June 24 (Bloomberg) -- Female playwrights, long aware that they’re produced less frequently than their male counterparts, may now have someone to blame: female artistic directors.

On Monday night at New York’s 59E59 theater complex, Emily Glassberg Sands, 22, held the attention of 200 theater insiders, including playwrights Lynn Nottage and John Weidman, for nearly two hours as she explained the findings of the thesis she wrote as a Princeton University senior in economics.

In January, Sands sent scenes from four unpublished plays to artistic directors around the country, and asked them to rate the dramas on audience appeal, economic prospects and other qualities.

Each was written by an accomplished female playwright, including Nottage, who won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama for “Ruined.” Sands assigned pen names to each play, equally divided between male and female pseudonyms.

Staff members from 82 theaters responded. The male artistic directors assigned nearly identical ratings regardless of the gender of the pen name, said Sands, who begins graduate work at Harvard University in September.

The female artistic directors and literary managers assigned “markedly lower ratings to a script” with a female pen name, according to the thesis, “Opening the Curtain on Playwright Gender: An Integrated Economic Analysis of Discrimination in American Theater.”

Perplexed

“It still perplexes me,” Sands told the crowd.

Notwithstanding the success of Nottage’s “Ruined,” about victims of sexual violence in Republic of Congo, and Yasmina Reza’s Tony Award-winning “God of Carnage,” women wrote or helped write just five of the 43 productions on Broadway in the past season. Fewer than one-fifth of shows at non-profit theaters with more than 99 seats were by women, the study said.

Weidman, 62, a frequent collaborator with Stephen Sondheim, said the study quantified trends that had been heretofore anecdotal.

“What she did was an enormous service to the theater,” he said.

Asked whether male directors and playwrights still amount to something of an “old boys’ club,” Weidman said: “I think that’s fair.”

Maybe, Maybe Not

Yet Sands found that the club has a surprising set of defenders. She didn’t think there is discrimination by women of women, “but I can’t rule it out.”

Carole Rothman, the artistic director and co-founder New York’s Second Stage Theatre, said she didn’t know whether women in theater are discriminated against by other women.

“I think there is a lot of bias,” said “I don’t know why, because I’m not one of the people who is biased.”

She pointed out that “God of Carnage” was the only Broadway play without music by a woman last season.

“I’m very pessimistic,” she added. “I feel like I’ve had these conversations for years and years.”

In her paper, Sands speculates that the lower ratings given scripts purportedly by women “may be attributable to heightened awareness among female respondents of the barriers faced by female playwrights.”

Women theater administrators “believe a script purportedly written by women will be perceived by the theater community to be of lower overall quality,” Sands wrote.

By studying doollee.com, a database of plays published since 1956, she also found that scripts with a majority of female parts are less likely to be produced than those dominated by male characters.

No Surprise

Sands was enlisted to study inequality in American theater by Steven Levitt, the University of Chicago professor who published “Freakonomics.” He put her in touch with Julia Jordan, a New York playwright who has been organizing playwrights on the issue.

Nottage said the numbers didn’t surprise her.

“We’re constantly being underestimated,” she said.

Looking at Broadway these days underscores the point. A new play by David Mamet, who had two revivals last season, is already announced for October. Neil LaBute, who had his Broadway debut last season, may return this season with a play called “Fat Pig,” according to the New York Post.

“It’s not just the privileging of male voices that becomes the issue, it’s the kinds of stories that are told,” said Theresa Rebeck, a playwright whose comedy “The Understudy,” is scheduled to open off-Broadway in November.

‘Men Hate Women’

“Broadway of late seems to celebrate a lot of male writers writing about how much men hate women,” she said. “Obviously there are guys out there who do hate women, but that’s hardly the story of the culture. It just presents a kind of crippled and demented fantasy that doesn’t actually hold up.”

Sands worked with Cecilia Rouse, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton, in conceiving the thesis. Rouse, now a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, said there are no obvious solutions to the dearth of produced women playwrights.

“Simply reading plays anonymously, which would be an implied fix, may throw out useful information for a theater,” she said in an interview.

She pointed out that plays are often revised in previews, and an artistic director may want to collaborate with a playwright who, for example, seems open to making changes.

Anna Louizos, a set designer, found some encouragement in Sands’s study. “If you took a snapshot 20 years ago, it would’ve been worse.”

To contact the writer on this story: Philip Boroff in New York at pboroff@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: June 24, 2009 15:43 EDT