Tech Column: The gender imbalance in tech

The notion that ‘girls just aren't interested’ in technology was dispelled in 2015 by Georgina Born et al. in their paper, Music Technology, Gender, and Class: Digitization, Educational and Social Change in Britain. ‘The proportion of students aged five to 16 choosing “music technology” as their instrument is about 40 per cent female (sometimes more),’ according to that paper. ‘After age 16 this figure drops to 25 per cent, while among music technology A Level entries the fraction of young women is 18 per cent. And, finally, at university enrolment on music technology degrees, they represent approximately 10 per cent.’ The authors call this a ‘leaky pipeline’.

The Audio Engineering Society's 150th Convention was held from 25–28 May 2021. I curated two panel discussions with Carol Bousquet, former executive director of the Association of Loudspeaker Manufacturing & Acoustics. The panels were called ‘Women in Audio: Project 2000, A Retrospective’ and ‘Women in Audio: Today's Leaders’.

We were interested in what kinds of gains have been made in terms of encouraging young girls and women to seek careers in audio engineering. We revisited work that began in 1995, when Bousquet launched Women in Audio: Project 2000. She recruited a high-profile list of academics and practitioners including psychologist Dr Catherine Steiner-Adair; Dr Isabel Carter Stewart, executive director of Girls, Inc.; recording artist Laurie Anderson; and educators Robin Coxe-Yeldham and Angela Piva to discuss girls' psychological development and the possible connection to the dearth of women in audio.

Bousquet and Anderson returned for the anniversary event, while newcomers included myself, Anderson's producer Roma Baran, who sits on the board of the Institute for Musical Arts (an all-girls music school in Massachusetts, USA), and Dr Stephanie Hull, the current director of Girls, Inc. Panellists listened to a clip from the original event, in which Steiner-Adair offered some sobering insight based on their extensive research into girls' development at the time:

‘Girls do great… up until around the age of 10,’ she said. ‘Because up until the age of around eight or nine or 10, they are allowed to be honest about what goes on and what goes down in relationships. Girls at eight, nine and 10 talk all the time about anger, envy, jealousy, hatred, competition. They are loud, deep-belly-voiced young women. This capacity to speak vocally and in their body about anger, meanness, envy, competition – the inevitable, real, heartfelt, hard stuff that comes in real relationships – disappears by 15. Disappears. Girls come up against a cultural mandate written about by Carol Gilligan and Lynn Brand as the “tyranny of kind and nice”. And it's at this moment in their lives that girls get the message – much more intensely than before – that they have to be kind and they have to be nice… and that it's much more important, in fact, to be kind and nice than it is to tell the truth. It's more important for your safety in the world.’

Terri Winston, founder and executive director of Women's Audio Mission, reacted to this clip. She felt that things were worse, or at best the same, for ‘black and brown girls’. Her programme focuses on underserved populations in the San Francisco and Oakland regions of California, and she is heartbroken by the effect that economic deprivation has on young girls' self-confidence. What does encourage her is that girls participating in her programme find that confidence, and they are now training 3,000 girls every year. Winston also let viewers know that their oft-cited statistic that ‘less than 5 per cent of women’ are audio engineers came from the original Project 2000 event, which she attended. Joining Winston on the second panel were founders of women-centred mentoring organisations.

Mentoring, role models, and networking are all factors that contribute to the social capital needed for women to succeed in the field, as I concluded in my book, Women in Audio. This is supported by the scholarly research, interviews, and the academic conferences and panels mentioned above. In fact, Dr Elisabeth Dobson of the University of Huddersfield found over 70 ‘feminist audio collectives’ currently supporting women and girls in the field of audio and music technology. Educators working with young people today are encouraged to collaborate with these groups in order to bring awareness to the career options that audio engineering provides, and to connect young girls to workshops and support networks.

Links

Dr Liz Dobson, Feminist Sound Collectives: bit.ly/34rMDQM

Women in Audio Project 2000: A Retrospective: sched.co/jAJf

Women in Audio Project 2000: Today's Leaders: sched.co/jAyt

Music Technology, Gender, and Class: Digitization, Educational and Social Change in Britain: bit.ly/3oZJTnb

Women in Audio, Leslie Gaston-Bird: bit.ly/34tPJDQ