Women and non-binary producers and engineers ‘vastly under-represented’ in top songs
Women and non-binary people were shockingly under-represented across the top 50 streamed songs of last year. Why are they struggling to be taken seriously in music?
When Anna Laverty graduated from the Sound course at WAAPA in 2003, she was the only woman in her class. Over the next 15 years, as she cut her teeth in studios across London, she says she only ever ran into one other woman: fellow Australian Catherine Marks, who this year produced the acclaimed boygenius debut record.
“I never saw another woman in the studio,” says Laverty.
Her story is far from unique. Women and non-binary people are shockingly under-represented in the world of music production. A new study, “Lost in the Mix,” found that they claimed less than 5% of producer and engineer credits across the top 50 streamed songs of last year, and senior studio roles are largely out of reach for them.
The report examined the metadata for 757 top-streamed tracks of 2022 and analysed 14 different music genres. Among the top 10 streamed tracks of 2022 across five major streaming platforms, only 6.7% (or 16) of the 240 credited producers and engineers were women or non-binary individuals.
The gender gap widens further when looking at specific genres. Metal has the lowest percentage of women and non-binary people credited in key technical roles, with 0.0% (based on an analysis of the top 50 songs). Rap and Christian & Gospel also trail closely behind with only 0.7% and 0.8%, respectively. Beverly Keel, co-author of the report, emphasises that these “pitifully low” percentages would be considered an “embarrassment in any other industry.”
“It’s just not enough,” says Laverty, an acclaimed engineer and producer who has worked with the likes of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Depeche Mode, and Florence and the Machine. “It’s terrible. It’s dire.”
Women have been behind the console for some of the most enduring music in modern music history: take Sylvia Robinson, who produced Sugar Hill Gang’s ‘Rappers Delight’ and Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five’s ‘The Message’; or Sylvia Massey, who has cut tracks for heavy hitters like System of a Down, Tool, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers for over three decades; ‘80s DJ and producer Yvonne Turner, a key architect of New York House; and Kate Bush, who squirrelled away in her family studio barn to self-produce what would be her opus, “Hounds of Love.”
Yet Laverty, who has known she wanted to work in music production since age 14 “before I knew what it was called,” says that female role models were hard to come by. “Even though Kate Bush produced her records, she was never really referred to as a producer at the time.
“In my mind, it was dudes that did it. It was always considered a male technical role in the studio.”
The conversation about gender imbalance in music production has been going on for decades, with little progress made. Laverty speculates that gatekeepers, a lack of comfort among women and non-binary people in studio spaces, or the harsh working conditions for producers may be contributing factors. But instead of playing the blame game, she says the industry should focus on how to remedy the problem.
Laverty says the first step is to put pressure on major labels. “They are the ones who make these big songs; they need to employ more women. But when you’re dealing with companies that are just trying to get a hit, they’re quite happy to stick to the people that they know are going to get them there.”
“The best way you can support women in music is to hire them. Just hire them. Look for them and hire them.”
She adds that while the music industry needs to undergo significant transformation, achieving gender equality in music production will be a challenging task to undertake. This is partly due to the fact that producers and engineers in the field generally work freelance. As she puts it, “We don‘t work for big production houses, so they can’t introduce quotas on it.”
Things on home soil are a little more optimistic, says Laverty, who is the founding director of the Music Producers Guild of Australia, and counts a representation of 12% of women in production and engineering. She observes a change that’s happened within the industry. “For many years, there was such a weird thing with women in music, where they were pitted against each other. There could never be room for two female pop stars,” she says. “But women have turned around and recognised that it’s total rubbish.”
Ninajirachi, real name Nina Wilson, a 23-year-old producer hailing from the Central Coast, believes that gender parity in the music industry is “a matter of representation catching up to the culture.” In her view, ”The under-representation is still there as a by-product of that era” when only men were taken seriously as producers.
“The biggest producers don’t pop up overnight; they have been around for 10 years plus, and they are still around from that era when no one took women seriously,” she says. “Even though people are taking women seriously now, it’s still a matter of infiltrating this clientele base that has a very set idea of who they like to work with.”
Wilson, a self-taught producer, who first entered the industry at 17 and now works in music full time, says that her experience has been largely positive. It’s something that she credits to her mentor, DJ Nina Las Vegas, under whose imprint NLV Records she is signed, for helping her navigate the industry.
“Nina was the first person that felt like my big sister, who I could call and be like, someone just offered me this, like, should I do it? Or like, what does this mean?”
Wilson, who is speaking with The Australian over Zoom, has just returned from a writing trip in Los Angeles. “I worked with so many amazing and accomplished writers who have written songs with billions of streams. They took me seriously and loved my work,” she says.
“I didn‘t have to explain myself or demonstrate my competence; they just got it. That was really cool and refreshing. So hopefully, more of that. I don’t see any reason for things not to keep going the way they are. So far, so good. “
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