I’m honored to have been invited again to write about Women’s History Month for Allegro. Most years when stepping into this space, I take the opportunity to talk about Maestra, the nonprofit organization I founded which provides support, visibility, and community for women and gender-expansive musicians and other underrepresented theatre artists. I still see the world very much through that lens, but I’m coming to you today with a more personal perspective.

From where I sit in late February, watching the sun come up and hoping it will finally melt the snow outside my window, I’ll tell you this: it’s a really tough time to be a woman. Okay, it’s not tough to be a woman. It’s tough to move through the world as a representative of womanhood. It’s more clear than ever at the top of 2026 that the professional spaces women inhabit were mostly not designed for us to be there.

This morning my news feed was full of articles about the link between patriarchy and authoritarianism. The AI bias against women. The healthcare bias against women. The investment bias against women. Attacks on the trans community, this week even in the US Senate. The forced removal of the pride flag from Stonewall. The criminalization of DEIA. Katherine Needleman. Billie Eilish. Virginia Guiffre. Gisèle Pelicot. Over three million Epstein files. Over three million Epstein files.

It’s a tough time to be raising daughters. These girls have a lot of questions I don’t know how to answer.

My older daughter is 20, a junior in college, and I’m pleased to tell you that she is a music major. (She’s also a proud former winner of the Local 802 Anne Walker Scholarship, thank you very much!) In our house, my musician husband and I treat music like a second language. When our two girls were little, we said that if our family had been Italian they would have learned to speak Italian, and since we’re musicians they will learn to speak music. My husband once said that the sign of a true musician is that she looks at a dot on a sheet of paper and imagines what it sounds like. We wanted our girls to be able to do that, and I’m happy to report that they can.

Our older daughter, in fact, has written songs and arrangements for her rock band and her a cappella group, she’s recorded an album and an EP, she’s building a TikTok following as a singer, she’s composed chamber music, and she’s currently the Teaching Assistant for a music history professor — which means that once a week, she’s actually teaching the class.

And yet — in spite of all that success — she texts me several times a semester with rage in her fingertips to express some version of the same idea: These boys don’t take me seriously. She’s the only girl in her composition class. The only girl in her rock band. Her ideas are dismissed in the recording studio, even though 45 minutes later it turns out she was right. There were no women on the syllabus in the music history class she took. (She has added women to the syllabus for the classes she’s now teaching.)

I see it all the time, myself, when I go around the country visiting schools and theatres. No girls

in the jazz band. No girls in the rhythm section. No girls playing low brass. No women in music department leadership. Things are changing, for sure, and I don’t need anyone to write me and tell me about how they know one female tuba player or they worked once with a trans music director and she was great. The first time I played with the New York Pops, a woman several years older than me told me that in her earliest years, there wasn’t a women’s bathroom on the musicians’ floor; they had to go up several flights of stairs and use the dressing room designated for the chorus girls. Evolving or not, the bias against women and gender-expansive people is still very real, possibly even getting worse, and I’d like to use this opportunity to ask my fellow musicians to be intentional about calling it out when you see it.

Over the years I have collected a few easy-to-implement tactics. I offer these to you whether you’re an underrepresented person yourself or whether you’re sensitive to this issue and want to be an ally to your colleagues.

PLUS ONE

If you’re invited to an event, especially a professional or musical event, and you’re given a “plus one” ticket, bring someone who would benefit from being in the space. I sometimes think about bringing a younger musician to a concert or a lecture or an opening night or about inviting a mentee to shadow me on a gig where they’d learn an enormous amount just by being in the room. This isn’t about gender, it’s about access. Allow yourself to think about who has access to the spaces you occupy.

ADD TWO NAMES

If you’re in a position to do the hiring, at some point someone will give you a list of names of people you might consider. Take a look at who’s on that list, and if what you see is homogeneity of any kind, name it, and then ask for two more people to be added to the list. We’d all love to live in a world of meritocracy where the best player always gets the gig. But maybe you can’t find the best player if that person never got “added to the list” in the first place.

OFFER A RESOURCE

I recently music directed and played solo piano with an orchestra, and a female bass player found me on a break and said it was refreshing to see a woman in such a powerful position. I said, “There are so many of us. Do you know about the Maestra Directory?”

FIND YOUR KEYS

If you walk out of your house without your keys, you’ll go back and look for them. You know they’re there, but you can’t move forward until you find them. Don’t default to “We tried to hire more women, but they don’t exist here.” They do. Are they ready to do the gig you’re offering? Maybe not. But you won’t know if you’re not even looking for them.

Local 802 member GEORGIA STITT is an award-winning composer, lyricist, music producer, and pianist. Her original musicals include Snow Child, Big Red Sun, The Danger Year, The Big Boom, The Water, Mosaic, and Samantha Spade, Ace Detective (“Outstanding New Musical” from National Youth Theatre), and the upcoming Girls Just Want to Have Fun. Georgia has released four albums of her music: A Quiet Revolution, My Lifelong Love, This Ordinary Thursday, and Alphabet City Cycle, and her newest album, Bell Tower, will be released on March 6th. Georgia has worked in the music department on projects including NBC’s The Sound of Music (Live!), Off Broadway’s Sweet Charity (starring Sutton Foster), the films of The Last Five Years (starring Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan), 13: The Musical, and the recent Broadway revival of Parade. The founder of Maestra Music, she is also in leadership at The Dramatists Guild and The Recording Academy and teaches at Princeton University. Georgia lives in New York with her husband Jason Robert Brown, and they are both members of Local 802. Georgia Stitt’s previous article for Allegro can be found here: 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025.

AMPLIFY 2026

Maestra’s annual gala concert, AMPLIFY 2026, will be produced on April 6th at City Winery in New York City. Musicians will be covered under a union contract.

ABOUT MAESTRA

Structural inequities in training, hiring, and accessibility have long limited underrepresented artists, including women and gender-expansive musicians, from full participation in the professional life of the theatre. Founded in 2017 by acclaimed composer, lyricist, and music director Georgia Stitt, Maestra Music believes that creative excellence and cultural equity are inseparable and demand sustained intervention. Through Maestra’s Directory, mentorship, and advocacy, as well as through our RISE Directory and network partners, we provide support, visibility, and community for our members and allies — along with year-round programming designed to build lasting models for equity across the theatre industry. www.maestramusic.org

Personal essays published in Allegro (including MEMBER TO MEMBER) do not necessarily represent the opinions of the union or its members, officers or staff. To give feedback on this article or submit something to Allegro for consideration, send to allegro@local802afm.org.