Gender Parity Reading List: TACTICS, Howlround, Carey P on HuffPo

This is a great week for reading about gender parity in the blogosphere.

Check the Works by Women SF TACTICS interview series here.  I'm proud to be one of the women theatermaker/advocates included in these interviews. Each interview ends with a suggestion of a simple action that will work toward gender parity.

Howlround has a fantastic series of interviews and essays running this week, including Julia Jordan, Lydia Diamond, Lauren Gunderson and Carey Perloff.  Theatre Bay Area is the curator of this series, as a lead-up to Monday's Annual Conference.

And Carey's also on HuffPo with a response to  Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In.

I know that people are responding to these writings on their own blogs. I've seen a few of those here and here.  Anything else that people should be reading that I've missed?  Add them to the comments.

Check the blogroll updates!

I've made a few tweaks and changes to the blogroll over there in that right hand column. 

I've deleted a few things that were no longer active, and added blogs that are newish or that are personal recent discoveries.

In particular, check out Melissa Hillman's Bitter Gertrude if you haven't already for an Artistic Director's perspective on the theater world, and both the Works by Women and Works by Women SF sites for interviews and other resources for women theater makers. 

Works by Women and Works by Women SF are also meetup groups with regular opportunities to see shows where women theatremakers are prominently featured.

As a co-host of WWSF, it's been really terrific to be able to support and learn more about what women theater makers are doing in the region.  Our next event is this Sunday, and it would be great to see you there!

Girls of Atomic City & Honor

Some good things I've been reading lately include Denise Kiernan's The Girls of Atomic City, a non-fiction book about Oak Ridge, Tennessee and the women who worked there during WWII on a super secret project.  In a nutshell, these folks were doing the grunt work of the Manhattan Project, enriching the uranium that would provide the explosions.  Because of the high levels of secrecy surrounding the project (most of the people working there didn't know what it was they were working on), the organizers recruited young women from neighboring areas, who they believed would be obedient and work hard.

The amazing book not only gives you the day to day lives of several of the women who worked there, it also looks at women's contributions to the development of nuclear technology as a whole.


I've also torn through the novel Honor by Elif Shafak.  The story is set in Kurdish communities in Turkey and London, follows multiple generations from the 1950's through the 1990's, with the bulk of the book set in London of the late 1970's with punks and racial tensions mixed into the milieu.  It looks at Muslim tradition and women's and men's roles, and unfolded with incredible beauty and surprise.