Opinion: How do we talk about female leaders in opera?
By Kamala Sankaram
One thing about sharing an uncommon name with a former presidential candidate — you get drawn into a lot more political conversations with strangers. And during last year’s campaign, these conversations and the discourse at large repeatedly showed me that we still have trouble talking about what “female leadership” really is.
To put it bluntly, we don’t talk about female leaders in the same way we talk about male leaders. In defining the qualities of a good leader, we’ve historically looked for “agentic” traits, or traits that arise from individual agency like “decisiveness” and “strength” and “assertiveness.” Probably because our leaders have largely been male, we’ve coded these traits as being inherently “masculine.” On the flip side, there’s plenty of research showing that we tend to view communal leadership styles that emphasize cooperation and empathy as female and less desirable, including the 2018 study “The Power of Language: Gender, Status, and Agency in Performance Evaluations,” published in the journal Sex Roles.
I’d argue that, especially in a collaborative art form like opera, the exact opposite is true. A communal leadership style is just as valuable as an agentic one, and it is important for us to separate these traits from their stereotyped associations with gender.
This isn’t as easy as it might sound. There simply aren’t as many women as men in comparable leadership positions, and those who are there have often attained these positions using a more agentic, or masculine-coded, style. A recent study, pithily titled “Unequal Opera-tunities: Gender Inequality and Non-Standard Work in U.S. Opera Production,” published in Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion: An International Journal in 2024, found that at Budget 1 opera companies, only 5% of conductors and 15% of stage directors were women, and artistic leadership at these companies was less than 2% female. The percentages are higher at smaller companies but still do not reach parity.
“The Power of Language” study I mentioned before tells us that this is likely because female leaders are evaluated negatively for possessing communal leadership traits, while male leaders are not... Keep Reading
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