Meet the women fighting for equality in the Scottish music industry

“The figures were so awful for women,” said Brooks. “It was just appalling and I thought that was shocking in 2016.”

But it was Reed’s call to action that really resonated. She told the audience that if they wanted to change things you will have to “go home and make it happen yourselves”.

That, combined with inspiration from Michelle Obama’s speech about the Let Girls Learn campaign, led to the launch last week to coincide with International Women’s Day of a new initiative to support women in the Scottish music industry.

Its aim is to address gender imbalance and promote the visibility of women in all areas of the business.

Scottish Women Inventing Music (Swim) has already identified education to be one of the biggest targets for grassroots change, with advocacy and activism providing the other key strands of the group’s future aims in securing a level playing field for women in music in Scotland.

Swim is entirely run by volunteers and inclusive of anyone female or that identifies as female in the industry, from performers and technicians to those in other roles behind the scenes, such as marketers and journalists.

Composer and musician Brooks decided to start Swim after returning from a trip to the US, where she heard former first lady, Michelle Obama, speak.

“I came home and spoke to Gill Maxwell at the Scottish Music Centre and she thought it was a brilliant idea so two of her workforce who are music graduates and young women volunteered immediately to be part of it and it’s grown from there.”

One of the first people involved in what was to become Swim, Laura Leslie from the Scottish Music Centre, said that an initiative such as this was desperately needed. “You see all these stats about women in music and they do look terrible. But it’s difficult to get a real handle on what that really translates to in the music industry. Meeting all those women [at the initial discussions] and having them all in the room there was a real sense that this was a really good time to do that and that people needed something, some kind of place where they could come together and share their ideas and build on them and get a bit of support.”

Leslie said that the statistics surrounding women’s involvement in the music business can be disheartening and that the type of change Swim is pushing for is something that will take time. The concept is centred on connecting women, particularly as being a female in various sides of the business can be isolating, she explained. Swim will also help promote members, providing a platform for their work, as well as a database and network of names and roles. The plan is to share this comprehensive database with organisations that are underperforming when it comes to addressing gender imbalance.

Halina Rifai, Swim board member, journalist, promoter and marketer, said that instead of chastising or bringing organisations with a poor gender balance record down, it’s “saying to them ‘yeah, it’s shit what you’re doing but we can maybe help you’.”

Brooks wants to tackle the inequality of opportunity from a young age and plans to send members to schools and colleges in the future. She feels that at an educational level, there is a 50-50 split of men and women studying music in colleges, universities and conservatoires, but by the time they graduate, very few women take their careers in music further.

“There are a lot of male teachers who are quite threatened and they’re just not giving the positive message and realising there are different kinds of support that women sometimes need, but that’s the same in any walk of life these days,” she said, adding that one of the biggest barriers for women is a lack of accessible childcare. “Unless you provide a creche, unless politically there’s a will to allow people to stay in a work space and fulfil their potential, then we’re on to hee-haw.”

Diljeet Bhachu, co-founder of the Scottish-Asian Creative Artists Network, musician and board member of Swim, who appeared as both panellist and performer at Swim’s launch, will be heavily involved in the education programmes. She suggested that for her it was a push against the lack of active encouragement to pursue a career in music, as she was effectively channelled into pursuing a role in music education rather than a performance-focused one.

Swim board member Halina Rifai

‘IT was subliminal,” she said. “In school composers were these dead white men and then I went to university and met composers who were living women who were my age. There was one moment when pursuing a degree when I was actively told ‘no, you won’t manage this’. I don’t know if it was as much on account of my gender but it was also the same teacher whose job it was to be preparing me for a career in music. They didn’t actively embed any inspiration and I had to seek things out myself.”

The collective aims to run parallel to the Keychange initiative, which is an international commitment for festivals to achieve 50-50 gender equality on stage by 2022, backed by PRS. “We can help grassroots-wise by making people aware and to support the festivals that do that,” said Brooks. “We are determined to be a positive channel for change.”

Jess Partridge, project manager at Keychange, added: “It’s amazing to see other people taking inspiration from Keychange and really trying to create new things, especially other networks because we’ve seen how key that is.”

Leslie said: “What is really remarkable is that despite all these terrible statistics, there are so many women out there who are continuing to make a difference in spite of that. They’re not put off by the fact that there aren’t that many female sound engineers for example. They are continuing to do that anyway.

“It comes back to visibility – making that look more common so that it just becomes something that’s accepted. We want Swim to be really successful and there’s a lot of enthusiasm to drive it forward but ultimately we don’t want it to be needed anymore. It should get to a point at some stage in the future, whenever that is, [where] it’s just very common to see female sound engineers and people working on the backline that are women.”

Emma Pollock, musician, label boss and one of the founders of recording studio Chem19, was a panellist and mentor at the launch. She said that it’s largely the tech side of the business that needs attention due to an “alarming lack of women” involved.

“I know there are debates about certain festivals and venues and certain very subtle bias that is sometimes demonstrated towards lads’ bands,” she said. “But to be honest in general I think women artists, for as long as I’ve been in the industry, or certainly in the past 10 years, have actually been much better represented and I think are carving out a space for themselves quite well at the moment. It’s the technical side for me that I’m a bit more aware of, having been a touring artist and turning up at venues and it’s usually a guy that’s behind the desk. It would be really nice to start to redress that balance. There are some venues that are encouraging the development of female engineers in that area because they are so underrepresented.

‘THIS is a very complex issue and it’s not as simple as women need to be on the lookout and have to be wary of our male counterparts and we have to fight for our corner,” she said. “I don’t really see it like that. I’ve always seen it as I’m an individual who always wanted to go into the music industry because I was quite attracted to it, and when I came to Glasgow it felt more tangible because of the city and its energy and its industry and I didn’t really give a second thought to my gender. I just did the thing because I wanted to do the thing and it didn’t really have much to do with my gender. It wasn’t a political or gender-related statement.

“I think there is a very important distinction between assuming a stance of a victim or actually just saying ‘look if you want to go and do anything in any industry then take your gender out of it and just go and do it’. And by the way don’t treat the guys any differently either because that’s a really important issue. We can’t solve a gender issue by creating a new one. I don’t want to make my gender the first thing that defines me. I have faith in being recognised through merit and I don’t want to lose faith in that.”

Reflecting on the launch, Rifai suggested that the hard work had yet to begin. Several of those involved reported issues around education. Rifai was one of only two females at her university course in music and said there was a sense of being in a minority and that “you shouldn’t’ be there”. But it’s another kind of discrimination that has been the starkest. “A lot of the discrimination I’ve had is very much to do with my weight, it’s been appearance for me in the industry,” she said. “Instead of actually looking at my talents and skills I’ve had people saying ‘look at the state of her’. They don’t even take into consideration what you can actually do, it’s more the aesthetics.”

Rifai suggests that things have improved but there’s still a long way to go. “There’s still a lot of dinosaurs within the industry and a lot of white men that are in the roles that steer what’s happening within the music industry,” she said. “No matter whether that’s classical right through to everything, they are just pulling the strings. It’s a generational thing so hopefully if we can influence the generation to come through to almost obliterate what’s happened before then hopefully it will change.”