Study of the cultural council on diversity in museums, theaters, opera houses – culture

The lawsuit has been filed for decades, but it has been particularly loud since “Me Too” and “Black Lives Matter”: Germany’s cultural institutions would like to be progressive and open; in fact, older white and German men dominate there. This is not only fatal for the career opportunities of women or people with a migration background. In museums, theaters or opera houses, it also prevents them from opening up their content, new perspectives and new ideas. Which in turn means that large parts of the audience, especially younger ones, cannot find themselves in their programs and, in the worst case, could be lost to the institutions.

The German Cultural Council, a lobby organization for German cultural institutions, shares this concern and has now commissioned a study on diversity in German cultural institutions for the first time. It was financed by the Ministry of Culture.

At first glance, the results are optimistic. The proportion of women among employees is 64 percent. The perceived male dominance has apparently been refuted. The report confirms a different impression, however: there are few young employees. Four out of ten are over 50. Most of the other employees are over 30. Younger people hardly ever work in the houses. The most interesting question, however, is probably the proportion of employees with a migration background. Here, too, the report is surprising. Around 20 percent of employees fall into this category, which is just below their share in the total population (a quarter).

Once again, the “migration background” category proves to be misleading

However, if you take a closer look at the report, you will see that its informative value is close to zero. On the one hand, only institutions that are funded by the federal government were taken into account. These are mainly larger houses, especially in Berlin, which are of course more diverse than provincial museums or small town theaters.

The procedure itself is also likely to have skewed the results. The authors of the study relied mainly on an anonymous survey of the heads of the institutions, i.e. precisely those who are responsible for the lack of diversity. A third of those contacted did not respond. How truthfully the others answered cannot be verified. The fact that a director says that diversity is very important at his house does not mean that a young black actress cannot experience discrimination there. Their possible experience was just not included in the study.

Once again, the category “migration background” proves to be misleading. The top Japanese violinist, the canteen cook who fled Syria, and the administrative clerk with a Danish mother have little in common sociologically and play very different roles in terms of diversity, but end up in the same group here.

Olaf Zimmermann, the head of the cultural council, admits the weaknesses of his study. He speaks of mere “first results” and describes the report as “political action”, as “throwing something, hopefully not too small,”. But the subject is too important to be able to bring out fictional knowledge, even if it is well-intentioned.

.
source site