Transcript

[00:00:00] Aubrey Bergauer: Hey, everyone. Happy Women's History Month. As this episode drops, I will be heading out to a speaking engagement. This time, I'm going to Butler University to do a few different talks with different groups there, including one that's open to the public. So, if you are in the Indianapolis area, I will be giving my run it like a business talk as part of their signature series the evening of March 20th, and I would love to see some podcast listeners in the audience.

So consider this your formal invitation today in honor of Women's History Month. We wanted to bring you a special episode on this topic. These last few days, I've been thinking a lot about a conversation I had recently with a journalist. They were covering my book, run it like a business, same as the talk I just mentioned.

And a lot of the [00:01:00] folks who have covered my book have asked about a lot of the topics we have already covered this season on the podcast and previous seasons as well. Things like growing audiences, patron retention. Really how to lead an arts organization to financial sustainability. A lot of these things I've become known for.

And this particular journalist asked about all of those things too. But then, they took a bit of a turn. And they asked me if women in the arts still face gender bias in this industry.

And I said to them, first of all, yes. Uh, second of all, that's the whole reason really behind chapters six and seven in my book. Now, in the book I focused on solutions, all backed by research, but I did not have the space to get into the data behind the problems [00:02:00] themselves and why understanding the problem is so critically important to our arts organizations.

I can talk about growing ticket sales and donations all day long and you all know, I often do, but the organizations that are not looking inward at their own practices, at your own practices to ensure they are fair and equitable and representative of the population and people you serve, if your organization isn't doing those things, isn't having this kind of introspective work.

Moment, we'll call it. You will never fully achieve the revenue potential you are capable of. I've got a whole episode on the mathematical proof on that, so if you want the research and the numbers behind what I'm saying right now, go to that episode, aubreybergauer. com slash 24. That's 2 4 for episode 24, and I go into it in great deal there, in terms of how much money is on the table when [00:03:00] our teams and audiences are not so homogenous, and in fact look like the community around us, the world around us.

This episode is less about the dollars and cents of it, and like I said, more about diagnosing and understanding kind of the root of the problem itself. As you likely know, these issues are currently under attack. At the federal level, including changes to the latest National Endowment for the Arts grant guidelines.

We've been planning for this episode on this topic to run this month since last fall, okay? And we chose, in light of all of this, to stay the course because this topic is just too important to shy away from. Now, I do believe that most people don't want to be exclusionary. I don't think people wake up in the morning and say, I want to be exclusionary today, right?

I think most people want to foster a stronger future and a more [00:04:00] equitable future for the arts. And one of the primary ways to achieve that Is to do what we're doing today to get to the bottom of the disparities we see and understanding what's causing them So that's what we're going to do. We will get into some numbers I can't do an episode without sharing some research and data and I am going to talk about the data and research I have learned about gender bias both in arts organizations And across more broad trends when it comes to gender in the workplace And then at the end of this episode, I have a free resource to share with you that has some research backed hiring tips and steps you as an arts administrator can take to eliminate or at least reduce gender bias at your institution.

So, all right, Women's History Month. Welcome, everybody. Let's do it. I'm Aubrey Burgauer, and welcome to my podcast. I'm known in the arts world for being customer centric, data obsessed, and for growing revenue. The [00:05:00] arts are my vehicle to make the change I want to see in this world, like creating places of belonging, pursuing gender and racial equality.

Developing high performing teams and leaders and leveraging technology to elevate our work. I've been called the Steve Jobs of classical music and the Sheryl Sandberg of the symphony. I've held off stage roles managing millions of dollars in revenue at major institutions, been chief executive of an orchestra where we doubled the size of the audience and nearly quadrupled the donor base, and now I'm here to help you achieve that same kind of success.

In this podcast, we are sorting through data and research inside and outside the arts. Applying those findings to our work in arts management and bringing in some extra voices along the way. All to build the vibrant future we know is possible for our institutions and for ourselves as offstage administrators and leaders.

You are listening to the Offstage Mic.[00:06:00] 

Hi everyone. Aubrey here. I want to share a quick case study with you. About a year ago, Austin Chamber Music Center knew they needed to work on identifying prospective donors and building relationships with the donors they already had. Plus, they went through a leadership transition and knew they needed to fundraise more and fast.

They came to Annual Fund Toolkit, who did a comprehensive analysis of their donor base, then developed a system for the organization to connect with those donors based on their needs and giving styles. They did all of this combining in person asks with email, social media, and direct mail. By the end of the fiscal year, their year to date fundraising had doubled compared to the year prior.

And that's just the numbers. They now also have a streamlined process for tracking and maintaining donor relationships going forward. How did they do all this? They did it with Annual Fun Toolkit. Annual Fun Toolkit is not just another consulting firm. What sets them apart is their laser focus on two critical challenges, improving donor retention and [00:07:00] growing the major gifts pipeline.

This can be your organization, too, because this is what Annual Fun Toolkit does every day. Their founder, Luis Diaz, is one of the most brilliant minds in fundraising I've ever met. The organizations that utilize Annual Fun Toolkit's advice and assistance are coming out ahead. To read the full case study, head over to get that annual fund toolkit.com/acmc.

That's get dot annual fund toolkit.com/acmc For Austin Chamber Music Center, trust me, your donors and your mission will thank you

[00:07:45] Katharine Bartholomeusz-Plows: through my career. Yes, of absolutely experienced men getting paid more for the same role or for similar roles that I'm doing. 

[00:07:57] Aubrey Bergauer: This Katherine Bartholomeusz [00:08:00] plows. She's the head of artistic planning at the Melbourne symphony orchestra. Yes. Down under in Melbourne, Australia, gender bias is an issue that women are still dealing with all over the world.

What is it though? That's causing the gender bias that people like Katherine are dealing with in the first place. I know there are all kinds of arts administrators listening to this from various artistic disciplines, but we're going to start with data from the world of opera. Last year, research out of the University of Melbourne and Deakin University published a study about the lack of representation of women in opera.

The researchers were working with a data sample of over 7, 000 credited creative roles. That is a very large sample size. So what they did basically was go through every program book over the last 16 years and website listings and things like that and assembled the list of all the creative roles and who was [00:09:00] filling those roles.

So we're talking roles like set designer, director, lighting designer, costume designer, right? The paper was very aptly named Unequal Opera tunities. Okay, here's what they found.

At 11 of the biggest budget opera companies, that's places including the Met Opera, San Francisco Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Houston Grand Opera, and my old stomping grounds at the Seattle Opera, to name a few, over the last 16 seasons, 95 percent of conductors were men, 5%. Only we're women. And out of all creative roles, 82%.

Over those years have been filled by men and the same goes for administrative roles [00:10:00] as well. Not just creative roles And this isn't just an opera problem These types of disparities are all over classical music and the performing arts as a whole So theater and jazz have similar stats. I've come across even visual arts museums.

They have similar stats I've come across as one example a study out of the Canada Council for the Arts Found that in Canadian theater companies, women make up only 30 percent of stage directors and artistic directors. Same aria, different act.

So let's back up a bit. Here's a few more stats that may come as a surprise to you. But actually, we'll start with orchestras first. In the United States, there are equal numbers of men and women represented across Orchestra administrative roles moving back to opera. According [00:11:00] to Opera America, women actually have more administrative roles than men overall.

And for the overall nonprofit labor force, women make up 73%. So essentially, a super majority, almost three quarters of the overall nonprofit labor force. So what's the problem here? Why are there so many male dominated decision making roles? When there are actually so many women working in arts administration, well, this shows up in three ways.

One, women are not advanced from entry and mid level arts administrator roles to senior leadership roles at the same rates that men are. Men are being accelerated. Up the ranks faster. Two, women are relegated to smaller arts organizations, meaning by budget size, while men are ushered into roles at larger [00:12:00] budget sized organizations.

Three, when women do end up in arts leadership, it often happens when the organization is in some kind of financial crisis. This is especially true in the institutions with the biggest budgets. You've heard of the phrase glass ceiling, I'm sure. Well, this last one is referred to by researchers as the glass cliff.

So researchers at the University of Exeter in the UK coined this term glass cliff. They found that Women inside and outside the arts are often promoted during a time of extreme financial duress or financial crisis, which is the equivalent of standing on the edge of a cliff career wise. If they fail, they fall off the cliff.

Their careers don't ever really recover. So in other words, when women are allowed to enter arts leadership, they are more likely than men [00:13:00] to go into those roles with the financial deck stacked against them. So these research coined that term, the glass cliff way back in 2005. That's when they first published this research.

Now, here we are 20 years later. And this is still happening in all kinds of industries, including, of course, arts and culture, so much of our art has evolved since the 18th, 19th centuries, right now it is time for our hiring practices to evolve as well.

But before we get into that, we're going to take a little break. So far, we have talked about the numbers and the trends. What is happening with men and women in the arts, and coming up, we're going to shift to get into the why. Why has the structure of arts organizations caused these issues we just laid out?

And we'll talk about how the intersection of race and gender identity complicates things even more.[00:14:00] 

Here's a fun fact. A returning audience member is worth seven times more than a first timer. Yes, I am talking about audience retention, one of my favorite topics, but the problem I hear all the time from arts organizations is how to best track your own patron retention data across marketing and development.

That's why I want to tell you about Artelize. Artelize has brilliantly solved this challenge. Their audience retention dashboard is the one stop place to access your audience data across Every important metric, first time buyers, multi-buyers, subscribers, and donors. I've worked with a lot of tools in data management programs over the years.

The Artelize audience retention dashboard works with any CRM and it supports arts [00:15:00] organizations of all sizes all over the globe. If you can upload a spreadsheet within minutes, you can access all your data, your key patron segments and top retention metrics beautifully laid out and easy to read. It's just that easy.

No joke. And their tool even makes real time recommendations based on your patron data to boost conversion at each stage of the customer journey. So you can see what's working, refine your approach. Approach and keep doubling down on what drives the best results. The Artelize team brought me into their process and we had clients test the product with their own real data.

So let me tell you, I have seen firsthand the immense time, money, and effort. This dashboard can save arts organizations, allowing you to finally harness your data in one place. Think. Easier collaboration between marketing and development efforts. Easier for presenting at board meetings, easier to see everything in one place without running multiple reports.

If you are ready to grow, retain, and engage your audience with data driven [00:16:00] tools that are easy and fast to use, visit aubreybergauer. com slash dashboard. Listeners of this podcast save 20 percent and members of my run it like a business academy save even more. That's www. aubreybergauer. com. Okay,

I don't want this episode to be a total downer, but we have to understand the problem before we can solve it, right? So if there could be a silver lining when it comes to gender bias in the arts, it would be that there is also plenty of data out there on what is causing these pervasive issues in the arts world.

Let's continue with the glass cliff. There is an article on this from Investopedia that says promoting women during a financial crisis does two things. One, it makes the company or organization look good for promoting a woman to a leadership role. And two, [00:17:00] it gives them a scapegoat. If things fall apart, if things go well, the company or organization gets to maintain a positive reputation of being progressive and even inclusive, and if things fall apart, they can clean it up, so to speak, by reappointing males.

to those positions without reproach, without any backlash. They essentially can say, well, we tried it and it just didn't work. Yes. We can move on to the profile of someone who's been successful before, which is code for a white man. White men are historically the ones who have been successful before because they were the ones who were set up to be.

successful before.

As we were diagnosing what's going on here, this is where gender bias in arts organizations is in direct [00:18:00] relationship with these broader gender norms that are outdated, but still alive and present in our society today. So as I mentioned earlier, white men have historically been branded as kind of CEO material because they were historically given the opportunity to be CEOs, right?

You see kind of the circular logic or circular pattern here. And as we know, this goes back, you know, centuries basically, right? So where that brings us today is that over all of these years, this has essentially caused A mental tire rut in our brains, in our collective brains. So mental tire ruts, just like it sounds, like when a tire makes a rut in the mud, it's like the same tires on the same path over and over, right?

And so that's what's happening in our collective brains, like at the societal level. And the researchers in Melbourne, If you think back to their work, they put it well when they said that social norms basically [00:19:00] perpetuate a gendered division of labor. So that's what's happening. We see what's been done before.

So we do it again. And it kind of is like this cycle that repeats a female example of this, of the mental tire ruts is that women tend to be hired for more feminized roles, roles that are coded more feminine, like makeup artists or costume designer. And if women try to deviate, this is what the research shows.

You know, the woman who says, I don't want to be a costume designer. I don't want to be a makeup artist. I want to be a CEO. Those women are then seen even subconsciously as higher risk and therefore less reliable than their male counterparts. Now, I said I'm not here for just all doom and gloom. The good news is that once mental tire ruts are identified, they can be rerouted.

We can form new idea pathways in our brain. All the research says the first step to overcoming bias is to name it, identify it. So to know the bias is to overcome the bias, essentially make a new [00:20:00] mental tire route. So connecting some dots here, one of the chapters in my book is called Heidi versus Howard.

Hire fairly, compensate radically. And that chapter title is based on an infamous study out of Columbia University called the Heidi versus Howard study. Maybe you've heard of it, but if you haven't, very quickly. What they did was they had to the researchers had two different groups, and these people were told you're evaluating a candidate for a job, and they kind of explained what the role was, and the two different groups were each given identical resumes.

Except for one difference, and that one difference was the name at the top. One group got the resume with Heidi's name, one group got the resume with Howard's name. Now, the findings of this, and why this is so interesting and became infamous, is that the findings were that Heidi and Howard were evaluated by both groups.

As equally [00:21:00] competent, which they should have been, right? Their resumes were identical. So this so far, it's like, okay, check good. Heidi, however, was described by the evaluators as too assertive, not likable, self involved, and therefore not a good fit for the job Howard. On the other hand, the group who reviewed the Howard resume did not give those labels in the evaluations.

All because of a name on a sheet of paper.

So if all this sounds familiar, it should. These are the mental tire ruts, right? Now, this is not just an issue of gender. That's the point of this whole episode, but I have to say that race and ethnic identity are, of course, an issue as well. A similar study from the American Economic Review found that applicants with names that [00:22:00] suggested they were white got 50 percent more callbacks from employers.

Then those folks whose names suggested they were black. I also want to acknowledge we are operating in a gender binary here. We're talking men and women and all of this. And that's because that's the research available right now, or at least that I know of and was able to find on this topic. The point here and all of this is that art organizations have a problem with equity and inclusion, which has real consequences for all kinds of groups of people.

And this is not just at the top of the org chart, which that's what tends to get the most attention, right? In the broader media, even when we're talking about these different creative roles at the top. But the root of the problem, this is really where we start to get at the crux of it here. The root of the problem is up and down the whole organizational structure overall.

And it starts [00:23:00] early. It actually starts, listen to this, it starts when, right when women enter the workforce. The biggest barrier to women's advancement is what the researchers call the broken rung. So we talked about the glass cliff. Now we're going to talk about the broken rung. This is the first opportunity for a promotion that an employee encounters in their career, right?

So we call it the career ladder. And the first rung of a ladder is your first promotion of your career. So the researchers are saying the rung is broken. It's the broken rung. And they say that because this entry level promotion is actually where the gender discrimination and gender bias begins. So the researchers found that for every 100 men promoted from entry level to manager, only 87 women are promoted.

That's McKinsey and Lean In is where that research comes from. And it's even worse for women of color. For every 100 white men [00:24:00] promoted, only 73 women of color are promoted at that first stage, first promotion of their careers. So it's the broken rung on the career ladder. I said it before, what this teaches us is that men's careers are advancing faster While women at the same time are being held back right from the beginning and not just then, but the research goes on to show this is happening at every subsequent rung of the ladder, the number of women being advanced decreases even more.

So how do we deal with this? What do we do? 

[00:24:33] Dr. Amanda Coles: Leadership and agency of key decision makers is the piece.

[00:24:44] Aubrey Bergauer: This is Dr. Amanda Coles. She's one of the researchers from that study I mentioned at the top, Unequal Opportunities. 

Because you can fill a pipeline. Full of diverse candidates and still not see [00:25:00] that translate into leadership, reward and recognition at the highest end of the industry. So, yes, I agree that training and filling the pipeline is really important.

That is not going to solve the problem. You cannot simply add more people who look different than white men to a system that is hostile. Right? To diversity. You need to focus on changing the system itself to value inclusivity, diversity, and belonging as core industry values.

[00:25:43] Aubrey Bergauer: The original point of Women's History Month. Why this month was even created in the first place. Was to celebrate the many achievements and contribution of women past and present. And you know what? I look forward to our arts organizations being able to [00:26:00] celebrate even more of those achievements when the women in the arts are able to fully contribute.

Before I go, I want to give a big shout out to the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and their partners for their Women's Day programming. The clips you heard from Dr. Amanda Coles and Katherine Bartholomew's plows were a part of a panel discussion from that programming. Huge thank you to all for the work that you do.

I love this quote about hiring practices. This is from Laszlo Bock, the former head of people at Google. And he once said, quote, most assessment occurs in the first three to five minutes of an interview. And that interviews are subconsciously biased toward people like themselves. As I mentioned, I have a free resource for you to address this challenge of bias at your arts organization.

It's all about applying equitable hiring practices as an arts administrator when you're looking to grow your team. And this is helpful no matter the role or no matter [00:27:00] the seniority. So much of what I talked about today can be remedied by thinking intentionally and equitably through all three of the main phases of hiring.

That's writing the job description, reviewing resumes, and conducting the interview. And that's what this guide is all about. It's packed with research and tips of what you need to do. So download the guide to equitable hiring practices in the arts at aubreybergauer. com slash 45. That's number four, five for episode 45.

Again, aubreybergauer. com slash 45 to get your free guide right now.

That's all for today, folks. Thanks so much for listening. If you like what you heard here, hit that button to follow and subscribe to this podcast. And if you've learned something or gotten value from this. Please take two seconds to leave a quick one tap rating or review in return to all of you one more time Thanks again.

See you next time on the offstage mic [00:28:00] The offstage mic is produced by me Aubrey Bergauer and Erin Allen The show is edited by Novo music an audio production company of all women audio engineers and musicians Our theme music is by Alex Grohl Additional podcast support this season comes from Kelly Stedman other members of the changing the narrative team and social media brand management like classical content.

This is a production of Changing the Narrative.

Good marketing talent can be hard to find. That's why I'm so glad I discovered MarketerHire. As my business has grown this year, I can definitively say a part of that growth was because of the way MarketerHire helped me not just find good marketing talent I needed, but how fast they did it and how they worked to match me with the perfect people.

First, I reached out about an email copywriting project and email platform migration we were going through and marketer hire [00:29:00] matched me with Jamie within a week. A few months later, we needed technical support on our Google Analytics and they had us connected to Alec within days. Both Jamie and Alec needed zero training, were incredible to work with and experts in their respective areas.

And most important, they completely delivered on time, on budget, and got the results I needed. What I like about marketer hire is that you can engage someone for as long or short as you want. I hired Jamie for a three month project, for example. On the intake call, they really listened to what I said I needed.

I even said that I need someone with an interest in the performing arts. And it turned out, Jamie had a theater background and is still a member of her local thespian troupe to this day. Both Jamie and Alec were able to move my projects forward so much quicker than if I had led a traditional hiring process or search.

The whole thing was really easy from start to finish, and they never made me feel obligated to proceed if I didn't want to. They were even able to work with my small business [00:30:00] budget. At your arts organization, imagine working with Fortune 500 level talent who ramps up to understand your work fast and then delivers great results.

Get a 1, 500 credit toward your first hire when you go to try. marketerhire. com slash offstageMic. That's try. m a r k e t e r hire. com slash offstageMic. Whether your arts organization needs email copywriting or Google Analytics Set up like I did, or if you need paid ads, paid search, or even a fractional CMO market or hire, we'll get you set up with top talent fast.

One more time. That's try dot market or hire. com slash offstage. Mic to get started and get your 1, 500 credit.