This is how it is:

In human years I am 41.

In dog years (not dog years - the opposite), that is, years that have somehow presented fair opportunity for creative growth and attention to my professional trajectory, you could take out at least 10 of those which were spent in pregnancy and then looking after very young children.
Ours is not a business that cares to welcome the post-partum, ex-ingenue back into the fold having kept the seat warm. Nup.

The controversial bit is that I would knock off still more years still for lack of opportunities offered to women as opposed to men; for the sheer lack of self-belief which comes upon women of a certain age like a cold shadow (all those teen-years of sassy world-rule and then what? A grand succumbing, a suffocation… where does it go?); and also for lack of close-up, warm-to-the-touch role models.

I have had this conversation several times:

CASTING DIRECTOR: “Federay! I thought you’d left the business.”
FEDERAY: “No. Who told you that?”
CASTING DIRECTOR: “Oh. I heard you had a kid.”

So having kids equals leaving the business. For women: a serious career in the arts is meant to be some kind of prophylactic.

Men (do I need to add?) do not have this conversation.

So in response to Bailey’s cry for opportunity (scroll to final section: Disappointment), which I endorse but wish also to constructively dissect, the first point I would like to make is a question: what has age got to do with it?

My experience has taught me to find some peace with the fact that if the timeline to which I aspire and against which I measure myself is the standard (and universal) male timeline I will die of despair and frustration. My friends who are making a living from writing are men who have no dependents and who can write full-time - I do not have that freedom. For every week they spend writing I spend (rough guess) some hours - half a day…

Many of the best New Writing opportunities around are offered to the under-30s. I propose that this suits blokes more than women – blokes are less likely to expand their creative horizons, post-children, into new media. Women tend to diversify their skills throughout their lives. Therefore, these advantages are the privilege of those who choose to write in their first life. Many women are “late bloomers”, and leave their familiar patches later in life, just when they have something to say and just when no-one wants to hear it. (Don’t question me – I know it to be true.) Show me the competitions, bursaries and schemes in the Arts that count for anything, aimed exclusively at the over-40s? I do not think I am alone in having had not much to say in the form of a play when I was under 30.

But I refuse to be made to look over my shoulder, regret being family-shackled or make comparisons which lead me to anger. That is the adjustment I have made - I don’t know what Germaine would have to say about it but it’s working so far. More or less.

I have a friend who is a novelist and teaches creative writing. She says it is a well-known fact that if you call your course: Starting to Write - you will get a lot of women. If you call your course: Advanced Fiction - you will get a lot of men. The standard will be the same.

I have just come back from watching my kids at their weekly Streetdance class. At the end of the class any child who wants can dance freestyle in the centre of a circle. A third of the class are girls. Of the thirty or so dances we see (they can each go in as often as they like) ONE, ONCE is a girl.

So it goes. This is a very, very old conversation (or is it a row?) Why is there a need for an Orange Prize? Why does anyone call themselves a feminist now? Look where all this so-called choice has got us (nowhere.) What happens to us? Is it conditioned or unavoidable? Where is the fault? Are we trying too hard to dance to a male tune? Against what criteria are we measuring ourselves?

The Factory is not immune.

Myself, I say women: maintain your rage - just keep it creative. I say men: don’t imagine this is not your business.

I also say: this place, the Factory, is the place to have this conversation because we respond to challenges with honesty, energy and imagination. We also are not a company that looks for solutions and rules - we look for more questions, strategies to test, true angles on old problems rather than the inherited angles. So let’s have this conversation - because it is interesting and our responses, I think, will not be to trot down the only-vaguely-effective, familiar paths of positive discrimination, women-only initiatives and such… it will be something else. I think. I think it will be for real.

And finally this.

Bailey writes: The Factory prides itself on being revolutionary, but 80% of the pieces in the set list are written by men. Fed made it to the list, and Barbara, both established female writers…

When I came to my very first Factory session it was a New Writing session and even though I was there on the strength of a blog I had written about a Hamlet I saw, I did not say then I was a writer. Even though at that first session I had three two-handers in my bag I didn’t say I was a writer. Even when Alex looked me right in the eye and said: “are you here as an actor or a writer?” and I could have said “both” I still didn’t say that I was a writer. I did not get those two-handers out in public for months.

Who is responsible for that?

Furthermore speaking of inexperienced: I have NO credentials. None. I have never had stuff produced or even read outside the Factory as a playwright. I have had a few tiny stories and things published but not even enough to make a cv look like a cv. I have no representation as a writer. I have never written to a brief or a commission, for a patron or an employer of any kind. My portfolio consists of blogs, short stories and short dramas - none of which is going to make any agents’ or editors’ hearts beat faster. Not because it’s not good but because it’s the equivalent of saying: “My Mum thinks I am the best in the school play.” To which the agent would be justified in saying: “Well you might be, but it ain’t going to earn me a commission.” At the time of writing: the sum total of my life’s earnings from my writing is £10.

The sum total of my life’s earnings from my writing is £10.

Every single writer who took part in writing for the 5050 sessions is now a more experienced playwright than I was when I came to my first Factory session in March 2008.

So reading what Bailey wrote I felt I should put that bit straight – not just because I am anal but because if that is surprising we should collectively be proud that it is possible for that assumption to be an assumption. Also, a triumphantly gender-neutral assumption.

The situation is far from perfect, way off, and I will here admit that I am surprised it has taken so long for this shovelful to hit this fan. I am in the middle of a few writing projects at the moment, a couple are a bit incendiary and might need pseudonyms and I am favouring Andrew Surname. Given a fair wind I can become hugely emotional and vengeful about the whole issue. I would say that 56% of me is still a red-faced 8 year old apoplectic with (suppressed) rage that I am not allowed to do the fun stuff my brothers are allowed to do.

So today I am filled with excitement and love for writing which I have never experienced in my life before - even though it is something I have always loved but mostly in secret. I am now surrounded by opportunities, not to gain exposure, recognition and riches, but to write and have my stuff read. I am trusted as a writer by a bunch of amazing, creative people I love and urged to do what I love doing almost as much as writing itself - get people writing. And that is because the Factory (Tim and Alex) said: we like what you are doing and we want you to do more of what you like, please. They said it several times.

And when I said: “I have no credentials, there is no cv, you realise.” They said: “we don’t care about all that.”

And I have to trust that “all that” includes the stuff that others see as precious boxes in which to delicately place nice, polite ticks.

Who is responsible for that?