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Breaking the second silence of #WakingTheFeminists

Power, harassment, silence and theatre

I am tired and angry about continuously seeing the ‘women as victim’ trope performed on our stages and screens.  In the few instances where women are portrayed as seeking power, they are often ultimately punished for doing so.

Are we staging the truth of women’s existence to expose it to the light, or are we denying access to alternative narratives that would help women express their strength and power in a positive way? I think both are simultaneously true.

I was deeply uncomfortable recently watching the Suppliant Women on the stage of the Gaiety – precisely they were suppliant, not defiant. I also wonder about the cost for those women who perform these types of roles, and are cast to perform them again and again over the lifetime of their careers – what does this do to them?  

I recall Joanna Crawley’s excellent analysis of Polish theatre in this regard, which she spoke about at a #WakingTheFeminists public meeting. What does it do to us as audiences when we witness artwork about past traumas?  Are we at some level, traumatised or re-traumatised by that experience, in our bodies, or does art help us reframe and transform the traumas of the past? Theatre, as much as it has the power to positively transform our culture and be inclusive and healing, also has the power to replicate and perpetuate its inequalities.

According to psychoanalyst Darian Leader, we literally stage our traumas to achieve both closeness and distance from them. We connect with fictional stories to reconnect what is broken in us. In his book The New Black, Mourning Death and Melancholia he argues that “the place of the arts in a culture [is as] a set of instruments to help us to mourn. The arts exist to allow us to access grief… In our unconscious use of the arts, we have to go outside ourselves to get back inside.”

We need to pull our focus right back and see and hear clearly what the theatre is showing us about women’s experiences. Until we acknowledge and address the violence against women in real life, the theatre we unconsciously programme will continue to scream this violence at us. Will we finally listen? Will we finally speak the unspoken in the real world? Will we make space for more powerful and strengthening narratives about women to allow us to shape a different destiny for half of humanity? This isn’t just about one person, or one incident, or only the theatre sector. It’s everywhere. But in the theatre, we have the power to start to tell different stories from different perspectives, to begin to reshape the culture.

This has begun with Grace Dyas, Lisa Tierney Keogh and others and their great bravery in speaking up. Their truths begin to displace the deceit and abuse of power that has gone unchallenged too long.

It also challenges those of us who may not have been directly affected by bullying or abuse, but knew it went on. We had all heard stories. I believe there’s not a single senior person working in Irish theatre today who hasn’t heard the stories, or has been aware of bullying, abusive behaviour.

Both the abuse, and the culture of silence around it, place each person who has been abused by these men into an invidious situation. On the one hand they are told to be brave and speak out, sometimes at great personal cost, and on the other hand they are told to be cautious, careful and keep quiet, also often at great personal cost.

It maybe difficult to do, but I believe that for our culture to change it means that many more women and men will need to come forward to share their stories about their experiences, and what they have witnessed. I just hope that if and when they do come forward that they have support and are fully informed of their rights and legal options, and if they do speak out they don’t have to do so in fear of potentially negative consequences. There are some risks in speaking out, but there’s great power there too, especially when many voices join together. I also believe there has never been a better time to speak out than now, and I hope the conditions for truth-telling continue to improve.

Everybody knows
Not all bullies are sexual predators, but all sexual predators are bullies. Harassment and bullying have been an ‘Open Secret’ for years. The trouble with open secrets is that that while they may appear to give people some comfort that they are not alone, because they sometimes share their experiences in private, open secrets also shut the conversation down. They go only so far, and the perpetrators are not publicly held to account. If ‘everybody knows’ and nobody does anything about it, I can only imagine how much more isolating that is for people at the receiving end of abuse. It is  protective it is of perpetrators. Where there is not explicit condemnation of abusive behaviour is it perceived as implicitly condoning it, and that needs to change. Open secrets are like severely gerrymandered districts, the truth flows silently along certain planes, but rarely crosses boundaries into the open. ‘Everybody knows’ doesn’t really mean everybody knows until an open secret becomes a public truth. And it’s only when things become public that we can really deal with them in the open, and change them.

It seems crazy to me that one set of laws (defamation) are actively set against another set of laws that are there to protect us from harassment and abuse. We have work to do on the legal structures too.

I’ve been thinking about complicity, and what we can do right now when faced with others in powerful situations which they abuse. As a producer and company manager I once warned a young intern about taking up a job at a certain theatre because of the stories I had heard over the years, and I was concerned for her. It seemed like all I could do at the time. But it’s not enough. We need to figure out ways to speak up when we see or hear something, and not leave those who have been abused to tell their story alone – a clear step by step process. I’ve had to do a lot of questioning myself. And often I don’t know what to do, but I’m working on it.

Those of us who have some power and roles of leadership, whether as executives or board members have a responsibility to create, promote and enforce structures and cultures of openness where people can speak freely and report abuse, bullying and misconduct without fear of retribution, without fear of a damaged career, without fear of being discredited and disbelieved. We can no longer be bystanders, and just shake our heads and roll our eyes. We need to actively open paths to truth, and be proactively supportive. And there’s a lot more to be done to ensure the conditions for abuse never arise again in our workplaces.

We cannot achieve gender equality in Irish Theatre without facing up to cultures of abuse on and off stage. It is not enough just to say we are open to women and expect them to come forward without doing the work to make our spaces, procedures and structures safe, welcoming and supportive, and communicating exactly what can be done to seek redress when people abuse their power. We all need to do a better job of communication, to really listen to each other, without dominance.

In order to support those who wish to speak out and to change the culture of abuse and silence, we all need to be more knowledgeable about:

  • clear definitions of harassment and abuse
  • How to report an incident, whether it has just happened for from years back
  • Who to report an incident to
  • Who is responsible for investigating an incident, and the process involved
  • What to do if someone reports an incident to you, and the steps to take
  • What your legal rights are
  • What supports are out there and how to access them (incl. counselling, legal, HR)
  • How to talk about this in public if you wish to do so

Powerful men and abuse of power
Power is a very useful thing. It can do great good in the right hands. In the wrong hands it does great damage when it is abused. All abuse is an abuse of power. Some very powerful men have a finely honed calibration of the balance of power, not just in general, but in every particular situation and social setting. They understand who has power and who doesn’t and to what precise extent. They gauge minutely who they can and can’t abuse, and how and when they can indulge in all sorts of bad and criminal behaviour with impunity. They know when and where and with who to be utterly charming, gregarious, entertaining, generous. They understand how to hold on to their power at all costs, to implicate others in their power structure, and to maintain silence and complicity. They know to associate themselves with other powerful people to increase the feeling of hopelessness in speaking out in those who may wish to challenge them. They hide in plain sight. They relentlessly go after anyone who may critique or call them out even in the mildest way. They destroy or attempt to destroy the careers of those who would challenge them. And when the are held to account for anything they immediately become a wounded pathetic animal, lashing out in fury, acting the victim, seeking sympathy for their supposedly ‘unjust vilification’ (as if their predicament, entirely of their own making, is worth vastly more sympathy, than those they have wronged). They are given the most ironic of platforms of power, on boards, on air, on television, at the top of companies and institutions, are funded/paid vast sums of money, are highly successful in many fields, can look forward to a comfortable retirement on a decent pension, and this exercise of toxic power and abusive leadership is allowed to go unchallenged because of this success, and their ability to extend and leverage their own power and dismiss others. And eventually, if they have to face up to public outrage over their misdeeds, they are more sorry about their own diminished power than feeling genuine remorse and empathy with those they have abused. We have seen this with recent cases in the US, but it is a common pattern.

They depend on silence. But then sometimes the day arrives when their power fades. Each person they have abused holds a jigsaw piece, that if all those various pieces were put together, we would all see a very different picture from that carefully cultivated public persona. When the silence begins to crack, we all begin to see a little more clearly the long-term damage that silence about abuse does to all of us caught in this malign web of power.

Silence as Trauma
It’s the silence that keeps us in the web of trauma. Our culture records, stores and reshapes our collective memories, including our collective traumas. Trauma, personal or collective, remains invisible and deadly until silence is broken. Breaking silence is necessary for healing to occur.

Two years ago, as #WakingTheFeminists started to break silence about gender inequality, TRAUMA the exhibition was running at Science Gallery Dublin. One of the curators, neuroscientist and Director of Science Gallery London Daniel Glaser, wrote in his introduction:

“It’s the burying of traumatic memory for the individual, the family, the culture that preserves its power. And this imperfect encoding and uncontrollable recall lies behind post-traumatic stress disorder. When memories break through in unrelated everyday life situations it is the chaotic, fragmented echo of the original traumatic moment that shatters the conscious present.”

To me, storytelling, whatever its format is one of the most powerful ways we shape our world. The stories we tell ourselves, our cultural narratives, define who we are, and who we are not; what we talk about; and what we don’t talk about; what and who we include and what and who we exclude.

It’s time to reshape our stories, to repurpose their power. It’s time to break again the hold of silence about sexual harassment in all our power structures.

There is no democracy without meritocracy; there is no meritocracy without equality of opportunity; equality of opportunity cannot effectively exist when one group is silenced.

Equal voice
Equal opportunity
Equal pay
Equal representation
Equal bodily autonomy
Equal power

This second silence is breaking. We are taking back our stories; We are taking back our stages; We are taking back our bodies; We are telling our truths. What has been whispered will become a roar until it shatters every pane of illusion and truth is finally acknowledged, and our culture tilts towards honesty and equity. Beyond the breaking of silence there are new horizons of healing, resilience and growth, and ultimately a shift in the balance of power. I have huge admiration for those who are already speaking out – I believe and support them. I hope more will follow in their own time with their own truths.

This is not a chorus of Supplication. This is a chorus of Defiance. This is a chorus of Strength & Support. This is a chorus of Change. Come Sing.

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One Thing More #WakingTheFeminists closing speech, Abbey Theatre

One Year Later, 1800 homeless women live here in Ireland.

One Year Later, over 1000 women live in direct provision here.

Over 3,000 women here have had to travel abroad for an abortion.

And the time to close the gender pay gap globally has widened to 170 years.

One Year Later, I had wanted to talk of Hope, but the outrage remains.

Making theatre is a privilege – it’s not life or death. Behind each of these numbers is a woman in a life or death situation. If we can’t make room for the marginalised to share their own voice from our stages, then what the hell are we here for?

If any of you doubted the real-world consequences of permitting male characters such wide ranging scope to do whatever they want and still be credible figures of power, while vastly restricting female characters’ access to powerful identities:  LOOK AT WHAT JUST HAPPENED [US election result].  That came from our CULTURE.  WE shape our culture, and how we shape it has consequences.

Women are central to the great events and issues of our time.   Our place is not at the cultural periphery, because inequality of voice compounds the inequality of our power.  Exclusion festers until it explodes. Listening to predominantly male narratives, is not only delusional, it’s dangerous. In failing half our talent, we fail our art, we fail our culture, and we fail our society.

Attentive listening and inclusion of other voices is a powerful restorative. Equality is not a luxury we can afford to defer. Equality is a muscle that improves with Feminism and exercising Feminism daily strengthens everyone of us.

Getting in touch with my own dormant feminist muscle through #WakingTheFeminists has been an immense privilege and a transformative experience.  Each of us working on the campaign will carry this learning into every area of our future endeavours. It will not be lost.

To female artists, this year you have heard loud and clear – your gender does not make you less capable of creating extraordinary theatre.  Your voice is vital, and we need it. The flaw is not in YOUR talent or ability, it is in our perception of it.  LOOK AT THIS, THIS IS WHAT COLLABORATIVE, FEMINIST POWER LOOKS LIKE, and it is a JOYOUS, playful, inclusive thing.

To male artists, thank you for listening and thank you for your support, for recognising value of #WakingTheFeminists in all our creative lives. I hope you understand that this movement is about expanding all our opportunities and talents, not diminishing anyone’s. We welcome hearing more from you in this conversation, because all want the same thing really – to live creative lives to our fullest potential.   

Now, the point of any public campaign of protest is to get a seat at the table – to rebalance the power.  All year, week after week, those of us organising #WakingTheFeminists have been pulling up chairs at all sorts of tables. We have found ourselves at tables we never imagined we’d be sitting at!  So that when you sit down to do your artistic work, you can do so in greater confidence that you will have a fair and equal chance that it will meet the audience it deserves.

And with that opportunity comes responsibility. Women of the theatre –  make your work with an urgency like never before. Take on this research as a creative challenge, not a fait accompli.  Be more ambitious than ever – equality can only be achieved with your full participation and your creative curiosity.  Be brave, be big, be rigorous, but as writer Danai Gurira says: Get It Done.

The research shows us where we can improve. It’s not about blame. It shows none of us are immune to bias.  Numbers are important, but they are not the whole story.  Awareness and action need to work hand in hand. No one organisation can do this alone.   Implementing widely initiatives like the Abbey’s visionary Guiding Principles on Gender Equality will help.

We all have an individual responsibility, AND there is additional onus on our leaders to ensure the appropriate practices to support this change are activated. It’s not just the right thing to do, it’s the law.

Section 42 of the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission Act 2014 places a positive duty on public sector bodies to have regard to the need to eliminate discrimination, promote equality, and protect human rights, in their daily work.

This applies to all bodies financed, even partially, with public money.

To all of you, and especially to you leaders of companies, I know, through all our conversations this year, that each of you believe passionately in equality in your hearts. Together we can to figure out with our heads, how to put what’s in our hearts on our stages. We are not defined by these statistics we have seen here today – use them as a springboard not a weight.

This public phase of #WakingTheFeminists is drawing to a close, it has done its job as rocket fuel for this movement. But, we all know there is more to be done. What comes next is slower and more deliberative, because true change takes time and collective, careful attention to be deeply rooted.

In order to manage the legacy project, we have set up a temporary non-profit company. It’s two aims are to publish the research, and to establish a learning programme in gender equality. Later today, we are coming together with our colleagues in the theatre to continue that work.

Last year we asked you t’ Stand with Us. This year we’re inviting you to make equality a reality within 5 years. Today is our momentous opportunity for leadership. Each one of you decides how this story, this history, plays out – WE have it in our collective power to be the first theatre community in the world to attain and sustain full gender equality. Imagine what that would be like.

All inequality is an outrage. Rage out against it in determination without despair until there is nothing to be outraged about. In this chaotic global moment, let’s open up – ignite ALL our stages with big complex messy conversations, using ALL our talent, ALL our genders, ALL our diversity. Make our theatre a beacon for equity, not a bystander to a burning world. International Women’s Day 2021 beckons us. LET’S GET IT DONE.

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Achieving a Feminist Republic, Mansion House

Talk given to Labour Women

What more needs to be done in order for us to really live in a Feminist Republic?

I’ve recently had conversations with with three female top executives in major leading corporate companies – companies dedicated to achieving gender equality. One explained that over one month, she had been the only female in every single meeting she had attended. Another outlined that while they are making progress in this area, it’s incremental, and not seeing it happen fast enough is demoralising. They say they’ve been inspired by the #WakingTheFeminists movement.

Yet, their stories, and stories about countless women like them, changing their world day by day, are not reaching our main stages or screens or airwaves. I’m fed up sitting politely in theatres regularly having to translate the protagonist’s experience to my gender. It’s not that there aren’t any great lead roles for women in theatre. It’s more that those roles tend to be women who kill their children, shoot themselves or throw themselves under a train. ‘Strong woman as cautionary tale.’ What if we expanded the narrative? What if we had a theatrical reference for Hillary Clinton other than Lady Macbeth?

The republic has to be imagined before it can be created. We create ourselves through stories. To achieve a feminist republic within the next 20 years we need to create imaginative spaces that allow us to explore that possibility, exactly the kind of space that the arts can and should provide. #WakingTheFeminists, Women In Film and Television, Women on Air, Composing The Feminists, Women in Advertising, all know in our bones and our everyday working lives – as women, we’re continually culturally famished.

Boys and men are spoon-fed their cultural icons and heroes, breakfast, dinner and tea. If we want a feminist future, then we have to start a more balanced cultural diet across all artforms. Girls have precious few external structures from which to build positive complex versions of ourselves as women.

It matters who is in charge of our stories, and who is doing the telling. Women’s cultural space matters as much as our political space, our economic space, and our physical space. These all work together to either diminish or affirm our humanity and equality. As a society we cannot be economically rich while we remain culturally impoverished.

A snapshot of our deficient cultural diet: 11% of history is written about women; less than 15% of plays on our main stages are written or directed by women; less than 28% women’s voices are heard on air; less than 16% of our films are written or directed by women.  In some cases the statistics for women’s work have diminished, not increased over time.  We can go backwards as easily as we go forwards – there is no such thing as a ‘natural’ progression towards equality over time. Just ‘waiting our turn’ is not going to work.

Yet women are the majority of ticket buyers and audience members in our theatres, but a minority as far as what happens on our stages. This damages our collective ability to advance – inequality of voice, inequality of visibility, perpetuates an inequality of power. Equality legislation and policies, as fundamentally important as they are, only give us the possibility of equality, not the actuality. They are a starting point, the danger is the destination is on a eternally receding horizon. Equality in principle must be back up by equality in practice.

#WakingTheFeminists aim is simple: Equality for women in Irish theatre. Equal opportunity, equal advancement, equal pay, safe workplaces, childcare – you’ve heard it all before. The theatre community is small, but its reach is wide – and we hope that what we achieve will impact beyond the theatre world.

So, we need more stories by and about women, told from a woman’s perspective throughout our culture, reaching wider audiences, performed in prominent places, more often. Otherwise there is no strong counter-narrative to the dominant patriarchy and its constant feedback loop affirming male dominance. We need to make it normal, not exceptional to listen to female voices.

And what women have to say through our artistic work is not just for a female audience, it’s for everyone, in as much as male work is assumed to be for everyone. And, yes, there is quality in equality! Meritocracy remains a fallacy until there is full equality of access and opportunity  – it’s only effective on even playing field. It’s one of those tricky ways language is used to exclude women from advancement.
On the morning of the 12th Nov last, as I waited to go on Morning Ireland, discussing the matter with a government minister in the green room, he commented,   ‘but surely it’s about picking the best plays.’   It should be, but it’s not. You can’t rise on merit if someone else’s unacknowledged privilege is prioritised. The flaw is not in the talent and ability of our female artists, (scientists, politicians, economists, etc.) It is in our perception of them, steeped in a culture that does not value women.

There are many deep and subtle causes, structural and systemic, that contribute towards gender inequality, and the solutions are complex. Unconscious bias is everywhere. Inequality is a socially transmitted disease. Without the tools and training in the practicalities of addressing gender inequality, and the focused participation of leaders, nothing will actually change. Awareness is not enough. Only by taking rapid, extensive, and sustained measures to adjust our perception will we achieve herd immunity to this disease.  

As well as commissioning groundbreaking quantitative research, #WakingTheFeminists are working with leading theatre organisations in order to set up policies, assessment plans, and training programmes that will address several aspects of the issue. From these actions we have to see results – soon.  We co-exist in a globally connected community, and we will achieve our aims faster by working together.  

While the Abbey found itself at the centre of a maelstrom last November, since then its reaction has been astonishing. The Board have developed and adopted several key principles to address inequality, that are visionary, far-reaching and practical. Combined, they place gender equality at the centre of the organisation. They understand it has to be addressed first at highest level – it’s a board responsibility, and then to be implemented at every level. I am fortunate as I join the Board, not to have to be the lone voice for gender equality, because they have all gone on that journey and fully embraced it. Because Lian Bell started a conversation we’d all been waiting for.

Ultimately, though, at its very heart it’s simple. Danai Gurira actor, and playwright of the Tony award-winning play Eclipsed speaking at the Lilly Awards in NY, gave this wonderful advice to women writers: ‘Go where you are loved.’  Hearing this, to me, it correlates that we must have structures, institutions, companies and champions that love women and want them to succeed. Love, in the respect, listening, encouragement, trust way, not in the ‘oh, you’re so hot’ way.

Finding ourselves as accidental activists with #WakingTheFeminists, here’s what we’ve learned so far:

  • Be publicly vocal on every platform and at every opportunity
  • Demonstrate the real impact on women’s lives
  • Place accountability at the top of governance and with leadership
  • Make specific and achievable asks that address structural inequality
  • Empower others to speak out, tell their story, get organised, and take personal and collective action
  • Include men in the conversation
  • No blame, focus on solutions we can all be responsible for
  • Meet weekly, use Slack (it’s a brilliant app)
  • Be clear about the issues and back them up with statistics
  • Count the numbers to change them
  • Listen for what’s going on under the surface as power dynamics begin to shift
  • Move fast, but understand that lasting change takes patient negotiation to achieve
  • Create space, time and training for people to learn about the issues and co-create the solutions
  • Create mutual amplification with sister causes
  • Have Meryl Streep in your corner, [Meryl makes everything better!]

 

While it feels like there’s been a huge shift in our cultural consciousness, it’s easy to forget that nothing has objectively changed yet: male artists are still in the vast majority on our main stages. As a former producer, there’s nothing like setting a date for Opening Night. #WakingTheFeminists have set a deadline of five years to achieve full gender equality in Irish Theatre.

It’s quite probable that another 100 years could pass without achieving a fully feminist republic. We need to rapidly accelerate the pace of change across all our institutions. Set a deadline. Make achieving gender equality a stated priority at every opportunity.

Finally, women of the theatre will no longer fade into the wings. We will not wait.  The stakes too high for us, we’ve lost so much already. They are too high for you, and for every other woman out there trying to make her way in the world, to allow the status quo to continue.  No woman should wait for her voice to be heard, for her body to be fully her own, for her wages to be equal, for her full potential to be recognised.  We must disrupt the culture. The time for action, the time for equality is NOW. To change the future, change the story.