Gender Equity and Inequality in Audio engineering - Multiple Perspectives

Friday, June 5, 2020

Presenter(s)

Amandine Pras

Assistant Professor of Digital Audio Arts
University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada
Grace Brooks

PhD Candidate
McGill University
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Jamie A.S. Angus

Professor of Audio Technology
University of Salford
Dukinfield, England, United Kingdom
Shelley Ann McCarthy Buckingham

Postgraduate Research Student
Limerick Institute of Techology
Eliot Bates

Associate Professor of Music
The Graduate Center, CUNY
New York, New York, United States
Samantha Bennett

Professor of Music
Australian National University

This panel expands on findings from an online survey that captured the experiences of discrimination reported by 387 audio engineers, producers, and studio assistants coming from 46 different countries (Brooks, Pras, Elafros, & Lockett, forthcoming). Statistical analyses of this survey reveal highly significant and systemic gender inequalities within our field. Also, a comparison of the survey results with a study about women working in STEM fields (Yang & Carroll, 2018) indicates that the workplace of the recording studio scores 33% worse than STEM on women being silenced and marginalized, 33% worse on gender-related workplace microaggressions, and 24% worse on sexual objectification. While trying to understand everything that exceeds what is necessary for the basic design and use of a technological object—in other words, its use in recording studio workflows, Bates and Bennett found a relation between the sexualization of gear, the economic fetishization of gear, and the boundary maintenance of gear communities—in other words, who is included within gear discourses and how. In a study about factors that contribute to gender imbalance, Buckingham and Ronan (2019) showed that willingness to help upcoming audio professionals depends on gender, and that women in audio do not conform to traditional gender-related preferences. Angus-Whiteoak will end this panel with a presentation about Girls and STEM education today.