urban excavations

[Selection from July 2025 report, published July 30, 2025 on the Women Count report series page.]

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: WOMEN COUNT VIII

The Women Count project collects, analyzes, and reports New York City production credits to illuminate the individuals behind company productions beyond Broadway. The Women Count report series, published since 2014, asks: whose plays are being produced, who is directing them, and who is being hired for off-stage roles? The goal of the report series is to document the past and present, and to change the conversation from anecdotes to action plans to support advocacy efforts on behalf of female and nonbinary playwrights, performers, and off-stage theater workers.

Off and Off-Off Broadway production trends range from areas in which female and nonbinary credits are dominant, areas where parity is being approached, and many other areas where parity is far from the norm. The Women Count reports do not analyze WHY hiring decision have been made but documents CREDITS to inform consideration of strategies to promote gender parity and opportunity.

Women Count VIII, the eighth report in the series, covers 24 companies and five seasons representing the breadth of the core database that begins with the 2010/11 season. In the current report, 2011/12 offers a baseline for comparison for the four most recent seasons 2021/22, 2022/23, 2023/24, and 2024/25. Across these five report seasons, 393 productions are analyzed including 13 co-productions among companies tracked by the study.

Report tables summarize information by season, with most providing company-by-company hiring trends. Total hires in each category are followed by a calculation of the percent of those hires that are female or nonbinary.

• “New” play productions – plays that premiered within five years of the study production – range from a low of 72 percent in 2011/12 to a high of 82 percent “new” plays in 2021/22. Four-fifths of productions staged by study theaters hover around 80 percent in the most recent four study years.
• Female or nonbinary individuals comprised less than 50 percent of playwright credits in four of the five report seasons. In contrast, almost 60 percent of playwright credits in the 2021/22 “pandemic return” partial season were female or nonbinary.
• Female or nonbinary director credits rose significantly since 2011/12, from 28 percent to almost 60 percent in 2023/24 with a slight decrease in the most recent study season.
• Set design credits for female or nonbinary designers ranged from 32 percent to 43 over the study period, never exceeding 50 percent.
• Lighting design credits for female or nonbinary designers approached 60 percent in three study years but have retreated to 40 percent in the most recent season.
• Costume design credits are primarily female and nonbinary, ranging from 57 percent to over 80 percent, landing at 74 percent in the most recent study season.
• Sound design credits for female or nonbinary designers ranged from 20 percent to 45 percent in the five study seasons.
• Projection and video design credits for female or nonbinary designers ranged from 13 to 63 percent during the report period.
• Female and nonbinary choreography credits ranged from 23 percent to 59 percent.
• Female and nonbinary composer/original music credits ranged from 6 percent to nearly 40 percent during the study seasons. Lyricist credits for female and nonbinary artists ranged from 14 percent in the most recent season to a high of nearly 50 percent in 2022/23.  Conductor/music director credits for female and nonbinary artists ranged from 9 percent to 71 percent (calculated for small universes in each season).
• Total study female or nonbinary production stage manager credits ranged from 63 percent to 84 percent during the report period, and stage manager/assistant stage manager credits exhibited a similar range of 68 percent to 84 percent during the report period.

The underlying project database continues to grow with new seasons of data and additional theatrical companies. Each of the eight reports in the series presents a different set of seasons, each capped with the most recently completed season at the time of publication. The project team assembles data from production playbills, season announcements, theater web sites, published production reviews, on-line databases, and professional networks, and all data are finalized only after productions have opened. Ongoing efforts are expended to update the database, correct any identified errors, and add any productions omitted in past reports. The lens of analysis expands in the most recent three reports to include a third gender code for individuals identifying as non-binary and reports now provide numbers and percentages for “female and non-binary” workers in study reporting categories.

The Women Count report series has become part of the national conversation on gender parity in theater and has joined multiple collaborations to develop knowledge and advocacy strategies to promote a range of voices in theater making. In 2019, the Women Count project joined the Counting Together initiative coordinated by Todd London and Luis Castro, who were inspired by ongoing evidence of systemic exclusion in the theater reported in multiple data projects to convene national and regional data projects to report findings collectively and to identify pathways to greater equity and inclusion through narratives in their multiple data reports. In February 2022 that initiative received two inaugural Anthem Awards in the areas of DEI community engagement and awareness. In 2023, Women Count became a Network Partner of the RISE (Representation, Inclusion & Support for Employment) initiative, a program of Maestra Music, working to build an equitable and inclusive theater industry through tools and resources.

[full report here]

© Martha Wade Steketee (July 30, 2025)