By now, the math is all too familiar. The percentage of women working on the technical side of music represents a strikingly small fraction of the audio production population — ratios that are similarly reflected on the stages they support. For instance, on this year’s Warped tour, just seven percent of the bands had women members, though one act, Doll Skin, a quartet of women from Phoenix, employed an all-female crew. Even when women do achieve a critical mass on stage, that success is virtually never matched on the other side of the consoles. And with dozens of all-female bills on its stages, at the Lilith Fair festival (representing the issue’s high-water mark over the course of its decade-long run from 1997), XY chromosomes still dominated the other end of the snakes.
The live sound industry ignores women at its own risk, and not due to any blowback swirling around the #MeToo movement — or the antics of certain CEOs and (ahem) presidents — but rather because it’s just bad business. At a time when live music and touring are the big revenue generators for the music industry, restricting the possible pool of talent to pick from just isn’t smart.
Live sound, and touring in particular, has had some endemic barriers for women, not least of which is the need to be away from home and family for extended periods of time. It’s not sexist to say that women are more often than not the anchors of family life, and it’s not an easy decision for many of them to make. It’s also a bit of a rough-and-tumble environment, physically and culturally, and as enlightened as my gender may have become in recent years, there’s still a touch (and then some) of the McSorley’s syndrome, a reference to that Manhattan ale house that defiantly remained an all-male bastion from 1854 to 1970.
Change Is Real
Things are changing. For starters, training in live sound is more widely available as it gets added to the curricula of more technical schools, and the number of women taking those courses is on the rise. Celebrating its 15th anniversary in 2018, the Bay Area-based Women’s Audio Mission (womensaudiomission.org) reports it trains as many as 1,500 women annually in audio and other media crafts, with 40 percent of its students pursuing careers in live sound, according to its executive director Terri Winston.
Karrie Keyes, longtime monitor mixer for Pearl Jam and Eddie Vedder, is also the co-founder of Soundgirls (soundgirls.org) a six-year-old non-profit that provides scholarships, mentorships, job placement, business development and workshops for women in pro audio. Keyes says it’s harder to gauge the percentage of its 6,000 members who work mostly in live sound. “It’s a pretty loose membership form,” she says, reflecting the fact that few people of any gender have economic luxury to pursue just one specialty consistently in this industry. But the fact that Soundgirls was started by two tour-sound veterans — Keyes’ co-founder is Michelle Sabolchick Pettinato, a Full Sail grad who’s mixed on the road for Gwen Stefani, Goo Goo Dolls, Ke$ha, Jewel and others — suggests that women as well as men have figured out that live sound is where the bread is buttered these days.
Soundgirls has an admirable depth, including an online “Directory of Women in Professional Audio and Production” spreadsheet that any touring worker would want her or his name and resume in (resumes are attachable and downloadable from the site). Even more remarkable, Keyes and Sabolchick Pettinato keep the site up to date largely by themselves and a small group of volunteers, online and from hotel rooms on breaks, even as Keyes hits the road with Vedder and company regularly, something she was preparing to do as we spoke.
Prejudice against women in pro audio, and in live sound in particular, is a real thing, but it’s often an unconscious bias, she contends. And while it manifests itself perhaps more in omission than commission — a tour manager or SR executive flipping through resumes on paper or online and skipping the female names — it still creates a sense of exclusion. That’s what Soundgirls and WAM offer as alternatives: not so much safe spaces as parallel networks for women (though not at the exclusion of men, Keyes stresses) where they can build both skills and confidence.
When they created Soundgirls, Keyes and Sabolchick Pettinato published a monthly newsletter to promote the organization. One regular feature was a profile on a woman working in one pro audio discipline or another. The sense of scale of women’s involvement in the industry at the time was such that Keyes recalls Sabolchick Pettinato worrying that they might run out of candidates for those short bios. “Six years later, we still have plenty of people write about,” she says.
Clear Skies Ahead
There are other currents pulling in the right direction. For instance, the PRS Foundation, part of the U.K.’s main performing-rights organization, announced earlier this year that its initiative to commit to a 50/50 music-industry gender balance by the year 2022 has been joined by more than 100 music-related festivals, including Canada’s Rock The Shores fest and the U.K.’s Big Scary Monsters Big Day Out.
Obstacles remain, but a growing level of awareness about live sound as a career path is helping push past those. Brittni Werner has been out on the road with Toby Keith, Chris Young and Imagine Dragons when she’s not working as the regional events coordinator for Sound Image’s Nashville office. She’s had that job since 2013 and encountered Music City’s old-boys-club culture early on, but says coming into the industry through a sound-reinforcement company helped her thread that needle.
“Nashville’s touring community has been male-dominated for years; it’s a network, and when someone needs someone for a tour, they tend to call within that network,” Werner explains. “For me, coming to work at Sound Image was a way to ease into that network, to get to the point where people see that you can do the job as well as anyone else. Now, a lot of these guys consider me their first call.”
Schools, which have seen a higher percentage of female enrollments in the last decade, are also becoming a wider avenue for access to live sound careers for women as those schools add it to their curricula. Werner cites Sound Image’s relationships with Belmont University, Full Sail and the Conservatory of Recording Sciences (CRAS) as sources for internships. However, as the opportunities for internships at professional recording studios diminish in number, more graduates of all genders are looking at getting onboard at tour-sound and installed sound companies. With a limited number of slots available and more applicants than ever, getting in that way isn’t getting any easier. For instance, Sound Image in Nashville will generally take on four interns a year, and Werner says that on average, one of them is a woman.
Still Evolving
It took a long time for the culture of pro audio to become what it’s been, and it’s not going to change overnight — music is a business that’s largely built on sex appeal. But we’re living through a remarkable time in history. It’s worth appreciating that our business gets to have a part in it.
Pictured: Hands-on training session at the Women’s Audio Mission, where 40 percent of its students pursue careers in sound reinforcement.
