After the boxes have been ticked…
The following is the text of the ‘flash talk’ I gave today at a conference called Institutional Transformation: Growth and Change in Post-Pandemic Theatre, held at the Royal Court and organised by James Rowson and Sarah Sigal to mark the publication of their report on institutional change in the British theatre. Congratulations to them and thanks to everyone who came for making it a brilliant day of discussion among academics, people working in the industry, students and members of the public.
After the boxes have been ticked: diversity data and institutional antiracism
It’s a truism that diversity should not be a ‘tick-box exercise’, and I’m sure I don’t need to rehearse for this audience why that is. Nonetheless, institutional antiracism does require some boxes to be ticked. Accepting that this is the case, then, my questions today are about what happens afterwards. What do theatres do with the data they collect? And what could they do with it to further the aims of institutional antiracism?
The first question is easy. Organisations use diversity data to evidence progress against targets to ‘increase diversity’ and/or more accurately to reflect the entity they wish to represent.
Asking how they do this is more revealing.
First, they tend to group racially minoritized people together, now often under the heading of ‘global majority’, which – of course – tells us nothing about the ethnic or racialized constitution of that group, and the inequalities or imbalances it may contain.
Next, organisations tend to report data as percentages rather than in their raw state. The National Theatre, for example, told us in 2021 that the proportion of its freelance staff who were ‘Black, Asian and ethnically diverse’ was 31%, as against 21% in 2016-17. Self-evidently, this is a meaningful change, but what it means remains obscure without more granular data.
The NT has also reported that, between 2016 and 2022, it multiplied by 7 the proportion of writers from the global majority whose plays it staged each year (5%-35%), almost tripled its directors of colour (10%-29%), and made a more modest increase in actors from the global majority, albeit from a far higher base (29%-36%). Here, other data can clarify the picture. For example, the same period saw a drop in overall productions from 22 in 2016 to 18 in 2022, so the impression of growth in the reported percentages is in fact partly an effect of reduced overall output.
We also see an effect, here, of the use of the term ‘global majority’, which obscures two important features of the data. Firstly, most of the writers of colour produced by the NT in this period were not racially minoritised writers living in the UK, and some of those who were were being employed to adapt white classics, or having their stories adapted for the stage by a white writer. Secondly, there has been a significant growth in the number of British-based directors of colour at the NT. That said, in the two peak periods for employing directors of colour recently at the NT (one under Nicholas Hytner and one under Rufus Norris), 58% and 75% of those employed were actually just two people in each case.
Finally, we should note that even the apparently ‘raw’ data of numbers of productions risks misrepresentation. Increased racial diversity at Nicholas Hytner’s NT is largely attributable to the existence of The Shed, where casts, budgets and audiences were all substantially smaller even than the then-Cottesloe-now-Dorfman Theatre. In fact, it was 2001 before a director or writer of colour was programmed outside the National’s smallest auditorium. Even since 2020, 62% of productions by directors of colour have been staged in the Dorfman. Counting productions, then, risks giving equal weight to things that have distinctly unequal impact on the activity and culture of an organisation.
So what could arts organisations do?
First, as I’ve shown here, organisations could use more granular data to track more specific changes than can be ascertained from aggregated numbers.
One more brief example. When Rafia Hussain and I analysed the employment of racially minoritized producers in UK theatre, we found that racially minoritized producers were 33% more likely to work as show producers than the average respondent, 50% more likely to be Artist Development Producers and 72% more likely to work in Participation. They were 68% less likely to have an executive role. We could plot a fairly straight line on a graph, then, showing that as the status of the role decreases, the likelihood that it will be occupied by a producer of colour goes up. A combination of diversity initiatives, glass ceilings and an infrastructure that’s often informal and contingent could, of course, easily produce this situation.
Organisations could, then, use these data to analyse the underlying racialized conditions of their operation. Two areas where the NT could not report progress in its recent diversity data were its permanent staff and audiences, which remained stubbornly at 12% and 11% respectively. In other words, if you are carrying either a permanent pass or a ticket for the National Theatre, you’re about four times less likely to be a person of colour than the average Londoner. An arts organisation’s permanent staff and the people who spend money and time on its products form the relational foundation of its identity, and if the National Theatre of 2022 is anything to go by, they’re significantly more likely to be white than a random sample of the UK population 11 years earlier.
This story – of people of colour being introduced in growing numbers to facilitate a fundamentally white relational structure – is where I’ll end. That, it seems to me, is the starting point for what we do after the boxes have been ticked.