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One Is Not Enough: Understanding Bias in the Audio Community

The studio owner skimmed my resume and nodded several times. He glanced up at me, back down at the resume, and then carefully set it back on his desk.

“Your credentials are great. The chair of the Sound Recording Department recommended you very highly, and we have a close relationship with him. So, we will hire you… We will hire you, but you won’t last. We will make sure of that.”

He paused, and I waited for an explanation.

“We don’t hire women. Studio policy,” he stated matter-of-factly.

Unfortunately, he was right: I didn’t last. I worked as hard I could imagine meticulously recording patch bay settings and outboard gear levels, setting up drum kits, moving gobos that were many times my weight, and carefully calculating my mic placements. I silently fought my way to being one of the studio’s best assistant engineers. All the while, my shifts were cut, I was offered up as entertainment to the clients and was goaded with sexual comments and sometimes worse.

After a long year of staying simply to prove the owner wrong, I quit. I had realized that by remaining there, I was succeeding only in making myself miserable.

That was my first experience in the industry.

Luckily, that kind of overt discrimination is rare even in an industry that is so male-dominated. For the most part, over the course of my ten-year-plus career, my co-workers have been my biggest supporters and have often become close friends.

Thus I would like to discuss something much more prevalent and subtle than overt discrimination: bias. By this, I specifically mean the assumptions that we make about any group as a whole based on our own previous interactions with members of that same group.

Fei Xu, a development psychologist who has researched this phenomenon, has reported that this is a natural instinct, even a necessary one. This innate human talent for using our past experiences to make assumptions about new things has helped us throughout our evolutionary existence. We have come to recognize that if a new animal has sharp fangs, it is likely a predator and not a friend. We have come to categorize small, round, red things as berries and have then innately known that they will be sweet and a stupendous source of energy. This ability to categorize based on our past experiences has single-handedly lead to our continued survival on Earth.

Unfortunately, it has also led to bias. Our evolutionary programming tells us to trust our previous experiences and draw natural conclusions based on them. Thus, our experience tells us that on the mix stage, the men are most likely the technical employees and the women the clients. It tells us that at sound industry award shows, the men are the nominees and the women are the wives and girlfriends.

As a supervising sound editor, I was once asked to add a Dolby E-encoded printmaster to my deliverables for a project. I had not encountered this request before, so I read up on the process and then made an appointment with our layback department to discuss it. When I showed up for that meeting and began to ask technical questions, the engineer responded to each one starting with the phrase “Tell your boss that he should…” Clearly, it had not occurred to him that I was the boss.

I did not correct him, and perhaps I should have. As uncomfortable as it made me to have him assume that I was someone’s assistant, I knew that his responses were not ill-intentioned. This was a case of an honest mistake based on actual real-life experiences. Most likely, he had never personally encountered a female supervising sound editor.

Furthermore, women are not immune when it comes to bias. I, too, have found myself wondering who that new producer is only to find out that she is, in fact, a sound editor or mixer. We all live in the world as it is, and our minds create the necessary assumptions to accommodate that world. We are not bad people for this. We are simply people.

As you can imagine, it is difficult to not only exist but thrive, in an environment that finds my pure existence to be a surprise. Add to that the constant visual reminder that no one else looks like me, that I am “other,” and you will understand the force of impact that this has had on my professional life. This impact is purely facilitated by numbers, not the environment. As long as there are so few women in audio positions, this issue of bias will remain.

So what should we, as an industry, do? The answer should be obvious: hire more women. Previously, I had thought that there was a general lack of women in the industry because young women were not pursuing audio engineering in school or as a career. However, since becoming a partner in a post-production sound studio of my own, I have been inundated by resumes, requests for coffee meetings, and emails asking for advice from the exact set of young women which I did not previously think existed. Not only are they there, but they are hungry for careers.

So, my request to you is twofold:

First, I ask that you do something scary. I ask that you create a situation in which you will be “the only one.” Put yourself in a position where you are a willing participant in a situation where everyone else is different than you. Go to a mommy and me yoga class, attend a service at a Sikh temple, drive to East Cesar E Chavez Avenue and spend an afternoon chatting with the shop owners and eating at a restaurant. It is important that you do this alone.

You will most likely feel out of place and isolated as if everyone is looking at you even when they aren’t. Those feelings underline the fact that as welcoming and accepting as any environment is, it is impossible to feel completely at ease when you are “the only one.” I challenge you to understand that one woman in a company or even in a department is not enough to claim diversity or to dispel ideas of gender inequality or workplace discomfort.

That brings me to my second request: I ask that you do your best to help women find a place in the audio community. If you are in a position to do so, interview more women when you have a job opening. Suggest female candidates to your boss. Answer LinkedIn requests. Give career advice. Brush aside the idea that your assistance may be misconstrued as a romantic interest. If there were more women, young female audio engineers would surely contact them to ask for coffee meetings and phone calls (a fact made evident by my now-flooded inbox), but for now, you are their best chance for an inside perspective.

More resources for A More Inclusive Industry

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Community

Community is the environment that is around us, and as individuals, we play a big part in the community we create and live in. Community is the places you live, work, the social media you produce and follow, the people around us, and the individual we are towards others. Community is our surroundings and attitude. It can be supportive, oppressive, creative, boring, ever-changing, or stagnant. Community is built by individuals but felt by the whole.

What community do you create?  Do you create a community of support and open communication or miss direction and negativity?  I’ve been a part of many communities, and I’ve found that positive communities with people learning, changing, and growing are the best to thrive in.  Communities allow us to question our ideas, gain different perspectives, socialize, find support, and allow us to vent frustrations without judgment. Communities allow us to be ourselves and challenge us in new ways.

Why are communities important? Communities are important because life would be lonely if they lived completely alone. Communities provide support and strength to people facing all sorts of challenges across the globe. Other communities like your town, provide support in your backyard. Communities allow useless barriers to be broken, needed walls to be built, doorways to be created for growth and change.

SoundGirls is a wonderful example of community. Sharing thoughts and ideas openly without threat of abusive responses or rejection is what many people need. People living the way we do, women experiencing what other women are experiencing, and our partners supporting us. We break down barriers that should no longer exist. Support each other and open doors for everyone’s future and share stories of success and failure along the way so we can learn from them too.  We are engaged and growing; we share our experiences, participate in discussions, and learn from each other. We encourage as well as challenge each other to build an active and broader community every day. How have you been engaged in SoundGirls?

What other communities do you surround yourself with?  How are you involved and living in these communities?

Switched-On Friendship – Wendy Carlos & Rachel Elkind-Tourre.

 

Where would electronic music be without Wendy Carlos?  Carlos’ 1968 album Switched-On Bach brought the Moog synthesizer (and electronic music) to the public eye.  It was popular enough to win three Grammys and become the first classical record to go platinum.  With her influence, the 1970s became saturated with synthesizers from disco to advertisement jingles to Progressive Rock.  The influential soundtracks of A Clockwork Orange (1971), The Shining (1980), and Tron (1982) also came from her hand.

Carlos was a pioneer in other ways too.  In 1972 she became one of the first public figures to undergo gender reassignment surgery and speak openly of it.  Gender dysphoria was something that Carlos was aware of at an early age, but it was not until 1968 that she started her transition.  The success of Switched-On Bach was both a blessing and a curse, as it made surgery available, but Carlos performed publicly as a man throughout most of the ’70s.  It was in an interview with Playboy magazine published in 1979 that Wendy Carlos finally disclosed her true self.  There was no public backlash, and Carlos’ main regret was that she had not come out earlier.

Wendy Carlos, a pioneer as she is, still relied on her friends to help her achieve greatness.  In 1966 Carlos met aspiring jazz singer Rachel Elkind-Tourre.  When she heard Carlos’ synthesized experiments of various Bach pieces, she brought forward the idea of a full album.  At the time Elkind-Tourre was working as an assistant to the President of CBS and used her influence to help pitch Switched-On Bach to the company, and later used her connections to provide studio space for Carlos.  With this first collaboration, Elkind-Tourre became a frequent contributor and producer of Carlos’ albums.

Not much of Rachel Elkind-Tourre’s private life is known.  Around the time she met Carlos, she had recently moved from San Francisco to New York City to pursue a career as a jazz vocalist.  It is this jazz background, and vocal training gave Elkind-Tourre the perspective and tools to be Carlos’ trusted co-creator.  Together they created Trans-Electronic Music Productions, Inc. (TEMPI) with Benjamin Folkman, another of Carlos’ collaborators.  In 1980 Elkind-Tourre married and moved to France, and ended the official partnership between the two.

The legacy of this friendship can be heard in the majority of Wendy Carlos’ albums.  Elkind-Tourre’s voice (through a vocoder) adds texture in Sonic Seasonings (1972), and her compositional influence is integral in The Shining.  Carlos does note that Rachel Elkind-Tourre is one to avoid fame and credit, which is a shame.  This is a story of women empowering women.  Their friendship should be celebrated, not just for the works they created together, but the barriers they overcame.

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