The last time I gave any thought to the Taming of the Shrew was probably when I was home sick from school with tonsillitis, watching Elizabeth Taylor chuck strategically-aimed apples at Richard Burton’s head. Growing up, my baseline for a good movie included gems like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, so it’s safe to say that my ten-year-old self failed to grasp the film’s more Stockholm Syndrome-esque elements. (Reality check: A musical based on the Rape of the Sabine Women really did constitute high-quality, family-friendly viewing at one point in the not-too-distant past. Admittedly, the dancing is still superb.)

Fast forward two decades, and I booked tickets for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s version of Taming of the Shrew, curious to see how the RSC would interpret the play I now viewed more along the lines of George Bernard Shaw’s assessment, as “one long insult to womanhood and manhood from the first to the last.” But the RSC has a real knack for translating plays as if Shakespeare wrote exclusively for our own socio-political context. For instance, keeping the respective Brumy and Irish accents of Romeo and Juliet made it seem as if the Shakespeare was speaking directly to knife crime in modern Britain.

Their creative director is radically inclusive, casting characters in a way that makes you think inclusivity ought not be that radical. The blindness of the friar in Romeo and Juliet intensifies his role as spiritual and practical guide, a messenger in a wheelchair zips across stage with an alacrity that elevates the role, and Shakespeare’s bawdy humour is delivered astoundingly effectively through British sign language by a minor role as the comedic-relief servant. Whatever the RSC had planned for a play ostensibly about an acerbic woman submitting to a gold-digging husband, it was sure to honor the Bard.

Sure enough, by the time the first scene finishes, I am on the edge of my seat—a precarious position when you’re in the barstool seats in the very top row. Director Justin Audibert has swapped the genders. Every single one. Padua has been transformed to a matriarchy full of powdered faces and Elizabethan power ruffs. It takes me a full two scenes to clock that the elderly Gremia with a grey wig and authoritative mole of disdain was originally written as a suitor to the long-haired, youthfully idiotic Bianco prancing on stage.

This latest incarnation of the play lives just on the boundary of comedy and tragedy. Seeing the genders flipped makes it astoundingly, embarrassingly easier to call violence by its name. Who would honestly feast and celebrate a wedding when everyone knows one partner put the other in a brutal headlock and effectively lassoed him or her down the aisle?  What preening young man would allow his mother to barter for his marriage? Watching the scenes where Petruchia effectively starves Katherine prompts me to wonder if I had misremembered the Taylor/Burton version. Hadn’t this story been sold to me as a romantic comedy at some point?

Obviously the nuance I missed as a ten-year-old was not wasted on the legions of Shakespeare fans and critics who are rather embarrassed by the Taming of the Shrew’s crudeness. But to see it gender-flipped is to be offered a counterfactual lens on gender bias in the world around us. What would we think of any given situation if the context was the same and only the gender was flipped? Would we chastise a man who rebelled at his mother who bartered for his dowry? How would we judge a wife who deprives her husband until he admitted that the moon was actually the sun? No doubt her sanity would be in question!

The struggle for equality for marginalized groups raises tough questions, but I find the counterfactual question—the creativity to imagine a parallel world with the gender flipped—cuts through much of the noise about fairness and equality. My field isn’t theater, it’s statistics, but the question of gender bias is still complicated. Human bias threatens to infiltrate algorithms that determine our credit scores, our job prospects, our insurance premiums. And yet, determining how to measure this isn’t straightforward. Simply removing a variable prone to bias, like race or gender, may only result in using another variable like economic indicators as a proxy. Recently, a group of researchers at University College London took a huge step towards defining and consequently removing bias with a paper on a counterfactual definition of fairness—exactly the same question the RSC’s Taming of the Shrew asks implicitly.

Philosophers, statisticians, and computer scientists use counterfactuals to determine causation in a system. For instance, one way to answer the question “Does gender bias determine the outcome of an online job application?” is by posing counterfactuals on the intervention in question. That is, if this candidate had been male, would the outcome have been the same? These questions mathematically highlight instances when certain variables like gender have different outcomes in real and counterfactual worlds. The Taming of the Shrew brings the imagined counterfactual world to life. Our algorithms, like art, inherit the bias of their creators. Counterfactuals offer a route to self-awareness for both scientists and artists.

In bringing into being the counterfactual world of gender-flipped Padua, the RSC gave me a serious cause for reflection that I believe can lead to constructive questions about equality for marginalized groups. How would a male job applicant face a panel entirely of women? How would jokes at the expense of women strike us if they were at the expense of men? Counterfactual questions cut through the assumptions we have surrounding sources of bias to reveal genuine merit. In stripping away the source of bias, counterfactual art and algorithms expose the root of an issue. The alleged respect Petruchia earns at the end of the play is baseless when wrought from violence. The Taming of the Shrew leaves the audience shaken in their many assumptions about gender roles, but, at the same time, it solidifies the conviction that the foundation for kindness and respect between men and women is no more complicated than minimal human-to-human decency.

Now I’m just waiting for someone to make a gender-flipped Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.