Spotlight on Jane Howard
“Being able to reflect on the good, important and often hard work people did was really rewarding,” says the 2019 Arts Journalism Prize winner.
All media: Arts Journalism Prize
Jane Howard, ABC, “How Australian theatre rebalanced its gender disparity”
Jane Howard’s longform essay traces the last ten years at Australia’s eight best-funded theatre companies, members of the Major Performing Arts Group, from an industry where 24% of lead artists were women, to an industry which has reached gender parity.
The judges said: “There has been no more pressing issue in Australian theatre in the past decade than the participation of women in key roles, particularly those of playwright and director. Jane Howard’s meticulous research on gender imbalance powerfully illustrates the depth of the problem and the genuine advances made.”
We interviewed Jane about how she found the story, working with data, and fitting in freelancing alongside a day-job.
How did you find this story?
I’ve basically been following this story since I started writing, which is eight years now. I did a lot of reporting on women in the arts and women in theatre in 2011, and then worked as a research assistant on the 2012 Women in Theatre report. So it’s always kind of been in the back of my mind.
Then last year I was working with Deakin University on a research report to the Ontario Arts Council, looking at the status of women in the arts in Canada. During that process I got really curious again about how the Australian numbers had shifted. I hadn’t looked at that for a few years; I was looking at the story in other ways, but not the numbers.
So as quickly as I could, I did the numbers for 2018 and saw that they were at parity. I started thinking, 2019 will be the 10 year anniversary of what I suspected was the turning event [when director Neil Armfield announced his final season as artistic director of Sydney’s Belvoir St Theatre, shows almost exclusively written and directed by men]. And so I did all the numbers, looking at the years from 2005 to 2019, to confirm that 2010 was the turning point. Through doing those numbers I was able to start pitching: I wanted to get the full story, research it further and really tell the history of the last 10 years.
So you’d been following this story for a while, and you were blogging about it in 2011?
Yeah, I was a little baby blogger. Writing was very much a hobby. It was an amazing time for theatre blogging in Australia. I touched on that in the story as well, there was a real community of people writing in that field. I had this little blog that no one read, and then people read that article and I realised it was a bigger story than I was giving it credit for.
How did you do that research? Did you have any background with data, or did that academic research give you a grounding for how to approach it?
My undergrad degree is actually in science, I majored in genetics at university. So I have a real interest in statistics and data, and have done a bunch of research work.
I went through annual reports, websites, emailed publicists, got all the programs for the last 15 years. I made a ginormous spreadsheet, with 16,000 data points. When you’re doing data work you really want to plug in as much as you can at the beginning stage so you’re not trying to fill in the gaps later, because that’s where it gets really tricky.
So the first step was just to get all that data into excel spreadsheets, then start analysing it, sorting it, and figuring out what were the interesting stories from the data.
And you did all that work as a freelancer? I want to talk a little bit about that — that’s a lot of time-consuming work, without a guarantee that you’ll find a home for it.
I so easily could have told this story in an op-ed. I could have pitched 700 words and just done the numbers for one year and said ‘look how good this is’. But I really wanted to see what the whole picture was. Partly it was just my own curiosity, I knew I wouldn’t be satisfied for myself if I didn’t have the whole picture. I think it’s a really important story.
I don’t freelance full-time, I have a day job. Partly because I have done full-time freelancing and I find it incredibly financially precarious and a stressful situation to be in. It’s not for me. But it also means I can spend a lot of time working on projects like this before they’re picked up, because I have income coming in in other ways. So I can commit time to projects that don’t necessarily have an outcome.
I think that’s a really important thing to share, particularly when there’s a lot of young journalists thinking about how they are going to structure their careers and, increasingly, people are not finding full time journalism jobs and thinking about how they can do this work. So thanks for sharing that.
I would love to have a full time journalism job! But it’s tough, especially when you have a niche specialty, like the arts. So I’ve definitely found that the best way for me to do that is to have a day job and then write. And that means I get to write about the stuff I really care about, and I’m really passionate about, and my writing is better because I’m not financially stressed all the time.
And I think that’s important to talk about, for young journos. I have things like weekends and I have holidays and take time off. It’s nice to get to a point where you step back from all that pressure I think a lot of young journos feel, to be working all the time. I realised I’m not going to do my best work if all I’m doing is freelancing 24/7.
What did it take to get this story up?
We originally planned it to be a month writing and editing. That just got pushed out and pushed out. That’s another nice thing about having day job, when that happens!
I did 17 interviews, of which 15 made it into the final piece, and another four or five conversations on background. I did a lot of reading and research. In that piece I briefly mention things like the Australia Council’s Women In the Arts work in the 1980s, and Playlab’s research in 1995. When I was looking back over the piece, that was a day’s research to find that, read it, figure out what I needed to say, and it becomes essentially a footnote! But you need to do that, you need to have that background and knowledge.
I could have told so many different stories, and gone in so many different directions from all of those interviews. That was the challenge, to synthesise down 10 years into 4000 words.
Then it was about three months back and forth in edits. That wasn’t constant time, there were other news stories coming out that Dee [Jefferson, ABC Arts editor] had to put her energy in because ABC Arts is such a small team. Then there were more interviews we needed to do. In April this year we had all the numbers fact checked, I had to rebuild all the graphs in the data system the ABC uses, which was fun but also a learning curve for me. And then it went up all of a sudden. It felt like a really long process, I was very happy to have it out in the world.
Your piece has a real diversity of voices, including First Nations perspectives and people with disabilities. Was that something that you wanted to incorporate from the beginning?
That was in it from the beginning, that was really important to me. And I think one of the most incredible things that came out of doing all the data was recognising the way diversity has shifted for playwrights and directors in Australia for the last decade. So often when we have these conversations about gender parity, it can become a conversation about white women, and white women are the people who get elevated.
It was really heartening to see all the work that has been done in the industry to make sure it hasn’t just been white women that have been lifted up in this process. I wanted to represent who is actually making work in Australian theatre. But also, for me, as a white woman, I wanted to make sure I was listening to other voices.
By having all those other voices in there, I hope the piece becomes not only a history of the last 10 years, but this snapshot of where people hope we’re going. And you can only ask those questions by having a real diversity of voices.
What impact did the story have? I suppose rather than pointing out a problem, you’re actually celebrating great results…
It was actually really nice to be writing a piece about gender and the arts and have it be a really positive. It was a strange disconnect! I know it was cited at the NOW Opera Conference in Brisbane in April. I’ve had a lot of people that I interviewed and broader people in the industry, respond with really lovely, positive responses.
A lot of people in the theatre industry did a lot of work to get to the point where I can write the story where there is gender parity and there’s a lot more diversity in other regards. And I think it’s really important to be able to highlight that work, and to show it, not just to the people who did that work, but also to people who are trying to make these changes in other industries.
To be able to reflect back to the people who do that work, this is what you did, and this is what has changed. That was really heartening. I’m not sure if there’s a broader impact beyond that, but being able to reflect on the good, important and often hard work people did was really rewarding.
What made you want to be a journalist?
I was doing an undergraduate science degree, writing essays about shoulder hair of Drosophila flies — that’s not a joke. As a hobby while I was doing that, I started a theatre blog. That was really just about having a hobby, an outlet, something that wasn’t related to science.
I’d always loved writing but I found this passion for writing about theatre, and looking at the ways Australian artists are telling stories through art, through theatre and performance.
I was really lucky when I was a young writer and wasn’t really thinking about being a professional journalist at all, a woman called Amanda Pepe became the editor of a publication in Adelaide called The Adelaide Review. And she wanted more diverse writers, and she wanted young women to write for the publication. She got in touch with me and that’s how I started writing professionally.
And are you still juggling your day job in science with writing?
My day job is in marketing, I left the science world completely behind. I’m really interested in statistical analysis, and how we can apply data to journalism and arts writing in particular but I’m no longer in the science world.
Have any colleagues that you’ve worked with wanted tips on how to do data journalism? Or would you have any advice for journalists who want to start playing with data?
I think a lot of it is just playing around with Excel. It’s the most incredible tool for analysing and synthesising data. I think people either get scared of it or think they can’t use it, but it’s actually quite an easy tool to teach yourself. There are lots of tutorials on YouTube and Google.
I definitely love figuring out how to best analyse statistics and make images out of data. And I’m definitely happy to help people with that. But I think it’s that level of interest, of taking things and asking ‘how can I reduce this into numbers or figures and tell the story that way?’. I think that’s where it really came from for me, was a real interest in the story.
It pairs quite interestingly for me, not only doing the journalism side of things but also doing the theatre criticism side. Criticism is so much about the emotions and trying to reframe a theatre show in writing, being able to use that whole creative side of your brain — I really enjoy using this very analytical, fact and number-based part of my brain.
Reach out, I’m happy to be contacted! But also, Excel is really fun, just give it a go!
It’s about thinking about “how can I use data to complement my work?” That’s what all the best data journalism is. It’s another tool, in the same way you use interviews and archives. Particularly online now where there’s so many interesting ways to use data and represent data, I think that’s the way to think of it. It’s not maths, it’s not scary. It’s another tool you can use to illustrate your story. And also to find the story.
The piece that I wrote, I knew the narrative of women in theatre in Australia in the last decade, but the actual story is so based in the numbers. And it was through doing that I found these other stories to tell. There’s probably a few more stories in all of that data but I think I just need to not look at it for a while!
What are you most proud of about the stories you’ve told?
I’m really proud I can trace this piece over a decade of work. I was part of that wave of writers that was really focusing on this a decade ago. And to have been able to follow this story to now is such an incredible experience.
There’s a lot of incredible artists making work in Australia. As an arts journalist you get to write about artists who are making work about politics and education and health, and refugees and feminism and everything. It’s such a niche to be an arts journalist, but really you’re just using artists to look at everything else in the world.
That’s a really special place to be in and I’m really proud that my work, cumulatively, is a picture of what Australian artists are looking at. And that’s a really incredible place to be in.
What’s your message to Australians about why quality journalism needs their support?
It’s a tough industry, journalism at the moment. Every publication is trying to figure out the balance of how to employ journalists to keep telling stories. But it’s through these incredible journalists that we get to understand who we are and the issues in our world. Sometimes that’s really terrible, hard stories we’d rather ignore — and it’s really important that we don’t ignore them. But there are also stories about achievement and beauty and celebration.
Journalism like all forms of mass communication allow us to be a cohesive society and connect in our communities, in our states, in our countries and the world. It would be a real loss to all of those levels of society if we didn’t have quality journalism and minds who are really curious about the world and looking at it, trying to share stories and ideas and provide context and explain. If you care about any of those things, you need to care about journalism and support it by subscribing, reading and sharing.
What’s the best thing about receiving this award?
I was in such shock when I got it and I think that still hasn’t quite dissipated. To be recognised as a journalist among so many incredible winners at the mid year awards, and the history of the awards… I’m so overwhelmed and thankful that my work is deemed worthy of that.
I’m a science undergrad, I do this on the side of a day job. It’s sometimes hard to do this in that way, and to have this recognition that my work stands alongside others in this industry is really amazing.
Jane Howard is a freelance journalist and critic based in Adelaide and working throughout Australia. She is a contributing editor at Kill Your Darlings, where she focuses on podcast criticism, and a regular contributor to Guardian Australia. Jane’s work has appeared in publications including the ABC, Meanjin, Crikey, and The Stage. She has written for the Guardian across Australia and in Asia; had writing commissioned in the UK, Canada, and the Czech Republic; and has been translated into multiple languages. Jane is deputy chair of Writers SA, and in her day job she works in marketing.
Follow Jane on Twitter: @noplain
The All media: Arts Journalism Prize is supported by. Facebook
The Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund supports $5000 in prize money for the winners of the Arts Journalism Prize and Walkley-Pascall Prize for Arts Criticism.
