Bozeman High grad’s thesis ‘shocks’ New York theatre community

published on Thursday, June 25, 2009 10:29 PM MDT

By JESSICA MAYRER Chronicle Staff Writer

When Bozeman High graduate Emily Glassberg Sands was a little girl, her father rewarded hard work with new fish for her aquarium. And on Wednesday, he gave the newly minted Princeton University graduate a goldfish.

“Here is a young woman that went from Bozeman High to Princeton and knocked them dead out,” said her dad, Bob Sands.

After graduating Phi Beta Kappa with a bachelor’s degree in economics, the young woman on Monday presented her graduate thesis about gender bias among playwrights to a roomful of New York theatre pros.

Since then, her phone has been buzzing with callers -- many of them reporters -- curious about her findings.

The young economist, having faced skepticism at the beginning of her project, found through her research that plays written by men were better received in the artistic community than work written by women.

She tested her theory by sending out 250 identical scripts, 125 of them under the name of Michael Walker, the other 125 under the name of Mary Walker.

Male artistic directors, she found, deem work by women on par with male-written plays.

Interestingly, it was the female theatre professionals who showed a bias against the female playwrights.

It’s tough to say what causes the discrepancy, Emily said. It could be because women have a heightened awareness of the barriers faced by other females so they’re a little tougher on each other. Or, perhaps they don’t want to be seen, in a male-dominated field, as favoring women.

But, that’s just speculation, she said. There’s more study to be done.

But in the meantime, she’s given the arts community something to gnaw on.

“The theatre community was very responsive,” Emily said. “They were also shocked that this was discrimination, perhaps, by women.”

Emily has researched perceived gender differences for more than half of her life. From the time she was 6 years old and her aunt gave her a “Girls Can Do Anything” T-shirt, she has worked to understand how society reacts to differences between the sexes.

At age 9, she went to New York City to attend the First National Girls Conference, aiming to empower young women. In preparation, she polled her Monforton School peers, asking them what they thought the potential for success was for girls versus boys.

Boys said girls had as much potential for success as their male counterparts.

But her female classmates said their prospects were not as good as the boys’ prospects.

When she returned from the conference in New York, Emily helped form Girls for a Change, a local initiative to make young women secure in their ability to achieve success.

“I didn’t found it on my own, it was a group of great girls,” she said.

Her mom, Sally Sands, said Emily always had a deep curiosity about the world, particularly things that make a difference in other peoples’ lives.

“She’s always been my best teacher, even as a very young child,” Sally Sands said. “That’s just the way she came into the world.”

After attending Headwaters Academy and Bozeman High School, Emily went straight to Princeton, where she studied under some of the nation’s foremost economists.

“I couldn’t be more grateful,” Emily said.

And now, the Bozemanite said, she is off to math camp, in preparation for graduate studies at Harvard.

“It’s not done and I love it,” Emily said.

Jessica Mayrer can be reached at jmayrer@dailychronicle.com or 582-2635.

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