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Art House Foundation and Leapwing Scholarship

Scholarship for Abbey Road Institute Miami

The Abbey Road Institute Miami believes in diversity and inclusion and couldn’t be more proud to announce this SoundGirls Scholarship, sponsored by Leapwing.

SoundGirls is excited that two of our members are involved with this great program Maria Elisa Ayerbe-Barona and Natalia Ramirez.  We thank them for the dedication to SoundGirls and Empowering the Next Generation of Women in Audio.

I am tremendously happy to learn that Leapwing Audio and Soundgirls will be sponsoring a scholarship for a future music producer at the Abbey Road Institute program in Miami! Abbey Road Institute’s program in Miami focuses on a 100% individually tailored and hands-on educational approach, perfect for a unique student with a unique passion for music and production.  As one of the few female music producers in the industry and proud member and supporter of the Soundgirls Organization, I understand the importance of high-quality education as a means to diversify and enrich the music industry. I am sure the prospective candidate for this scholarship will be outstanding, and I am certain this incredible opportunity will match with the right person thanks to the incredible outreach the SoundGirls organization has built over the years.

Maria Elisa Ayerbe-Barona

 

I’m very excited Abbey Road Institute is finally coming to Miami. The program will start in January next year with a very select group of students that will be experiencing the studio life in a boutique setting that I had the immense opportunity to be a part of since the beginning. Art House Studios is basically home to me so it makes me really happy that the school has partnered with SoundGirls and Leapwing Audio to give an outstanding woman the opportunity to show her talents as an audio engineer while being surrounded by great people and beautiful music. This scholarship represents a life-changing stepping stone in equality and diversity in our industry. I’m definitely thrilled beyond words!

Natalia Ramirez

This scholarship:

Submissions can be made until October 10th, 2020 at 11:59pm EST and winners will be contacted before October 31st, 2020. To submit your application for a scholarship, you must be 18 years old (before January 4th, 2021) and have a valid US residency permit. During the application process, you will be asked to upload the following items:

Click here to submit your scholarship application.

Transitioning in the Music Industry

Laura Nagtegaal and Savy Dunlevy share their stories of working and transitioning in the music industry. 

Transgender people are in a unique position to see exactly how sexist dynamics in the workplace tend to play out and Laura and Savy will share their stories and experiences with us and what the industry needs to do to overcome sexism and transphobia.

We look forward to this discussion and are thankful that Laura and Savy want to share their stories with us.

August 30th at 12 PM PDT

Register Here

Savy Dunlevy is a wireless and communications audio technician for broadcast television and live events. Although a newcomer to the world of audio, they have worked in and been involved with entertainment since birth. Some of their favorite projects include shows with HGTV, ABC Network, Broadway promotional shoots, Say Yes to the Dress, and Paul McCartney: Live at Grand Central.

 

 

 

Laura Nagtegaal – Laura’s career touring the world as a guitar technician, tour manager, and merchandiser started 25 years ago. With her sunny and infectious demeanor, she spreads her own newfound joy and youthful life force around.

Laura shared her story with SoundGirls last year and you can read it here Transitioning in the Music Industry

 

 

 

Speak Out – Reach Out

2020 still has no end in sight. There’re glimmers of hope that normality might come back here or there as we see imagines for physically distanced events and people being allowed to gather in crowds, however, we know the live events landscape has been forever changed.

During these hard times, we first need to make sure we reach out to each other for support and second speak out so people outside of our industry might understand the life-changing issues we are facing.

Reach out to each other, your family and road family, friends and neighbors. Find
support, a place to talk through your struggles and successes. 2020 has been quite the roller-coaster with many things out of our hands. If you reach a point where you cannot deal with it anymore reach out. It’s extremely important to support one another.

With no end in sight, our day-to-day lives can be daunting and hard. If you find you are struggling ask for help. If you do not have people you can confide in here are two options for online therapy Talkspace and Therapy Conductor.

If you are feeling really low and not sure where to go or what to do please reach out via a
suicide hotline. Here are the US line and an International directory as well.

Suicide Prevention Lifeline

International Suicide Hotline

Another option is to check with your location state or country resources as well. Most states have set up reduced or free therapy options for people affected by everything occurring.

Look into educational programs to pivot your career for the time being, along with food and financial support. There is absolutely nothing wrong with asking for help so if you need help, please do so.

If you have the energy or are able it’s important to tell our story; how everything going on has upended our lives, careers, and finances.

Speak out – Stand up and speak out. Tell your story, tell our story. It’s more important today than ever. We need to speak up for our industry and craft. The effects that 2020 has had on our lively hoods, dreams, and goals are astounding. This can be done in many ways, protests, individual conversations, petition signing, data collection and more.

Whatever energy you can muster, speak your story to help educate whomever we can about the long-lasting struggles in our industry that are affecting our personal lives. As many of us and our counterparts have said we were the first to be unemployed and will likely be the last to be employed again. Supporting one another needs to be a priority and expanding the global outlook of these issues will assist in that support.

Some opportunities to speak out and tell our story are

Roadiecare.com – they are organizing events across the globe to raise awareness.
LiveEventsCoalition.org – they are lobbying for support for live event professionals.
Change.org – A federal petition for the industry.
ExtendPUA.org – A source to reach government folks to tell our stories and petition for support. #Wemakeevents – they are also raising awareness through events.

Here are also two other resources for general information and industry resources.
ILEA International Events Association – Resilience and Recovery information
Events Industry Council – Standards, practices and research to elevate the events industry.

In the meantime: Stay well, Stay Safe, Stay Motivated.

 

 

 

 

Reimagining our Industry – Webinar

Thanks to COVID-19 we are all now unwilling participants in a seismic experiment that is shaking the foundations of society, technology, economics, healthcare and our Industry. SoundGirls and ProSoundWeb are pondering how we might reimagine our industry.

As we move from survival to adjustment, from chaos to catalyst, the next normal (or abnormal) is being shaped right now.

COVID-19 and protests happening throughout the world have unmasked our current systems  – the fragility of business and society, the consequences of urbanization and globalization, and our dependence on technology and healthcare. Activities in which consumers are likely to change behavior most are in travel, shopping, socializing, and live events.

We are faced with a choice to rebuild the world as it was or to realize the possibilities before us. Join a panel of industry veterans in a conversation about shaping the future of the pro audio industry.

Sept. 12 at 12:00 PM PST

Register Here

Moderator

 Samantha Potter is an audio engineer and an editor for ProSoundWeb with a passion for writing and educating. Additionally, she serves as the “Install Empress” for Allen & Heath USA, helping to merge the live sound solutions we all love into the commercial and install space.
Growing up as a musician, Samantha found her way to live sound by way of the studio, proving that bassists make the best sound engineers. The host of Church Sound Podcast and a co-director and leader instructor for Church Sound University, Samantha can often be found teaching, writing, and hosting discussions on various live-sound topics.

Panelist Include

Alesia Hendley is an Audiovisual professional that found her passion at a young age as a sound engineer within her Father’s church. Now you can find her making connections within AV, Digital Signage and IT, along with executing creative ventures. As a young professional she’s finding ways to bring AV technologies, and creative visions together in the effort to leave her mark by making an impact.

 

 

Jeri Palumbo has been a broadcast audio mixer and specialist for the past 27 years in Sports and Entertainment. Prior to her work in broadcast, she spent years as a trained musician and arranger on the music side of the business before going into post-production and eventually live broadcast. With a current focus on live remote broadcast events, Jeri’s work has included the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, NASCAR, Super Bowl, World Series, Stanley Cups, the Oscars and more. Entertainment shows have included The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien and American Idol to name a few. She also won a Telly Award for mixing the live bluegrass show “Songs of the Mountains.”Jeri has worn the hats of broadcast engineer/mixer, field audio, RF tech and communications and most recently broadcast A1 mixer for gaming eSports in immersive surround 5.1. Jeri served on the RF Coordination committee for the NFL, NBA All-Stars and serves in the same capacity for the Rose Bowl every year. Jeri also worked on the NFL’s Enhanced Audio team (sounds from the field) on its debut roll-out.

 

Bill Reeves has been working in the concert production industry for over 40 years. Starting out on the lighting crew. He graduated to LD/Production Manager within a couple of years and has been working exclusively as a Production/Tour Manager for better than 30 years. Highlights Luther Vandross (14 years), Prince (3 tours including Purple Rain), Stevie Wonder, Anita Baker, Maxwell, D’Angelo, Anthony Hamilton (14 years up to present).

Bill is also the co-founder along with Lance Jackson of Roadies of Color United.

 

Carlos Mosquera, born in Venezuela, has been passionate about music from a young age. Through Venezuela’s National System of Youth and Children’s Orchestras and Choirs called “El Sistema,” a music education program that reaches 400,000 children, Carlos received his Bachelor in Music. After playing with Symphonic Orchestras and ensembles around the world, he then graduated with a B.A. in Sound Technology from the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA) in the U.K. After graduating,

Carlos has become immersed in music and sound technologies. He has been a Recording/Mixing Engineer for organizations like the L.A. Philharmonic, The Colburn School of Music in Los Angeles, The Herb Albert School of Music at UCLA, and L-ISA Applications Engineer and developer for L-Acoustics’ new immersive audio technology. As an L-ISA Engineer, he has worked on numerous major shows such as Lorde, Lady Gaga, Childish Gambino, Alt-J, LA Philharmonic, Deadmau5, Aerosmith, Bon Iver, Sleeping Beauty Dreams, Cages, among others.

On his own time, he developed a positional app for the visually impaired called “Guiding Sounds”, using inaudible impulses reproduced by speakers. It’s an accessible, scalable, and cost-efficient solution that allows blind individuals to access real-time information of their location, enabling them to find exactly where they are, and how to interact with the world in a whole new way, no internet required. Carlos’s passion for music, sound, mixing, and coding extends beyond his professional career

SIDNEY WILSON 40+ years in the professional audio industry, Sidney’s experience includes a multitude of positions from touring as a front of house engineer, monitor engineer and systems engineer. He also has had stints in the nuclear power industry, MRI (Super Conducting Magnets) industry, working on Particle Accelerators at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and teaching audio electronics. In addition, he has experience in design and building of recording studios. He decided to spread his wings into commercial real estate sales and analysis of 200+ apartment complexes, including real estate development projects and single tenant net lease properties nationwide.

However, his heart is in Audio and the last 10 years have been focused on high‐end professional digital console rentals, sales and service as Operations Manager at Hi‐Tech Audio, Inc., and starting a small company (Erevu Group) specializing in noise measurement, analysis, and solutions for large outdoor concerts and events.

 

 

 

 

Recording through Live Stream Services

 

Ali “AMAC” McGuire

File Sending Guidelines 

Audio Movers Plugins: audiomovers.com

Two articles on sample rate and bit depth

soundgirls.org/understanding-ad-da-converters

prosoundweb.com/digital-audio-basics-sample-rate-and-bit-depth/


Vanessa Silberman

 

SoundGirls YouTube Channel

 

 

 

 

 

Diversity and Inclusion

Resources to Increase Diversity and Inclusion in the Music and Audio Industry

We are often asked ‘How can the industry proactively support gender and racial equality in the audio and music industry.

We’ve put together a list of concrete actions you might take.

Marginalized Groups in this document include women, non-binary genders, LGBTQIA and BIPOC.

These recommendations are for people working in education, industry, audio production and other related fields. We hope that you will read this document and identify three or more steps you can take to make the industry more inclusive.

Hiring and Referrals

Employ people from marginalized groups:

Resources for hiring and recruiting people from marginalized groups

Advertise roles in the right places and make proactive inclusion statements in the job postings. Provide clear opportunities for prospective applicants to contact you directly for further information about the role. If you find that people from marginalized groups aren’t applying for particular roles, undertake consultancy and ask why this may be.

Update your personal references: Can you refer people from marginalized groups for gigs and employment?

If in hiring a position, check that you have a qualified and diverse team looking at resumes. Make sure you have a diverse pool of candidates to interview. We hear all the time, we don’t care about gender or race, we just want to hire the best engineer. But how can you do that when your applicant pool excludes over half the population.

Seek to anonymize the application process where possible.

Look at the diversity in your organization and take steps to build a diverse hiring team.

Offer internships specifically for people from marginalized groups.

10 Ways to Prioritize Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Workplace

Provide Sexual Harassment, Diversity, and Bystander Training:

A note about corporate training programs:

Organizations often implement training programs in order to reduce their likelihood of being named in harassment suits or to check a box for E.E.O.C. purposes but does little to change workplace dynamics. Make sure your program is not solely to protect the company. You want to search out and find programs that include empowering bystanders, encourage civility, and offer continued training.

Here for the Music Campaign has resources to build safety into shows and festivals. They work with artists, promoters, fans, venue staff, touring professionals to address sexual harassment and assault in the industry.

Two Types of Diversity Training That Really Work

Confronting Sexual Harassment

Check Unconscious Bias

Understand your own implicit/unconscious bias; that you may be inclined to hear some voices more clearly than others.

Avoiding Unconscious Bias at Work

Test yourself for hidden bias

In the workplace

Reporting Harassment & Policies

As inequalities persist, business owners in every industry have a responsibility to examine the workplace structures they’ve set up or enforced. They must then ask themselves what makes a workplace inclusive and then make changes to support employees from marginalized groups.

What policy does your tour have in place? How do crew members report issues? It is imperative for policies to be effective and that they are taken seriously and handled in a timely manner? It is also imperative to protect the identity of the crew member reporting.

Does your business or tour have an effective reporting mechanism?

HR and harassment issues are some of the most commonly reported types of claims and employers need to be sure to have multiple avenues so an employee can feel comfortable reporting. Regardless of the notification method, employers should follow a consistent documentation process for managing those allegations to ensure consistent outcomes and effective remediation.

Your Company Ethics Hotline Might Not Be Enough

Be an Ally for your co-workers: Although this article is specifically on being an ally for women, it can be easily adapted to include all marginalized groups.

For the Men Who Want to Support Women in Audio

Listen

Listen to experiences of marginalized groups when they provide examples of what marginalizing behaviors look and sound like. Listen, and keep listening without debating, diminishing or deflecting. Just listen. Really take the time to digest each lifetime of experience and insight.

Relieve the burden and contribute to proactive social intervention

Don’t make people from marginalized groups responsible for addressing inequities. We need to work together to shape change:

Set equity targets i.e., to be recording an equal ratio of female artists, works by female composers, and working with sound engineers by a specific date. You might subscribe to the PRS KeyChange initiative. Huddersfield Contemporary Records at The University of Huddersfield have done this. See this excellent statement and commitment from Professor Aaron Cassidy.

Changing Environments

Understand how to create supportive environments for marginalized groups.

Make sure your physical environment is welcoming to all people. Consider how your environments are biased towards certain groups

In Education: Create intelligent, inclusive environments for learning

Reflect on approaches to teaching and learning. From a young age, girls seem to be more socialized to collaborate, so integrate more problem solving, communication methods, and peer learning tasks into music technology education. Erin Barra’s Beats By Girlz lesson plans are great examples of this, and they encourage collaborative learning

Be demanding as all students can become experts. If you teach a minority of girls (who are also less confident), create environments that build up their confidence but also don’t shy away from being demanding. Evidence suggests that those girls will need to be confident and to prove that they have excellent technical knowledge (see unconscious bias) – and anyway, knowledge is power

Support the least confident. Notice where less confident students aren’t contributing, take the issue seriously and consider why this might be happening. Perhaps some students need other (more private) opportunities and spaces to feel comfortable to take risks and make mistakes, because they may not have had the same opportunities to work with technology in the past, or because they have been pushed away by other more confident learners. Some students may just need more assistance with working their way back into practical collaborative projects where they need to feel confident in order to be more assertive with peers

Provide equal visibility of women and especially women of color. Just because we know about Björk, Delia Derbyshire, Wendy Carlos and Mandy Parnell we can’t simply assume that some kind of gender balance has been achieved. This is tokenism, and it is a big part of the problem. Help to address this by inspiring young people to understand that the default identity of a music producer is not a white man.

See the websites:  shesaid.so, female pressure, Female Frequency Her Noise Archive  SoundGirls Profiles Women in Sound 

Employ people from marginalized groups. Advertise roles in the right places and make proactive inclusion statements in the advert. Provide clear opportunities for prospective applicants to contact you directly for further information about the role. Think carefully about how to bring female experts into education. If you find that women aren’t applying for particular roles, undertake consultancy and ask why this may be.

In Higher Education, seek out people you can invite in to deliver guest lectures/workshops/supervision. Some may be part-time university academics also working in live electronic music, or in a studio, or in other areas of sound – so look beyond your network, and beyond conventional academia where possible. This helps to bridge the divide between self-employed artists and academia and provide pathways for people from marginalized groups to have the option of engaging in academic practices

Invite conversation. Talk with colleagues to check what your institution is doing to engage students who may have experienced discrimination and, if necessary, seek consultation from the staff at other institutions who are clearly addressing this well.

Understand the statistics by reading academic articles and education research, and drawing on websites of all-women groups. Try to avoid asking women to explain it – because this is exhausting and the resources are all available.

Additional Steps You Can Take to be an Ally

You Can’t Be What You Can’t See. Challenge the media representation of women in sound and music. Women do not see themselves in trade magazines, in panels at conferences, or in advertisements. Digico ran a fantastic ad campaign last year called Excellence Exposed which featured a diverse group of women engineers in both their backgrounds and musical genres.

SoundGirls has a monthly feature profile of women in audio to offset this, and all their weekly blogs are written by women.

Identify and offer support to organizations doing this work.

You can find a list here

Volunteer your time and expertise to these organizations. Whether it is doing advocacy work, amplifying their work on social media, administrative work, or financial contributions.

Wear the T-shirt – literally! The Women’s Audio Mission, SoundGirls, Gender Amplified, Beats By Girlz, Roadies of Color United sell their T-shirts. Help normalize and advocate for diversity in audio and the music industry.

These are just a few recommendations and the issue is much more nuanced and layered, however, we’re asking you to make a start. Be proud that you are a part of this important audio industry initiative.

Further recommendations and guidance

How Men Can Be Allies, 

Sexual Harassment 

More Inclusive Industry

Blogs on Diversity and Inclusion

The AES Diversity and Inclusion Committee

Resources for hiring people from marginalized groups

Resources for hiring people from marginalized groups

The EQl Directory

The EQL Directory is a global database of professionals that seeks to amplify the careers and achievements of women working behind the scenes in music and audio. Any person around the world can add their name and claim their space. And, any person looking to hire a more inclusive creative team can find professionals in their area.

POC in Audio Directory

The directory features over 500 people of color who work in audio around the world. You’ll find editors, hosts, writers, producers, sound designers, engineers, project managers, musicians, reporters, and content strategists with varied experience from within the industry and in related fields.

While recruiting diverse candidates is a great first step, it’s not going to be enough if we want the industry to look and sound meaningfully different in the future. Let us be clear: this isn’t about numbers alone. This is about getting the respect that people of color—and people of different faiths, abilities, ages, socioeconomic statuses, educational backgrounds, gender identities, and sexual orientation—deserve.

Women-Owned Studios, Sound Companies, and Services

Women in Lighting

Femnoise

A collective fighting for the reduction of the gender gap in the music industry. But we soon realized that the solution is not just activism. We have to go one step further: to connect and empower underrepresented individuals on a large scale, worldwide.

POC Theatre Designers and Techs

Wingspace

is committed to the cause of equity in the field.  There are significant barriers to accessing a career in theatrical design and we see inequalities of race, socioeconomic status, gender identity, sexual orientation and disability across the field.

Parity Productions

Fills creative roles on their productions with women and trans and gender nonconforming (TGNC) artists. In addition to producing their own work, they actively promote other theatre companies that follow their 50% hiring standard.

Production on Deck

Uplifting underrepresented communities in the arts. Their main goal is to curate a set of resources to help amplify the visibility of (primarily) People of Color in the arts.

She is the Music DataBase

FUTURE MUSIC INDUSTRY 

WOMEN/ NON-BINARY DJS/PRODUCERS

South America – Productores por país – Podcasteros

Diversity Database for the Perth Music Community

Women in Live Music DataBase

50+ All-women and feminist sound/music tech collectives, co-ops, non-profits

 

Organizations working on Diversity and Inclusion in the Music and Audio Industry

Gender Amplified is a nonprofit organization that aims to celebrate Women in music production, raise their visibility and develop a pipeline for girls and young women to get involved behind the scenes as music producers. The movement also connects passion for music with technical skills that can be used in a wide range of scientific and arts-based fields, areas in which women are traditionally underrepresented.

Girls Rock Camp Alliance The Girls Rock Camp Alliance is an international membership network of youth-centered arts and social justice organizations.

The International Alliance for Women in Music  An international membership organization of women and men dedicated to fostering and encouraging the activities of women in music, particularly in the areas of musical activity such as composing, performing, and research in which gender discrimination is a historic and ongoing concern.

New York Women Composers, Inc. The mission of the New York Women Composers, Inc. is to create performing, recording, networking, and mentoring opportunities for its members, and to work for the betterment of all women concert-music composers. We believe that continually focusing attention on music by women composers will hasten its full inclusion in the concert repertoire.

Parity Productions is a producer of new theatrical work and ensures that they fill at least 50% of the creative roles on productions with women and trans and gender-nonconforming artists. Parity also actively helps promote other theatre companies that hire at the 50% Standard.

Production on Deck Uplifting underrepresented communities in the arts. Their main goal is to curate a set of resources to help amplify the visibility of (primarily) People of Color in the arts.

Roadies of Color United International Network open to all Professionals in the Entertainment Services, Concert Touring and Live Entertainment Industry. Our Social network was created to unite, network, promote, and collaborate in order to help each other Grow in our related Industries. Our goal is to unite our related industries in a way that has never been done before until now promoting more diversity and inclusion within our related industries.

SoundGirls US-based international organization, with chapters worldwide. SoundGirls mission is to empower the next generation of women in audio. They work to expand opportunities for women in these fields and to share resources and knowledge through cooperation, collaboration, and diversity.

Technicians for Change A grassroots organization in Minneapolis and St. Paul Minnesota with no paid staff, made up of technicians and designers in various fields of the entertainment industry. We volunteer our time and resources (including personal financial support) to build a stronger community.

The Arts Administrators of Color Network are advocates and continue to fight for equity in the arts through collaboration, forums, and outlets that provide a voice for arts administrators and artists of color where there may not be one.

The Black Theatre Network is comprised of artists, educators, scholars, students and theatre lovers who are dedicated to the exploration and preservation of the theatrical visions of the African Diaspora. For 30 years, the Black Theatre Network has collected, processed and distributed information that supports the professional and personal development of its membership (comprised of individuals engaged in the full range of theatre professions, professional and community theatres and

Wingspace Theatrical Design is committed to the cause of equity in the field.  There are significant barriers to accessing a career in theatrical design and we see inequalities of race, socioeconomic status, gender identity, sexual orientation and disability across the field.

Women in Music a non-profit organization with a mission to advance the awareness, equality, diversity, heritage, opportunities, and cultural aspects of women in the musical arts through education, support, empowerment, and recognition. Our seminars, panels, showcases, achievement awards, and youth initiatives celebrate the female contribution to the music world and strengthen community ties.

Women Produce Music International An artist & producer-led non-profit org & network promoting & supporting the activities of music-makers, producers & engineers through a series of initiatives.

Women’s Audio Mission US San Francisco ‘the only professional recording studio in the world built and run by women – to attract over 1,500 underserved women and girls every year to STEM and creative technology studies that inspire them to amplify their voices and become the innovators of tomorrow. WAM’s award-winning curriculum weaves art and music with science, technology and computer programming and works to close the critical gender gap in creative technology careers.

 

The Financial Case for Increasing Diversity in Live Audio

Diversifying Your Portfolio

 

Increasing diversity in the workforce can be a divisive topic. As I covered in my last blog How to Find the Best Candidate for the Job, often the general consensus is simply that the best candidate should get the job, and a common response to discussions about diversity is that hiring someone because they are from an underrepresented group is unfair.

According to research, “if people believe that racism is no longer an issue in modern society, they also perceive affirmative action as unfair and hold negative attitudes towards affirmative action and organisations that endorse affirmative action, presumably because affirmative action is no longer deemed necessary” (1). Opposition to policies that enforce an increase in diversity, like quotas, is strongly linked to a false belief that society is purely meritocratic. For example, “a survey among Flemish politicians demonstrated that even a decade after gender quotas had been implemented in the political system, many men were still strongly opposed to them. This opposition was partly due to different explanations of the underrepresentation of women in politics. While most women stated that they felt women got fewer chances in politics, most men disagreed with this statement. In line with meritocratic beliefs, men believed that women were under-represented in politics because they didn’t fight hard enough for their positions, while the majority of women did not agree with this statement.”

Classing people according to identity politics makes me uneasy too. There is more to someone than their gender, colour of their skin, class, or sexuality. Unfortunately, there is population-level systemic discrimination throughout our society (2), including live audio, and pretending it doesn’t exist doesn’t make it go away. Affirmative action seeks to acknowledge the barriers people may have faced before they reach the candidate shortlist, issues that may prevent them from getting the job and reasons they may not stay in the role or even the industry. As long as people’s lives are affected by these things, we need to talk about them. Luckily, although foisting diversity initiatives upon people usually results in push back and rarely helps matters, voluntarily and consciously looking to employ and encourage people from underrepresented groups does improve diversity (3).

Employers might not be interested in reaching out to minorities in their field solely because it’s the right thing to do, but there is a growing body of evidence that it affects their bottom line: profit. Most of the research I could find on workplace diversity focuses on gender (and even then, it is almost entirely in binary terms of men and women), I imagine because it is a relatively easy metric to keep track of and quantify, but the principles remain the same for other factors like race, economic background, sexuality and age. Here is an outline of why employers should want to seek out diverse candidates, according to science:

Increased diversity is good for business

I want to get one thing clear right from the outset: increasing diversity is not an act of charity. It’s a smart business investment. “Diversity is associated with increased sales revenue, more customers, greater market share, and greater relative profits” (4). A 2005 study by consultancy firm McKinsey (5) found that worldwide, companies in the top quartile for gender diversity within their executive team were 15% more likely to have higher than average financial returns, for racial diversity it was 35%. The opposite was true for the least diverse quartiles, showing that they were significantly worse off rather than simply unaffected. Far from needing to let your business take a hit in order to do the right thing, increasing diversity is correlated with increased profits, even after taking the cost of inclusion measures into account.

The main theories believed to be factored in this positive relationship are increasing the talent pool, improving decision making, increasing employee satisfaction and strengthening customer orientation (5). These all sound a bit “corporate” and not directly related to an industry as idiosyncratic as live audio, but they really are. We like to think we’re a special breed, so why wouldn’t we want to attract the best of the best? If you’re only hiring people who are like you, whether consciously or not, you’re missing out on a huge pool of talent. If someone just doesn’t feel that women are suited to audio, for example, they’re halving the number of potential candidates right from the off. Making your hiring practises as wide-reaching and open as possible maximises the probability that you’ll find your next star engineer.

Complementary skill sets

Improving decision-making is perhaps the most widely cited reason for diversity increasing performance (e.g. 6). Think of it this way; would you go to see a heist film where the motley crew of jewel thieves was exclusively made up of eight lock pickers? Not even a getaway driver? It’d be a pretty short movie if they didn’t have a surveillance expert to scope the bank out in the first place. The whole point is that each person brings a different and complementary set of skills to the job. The very definition of motley is something made up of different and seemingly incongruent parts. A workforce made up of as many different people, not just measured by gender or race but nearly any metric, will increase their combined knowledge pool and maximise innovation. Why do you think investors are obsessed with finding the next disruptor business which will completely change their sectors, like Netflix or Airbnb? Approaching things differently gives you a major competitive edge and can result in huge profits. Teams made up of different backgrounds are also more flexible and better at problem-solving. They are more likely to focus on the facts, challenge each other’s views and process information more carefully than homogenous teams, who are more likely to be complacent and rely on shared biases to make decisions (7). Troubleshooting and coming up with alternative solutions to technical problems quickly is the lifeblood of live audio, why wouldn’t we put the best combination of people together to do that?

Happy workers are productive workers

Increasing employee satisfaction might not be as much of a priority in an industry that relies heavily on freelancers, but the principle is still a good one. Everyone knows teamwork is essential on any gig, and camaraderie can get you through the toughest of challenges. On the other hand, even the easiest job is unbearable if it’s crewed by grumpy sound techs. This atmosphere also gets noticed by the artists and management. Freelancers become the face of the audio company while on-site, so it makes good business sense to present that face as happy and engaged.

It is important to note that employee morale only improves if teams are diverse enough. The McKinsey study states that “For minority workers, for example, the boost in satisfaction kicks in when representation exceeds 15 percent of the workforce. Where diversity recruitment is a token effort, psychological outcomes are poorer.” It is not enough to hire one homosexual woman of colour and pat yourself on the back because you’ve ticked a bunch of diversity boxes off the list in one go. As someone who is often the only woman on a team, my experience is that it can sometimes feel particularly isolating, and raising issues that no one else cares about can single you out as a troublemaker. It is less exhausting and risky to your career to conform to everyone else’s behaviour than to try to bring about any meaningful change when you’re the only “different” person. The study also found that gender representation in the US had no effect on profits until women made up 22% of an executive team, after which there was a linear increase in profits in line with increased representation. Other research suggests that increasing diversity can in fact lead to increased confrontation within teams, at least in the short term (4), but that confrontation can result in decreased bias (8) and increased productivity (4, 8) overall. If teams are varied and open enough to foster an atmosphere of honesty and debate, everyone can learn from each other’s differences and improve as a result.

Closer connections with clients

Lastly, it strengthens customer orientation. Drawing on knowledge from a broad range of backgrounds will help to anticipate clients’ needs better and avoid any potential cultural faux pas. It is a natural human tendency to prefer people who are like ourselves (ingroup favouritism, (5)), so while trying to overcome that bias within the team, it could be an advantage in connecting with the client. Assigning an entire crew to match the identity of the client would be taking it too far, becoming its own form of segregation and decreasing diversity in the workplace. However, the client interacting with a range of people maximises the chances of finding someone to connect with and fosters good feeling, especially in very close and personal roles like monitors. If the audio crew has plenty of experience of dealing with people who are different to them, they can also handle cultural barriers more diplomatically than people with little experience.

Far from being a costly and miserable exercise in political correctness, diverse workforces increase profits, improve workflow, foster innovation, raise employee morale and strengthen customer relations. What’s more, the company benefits from the kudos that comes with being seen to be “doing the right thing” for equality. It can be tough to justify anything outside of the essentials of a business in the current economic climate, but when it comes to increasing diversity the old cliche really rings true: it isn’t whether you can afford to, it’s whether you can afford not to.

You Can Find Resources to Increase Diversity in Your Applicant Pool Here

  1. Quotas and Targets: How do they affect diversity progress? Chartered Institute of Progress and Development Policy Report, 2015. https://www.cipd.co.uk/Images/quotas-and-targets_june-2015-how-affect-diversity-progress_tcm18-10824.pdf
  2. The Truth About Anti-White Discrimination, Payne, 2019. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-truth-about-anti-white-discrimination/
  3. Why Diversity Programs Fail, Dobbin and Kalev, 2016. https://hbr.org/2016/07/why-diversity-programs-fail
  4. Does Diversity Pay? Herring, 2009 (https://www.asanet.org/sites/default/files/savvy/images/journals/docs/pdf/asr/Apr09ASRFeature.pdf)
  5.  Diversity Matters, Hunt, Layton & Prince 2005 https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/business%20functions/organization/our%20insights/why%20diversity%20matters/diversity%20matters.pdf)
  6. How Diverse Teams Produce Better Outcomes, Beilock, 2019. https://www.forbes.com/sites/sianbeilock/2019/04/04/how-diversity-leads-to-better-outcomes/
  7. Why Diverse Teams are Smarter, 2016 https://hbr.org/2016/11/why-diverse-teams-are-smarter
  8. Standing Up for a Change: Reducing Bias Through Interpersonal Confrontation, Czopp, Monteith and Mark, 2006 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.138.462&rep=rep1&type=pdf
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