How Blind Are Blind Submissions?

How Blind Are Blind Submissions?

There was a booklet of the winners. It featured their credits and productions. The winners seemed to share a commonality of relative success. They had — more or less — won the same awards, been given the same grants, been produced by the same theatres. I realized as soon as I read through this booklet that I did not stand a chance of being accepted there.

Then I saw that the application asked for blind submissions — that is — the plays submitted would be read without their author’s names attached. I thought, “Well — in a blind process I might stand a chance” and went ahead and applied, just because it’s always best to take a shot, even if it’s a wild one.

But I kept thinking about the Blind Submission process and who ends up selected. How is it that something that seems to be structured to focus only on quality yield a group of winners who seem to be chosen on their credits?

You could assume that the system is entirely meritocratic and that all of the best plays are chosen by the award committees and theatres and such — that there is a direct match up between quality of work and opportunities. But I have seen too many amazing unrecognized writers’ work and too many terrible plays in fancy theatres to ever believe this, however.

So…this blind submission process is somehow still yielding the same sorts of plays that unblind submissions do. Why? How?

In this particular case — only the first part of the selection process was blind — the rest of it involved looking at resume/bio and a statement. So it’s possible that all the amazing people without fancy credits are weeded out at that stage.

But even in more strictly blind situations, there is a sameyness that runs through the winners. It could, I imagine, reflect the sameyness of tastes of the people who make these decisions — that is, they like what they like and when they see more of the same, they reward it.

Or they like something because it is sort of familiar — the way current pop songs are designed to remind you of other pop songs you liked before so you have a happy resonance of familiarity when you hear it the first time.

Of course, it is a question of who is reading and what they are reading for. Are they choosing plays they like or plays they feel they should like or that they’d like to be seen liking?

Possibly, given that the winners have all achieved a good measure of success, the readers are already familiar with many of the plays they read — making them impossible to be truly blind and also get the boost of familiarity. If the readers have seen productions of those plays, they will have had the benefit of being able to vividly picture what is on the page.

I think, in the end, that very few blind submission processes are truly blind. Depending on the circumstances, there is a lot of information hanging off a play that does not require a name on it to glean.

The spirit of a blind submission process is probably well intentioned. The blindness idea is to be like the screens that hide musicians auditioning for orchestras. That process has helped orchestras radically transform the gender bias that had previously prevented gender parity. But, as I recently learned, there is still a great deal a trained ear can hear when listening to a classical musician auditioning. It will likely be clear, to the trained ear, with whom the musician trained and therefore also their age and location. Even these famous “blind” screen auditions are full of information.

Which is not to say we shouldn’t do them. The implementation of the screens for orchestras was incredibly successful at evening out a gender gap — but of course it doesn’t address any gaps that happened on their way to that audition. By the time you’re auditioning for a major orchestra, you are already in the top echelon of musicianship. Everyone playing is capable of doing the job. But along the way, I’m sure there are major gaps in accessibility — be they economic, racial, ableist or geographical.

So what does this mean for all these blind submissions I do? Not much, probably. I was sort of temporarily comforted and lulled into applying for something I am unlikely to get because of the illusion of a blind submission. I think that is why we continue to have them. They make people on both sides of a submission process feel like a meritocracy is at work. It isn’t. Meritocracy doesn’t work. (See this lecture.) But…perhaps we need to pretend it does. And pretending didn’t do anything but encourage me to apply for something I am unlikely to get. That’s fine. I collect rejections like stamps. Keep ’em coming. I can take it.

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Originally published at http://artiststruggle.wordpress.com on August 12, 2019.