How do you decide if something is fair? Where do you start if your gut feeling is telling you that not everything is as it should be? And what if you’re right? Or wrong?

After yet another year of festivals where I could count the female ensemble members on the fingers of one hand, I felt like something was amiss. As someone passionate about circus and feminism, and fueled by an ungodly amount of coffee, I wanted to find out if circus is ‘equal’. At this point, equal would mean a balanced amount of artists identifying as men and women on stage. How they are portrayed or what the shows were about was not even to factor in at this point. This is not going to be a fun read. This is not a feel-good text about the undeniable progress we´ve made in circus regarding equality. This is about some potentially alarming numbers I gathered while I was trying to find answers about circus representing women. Over the past few years I´ve had discussions about women in circus, more specifically the amount of women on stage compared t...