NY Magazine on Female Playwrights

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"In three separate studies — which Rouse calls a "triple play" — across 170 pages, [Emily Glassberg] Sands finds gender bias on the part of both men and women in script selection and production, and shows that it hurts theaters economically.

Her first analysis, derived from crunching data about plays and playwrights from the website doollee.com, reveals that women tend to write plays about women, but plays featuring female protagonists are produced less often than those starring men. And, while the proportion of scripts that get produced is fairly equal between men and women, the total number of productions is inequitable since fewer women write plays (one informal study of nonprofit theaters by the playwright Julia Jordan found that 17 percent of their plays were written by women). One way women have compensated for writing female stories is to write fewer roles, which make their plays accessible to more theaters."