The company announced the pledge a little more than a month after being widely criticised for its 2020 season announcement, which featured only one woman conductor alongside eighteen men (Brown, 2019). The company is also facing mounting pressure from the arts funding body, Arts Council England, which is prioritising organisations that champion diversity (Gardner, 2017). By joining the 50/50 pledge, The Royal Opera has not only aligned itself with 250 music organisations across the wider music sector but positioned itself as a progressive leader in opera.
Indeed, on the surface, The Royal Opera’s commitment to achieving 50/50 gender balance across its creative teams appears to be a productive strategy, particularly as women constitute less than a third of creative practitioners hired over the fourteen seasons.
However, as the closer analysis of the company’s hiring outcomes shows, the greatest imbalance of gender representation is not across creative teams as a whole. Instead, the most pervasive imbalance is located within individual roles on creative teams, specifically the role of stage director, which serves in a capacity of artistic leadership, and the roles of lighting, video/projection, and costume designer, each of which aligns to gendered
In light of this, a more effective organisational strategy would focus on achieving gender balance in occupational categories, rather than overall teams. In addition, the strategy would be weighted toward increased representation in the most significant creative positions. As each creative team is comprised of multiple roles of varying power and authority, this disparity must be acknowledged as part of any attempt to address gender imbalance. The position of stage director enjoys the greatest visibility, prestige, and artistic authority as part of a production and also plays a critical role in determining which other practitioners will be hired. So long as there is a gender imbalance in this role in particular, the artistic voices of women will not be fairly represented on operatic stages. As such, achieving increased representation in the position of stage director should be
prioritised above any efforts to achieve 50/50 gender balance across roles with significantly less creative power.
Conclusion
The analysis of The Royal Opera’s hiring outcomes establishes an important
benchmark that can be used to promote a better understanding of gender representation in creative roles in the opera industry. More critically, the data also provides a means to evaluate the company’s strategy to address gender imbalance over time. Despite The Royal Opera’s pledge to achieve 50/50 balance across its creative teams by 2022, the company has not publicly acknowledged any particular strategies being employed to achieve this aim. Regardless, our analysis suggests that the aim is, in itself, problematic. The company’s efforts would be far more effective by targeting those positions with the most creative power, as well as those that align with gendered stereotypes of work, rather than endeavouring to achieve gender parity across wider creative teams. More generally, the discussion reveals the need for frameworks for addressing gender imbalance within
individual cultural sectors that rely on sector-specific knowledge and quantitative data from the field.
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