Audio Engineering
Have you noticed any female sound or audio engineers in the music industry? Is audio engineering so biased that it can not accept female engineers in the industry?
Remember the Album of the Year winner Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech during the annual Grammy Awards?
If you don’t, here is an excerpt, “There are going to be people along the way who try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame.
But if you just focus on the work, [someday] you will look around and you will know it was you and the people who love you who put you there. And that will be the greatest feeling in the world.”
A few may ask, “what about it?” Well, if you didn’t notice, at the time she was making the speech about female empowerment, she is surrounded by an all-male crowd of music producers.
Not a single woman is up on stage to support her ideals.
But what appeared was not entirely the case. The success of the award-winning album “1989” was because of 19 people other than Swift, two of which are women: Imogen Heap and Laura Sisk.
Both women were unable to go behind Swift during the ceremony, but had made significant contributions behind the scenes.
This is a sad reflection though, that women in music production are still undermined. In an industry where males are dominant, the women’s capacity to take charge is questioned. The number of women, too, keeps on going down largely because of the discrimination, if not indifference.
Audio recording studios do not even bother counting women in their league because they seem to be ‘not around.’
But there’s one, the Women’s Audio Mission, a non-profit dedicated to supporting women in audio production, which has website that presents a statistic of only 5 per cent of people who work in the production of music, television, news and film are women.
If that is the only statistic we can find about women in music production, then it’s time to make the necessary changes to give women equal opportunities in such field.
More Women in the Audio Engineering Field (Source: Lady DJ Style)