They make up 49.7 percent of the earth’s population. Among U.S. doctors, their ratio is 31 percent. They even account for 19 percent of the elected officials in Congress. But the percentage of live sound engineers who are women is closer to the 5 percent mark.
Two members of this rarified group, Karrie Keyes and Michelle Sabolchick Pettinato, were panelists for the “Women of Professional Concert Sound” seminar at AES 2012 in San Francisco, hosted by the recording industry group, Women’s Audio Mission (WAM, womensaudiomission.org). The panel was moderated by WAM founder Terri Winston and also included Claudia Engelhart, Deanne Franklin and Jeri Palumbo.
“Other than Deanne and myself, none of us had ever met in our 20-plus years of touring,” Sabolchick Pettinato says. Although their paths had not crossed until an hour before the panel was due to begin, within 15 minutes of that first meeting, the women bonded like long-lost sisters. “We wondered how things might have been different had we known each other in the early days of our careers.”
Reminded of how isolating a career in live sound can be for women, Keyes and Sabolchick Pettinato decided to start SoundGirls.org. It doesn’t exclude recording engineers, but the nonprofit group has a decidedly live-sound emphasis.
Of the panel discussion itself, Sabolchick Pettinato notes, “it was not in any way a male-bashing session, or even about ‘girl power.’ It was about how we got our start, life on the road — everything any engineer goes through,” though presented with a woman’s perspective.
Typical Beginnings
Sabolchick Pettinato, an FOH mixing engineer, says her interest in becoming a sound engineer goes back to when she was in high school. “I loved music, and I loved anything technical, and wanted to be part of the process.” She started working part-time for a sound company out of Philadelphia and, typical of anyone in this business, she started at the bottom, working in the shop. Then she graduated to being a stagehand before getting to be a second mixer for local bands. She worked her way up the ladder but “desperately wanted to get out on the road and mix.” She got her chance for the Spin Doctor’s first tour. She’d go on to work with other acts, including Mr. Big, Joan Osborne, Tesla, Gwen Stefani, Jewel and the Indigo Girls, among many others.
Keyes, now monitor mixer for Pearl Jam, says she met Dave Ratt of Ratt Sound at a Black Flag show in 1986 and talked her way into doing part-time work for him, loading trucks and setting up gear. “I was just getting experience, and eventually I was one of just five people who worked every single show they did,” she says. “Eventually, I learned monitor mixing.” She moved up herself and established a long-term relationship with Pearl Jam leader Eddie Vedder, working almost exclusively for them since 2005.
So what is it like being in such an exclusively male-dominated field?
“For me, a lot of people were just in shock,” Keyes laughs. “But I didn’t get a ton of blowback. A lot of my early shows were with punk rock bands, and that crowd tended to be more accepting of anything and everybody who was ‘slightly weird,’ so it was not that big of a deal.” She does acknowledge that, hitting the road at age 24, she would run into “grumpy local crew members” and sometimes felt she was being slighted because she was a woman. But the people she worked with day-to-day knew her well enough to respect her abilities as a sound mixer, and were always supportive.
“Sound company guys mostly liked me being on the crew because I worked harder and smarter,” Sabolchick Pettinato says. “We’d be setting up for a show, and if they thought they had forgotten something, I had most likely put it in the van.” She laughs and recalls more than one instance of coming back from dinner for the show and the guy at the door shaking her down for the cover charge, assuming she was the girlfriend of the sound guy. But that was the exception.
While it’s hard to pinpoint the exact percentage of live audio engineers who are women — the 5 percent figure is just an educated guess — it’s definitely a “small number.” Regardless, “we’re out there,” Sabolchick Pettinato says. “Unfortunately, those who are out there think they are alone.”
“Engineer,” Not “Female Engineer”
Both SoundGirls.org founders stress that they don’t think of themselves primarily as “female engineers.” Instead, it’s as “engineers” who just happen to be women. Yet as the years went by and Kerry became a mother with two daughters and started advocating for arts in their school, she saw that opportunities in live events, particularly pro audio, weren’t always being presented to the girls. She thinks they should be.
Pettinato adds that this group is really just about encouraging girls to consider a career that, while traditionally male-dominated, is not exclusively so. “My goal with SoundGirl is to let women know that they don’t have to settle for a ‘traditional’ career option [in the live event arts].”
The nonprofit will continue to grow organically, and long-term goals include outreach to schools, fundraising to provide scholarships and, perhaps, to lobby trade schools to consider becoming more inclusive.
They are already on their way for their short-term goals, which include networking and celebrating the women in live sound who have already made their mark.
For the latter, they have on their site a profile on Kathy Sander, who worked for Clair starting in the late 1970s and began her career mentored by an audio legend and Parnelli Audio Innovator honoree, the late Bruce Jackson, on an Elvis Presley tour. She would go on to work for some of the biggest acts like Yes, and shows in history, including Live Aid and Amnesty International Tour.
For more information, on Keyes, Sabolchick Pettinato and the group they started, go to www.soundgirls.org.
