Francesca Zambello, artistic director of the Washington National Opera, which outpaces other major opera companies in hiring women as conductors and creative team members.
In Tuesdays (10/17) New York Times, Marc Tracy writes, “A new report found that women are dramatically underrepresented when it comes to conducting, directing and designing operas at leading American companies. Observers have long decried the lack of opportunities given to female conductors and composers at leading opera companies. A recent study found that women have been dramatically underrepresented in other crucial creative roles as well. Men accounted for 95 percent of the conducting credits at the 11 largest American opera companies between 2005 and 2021, the researchers found. But men also dominated other major roles in opera … they accounted for 85 percent of directing credits, 88 percent of set-designer credits, 85 percent of lighting-designer credits and 59 percent of costume-designer credits. The findings were included in ‘Unequal Opera-tunities: Gender Inequality and Non-Standard Work in US Opera Production,’ a research article that was published online last Tuesday … ‘In 2023, these rates of representation for women are not OK … because women are out there, they’re working in other fields and other performing arts,’ one of the paper’s authors, Caitlin Vincent, a senior lecturer in creative industries at the University of Melbourne, said … She wrote the paper with Amanda Coles, a senior lecturer in arts and cultural management at Deakin University, also in Melbourne.”
