Outnumbered in the Booth
In studio production, female and nonbinary students represent just 14% of the program
Originally published in spring 2022 of The Purchase Beat
When studio production major Kayla U. Dike first came to Purchase last fall, she began to question her musical knowledge after not knowing a slew of 1960s and ’70s rock bands who everyone else seemed to be familiar with. It wasn’t until no one in her class could recognize a Missy Elliott song, and thought that Erykah Badu was in the Fugees, did she realize her musical knowledge was not lacking, but different.
“Not knowing the people there or not knowing as many things as some other people, like a lot of background information, kind of pushes me to do more,” Dike says. “I have always known it’s a male-dominated field and it’s not anything super surprising, so it’s really just me having to bring something different.”
For female and non-binary students in the studio production major at the Conservatory of Music, it is not uncommon to be the outlier in the classroom. Across grade levels, they can count the number of non-male peers in their program on one hand, and the college’s own statistics more or less confirm what the student’s fingers tell them.
According to Purchase’s Institutional Research Reports, the music production program has averaged 86% male over the last three fall semesters, peaking at 11 female students in the program this fall. More generally, the Conservatory of Music has averaged 67% male over the last three years.
In terms of race, Purchase has made bigger strides. Between the fall of 2019 and 2021, the percentage of nonwhite students in music production has increased from about 38%, to now, more than 45%. Whatever the statistics may say about race, they haven’t yet caught up with some students’ perceptions or experiences.
“In my class, which is like twenty-some people… there are four women,” Dike says. For me personally, the biggest gap that you really see is that everyone is mostly white and there are a lot of white references, but there’s not really anything outside of that.” If she or someone else refers to an artist of color, “nobody else really knows them, so it’s hard to really discuss.”
Aniya Russell, a junior studio production major, feels the disparity most in terms of needing to prove herself. She is aware that while being in the program’s minority may give her an edge, it is also a reason to cause doubt.
“I feel like there is a pressure in a way to be the best, you know, because it’s like we are representing for our group, and you always have to go two times harder to be seen, and then also me being a Black woman on top of that it’s like four times,” she says. “At the same time, I do feel like the teachers are making things equal. They aren’t singling anybody out or anything, so I feel like I haven’t had any bad experiences with that.”
This last point is a crucial takeaway for Rebecca Haviland, an assistant professor of music and technology and co-program head of studio composition. She occasionally teaches production masterclasses.
“For us, one of the things that is always very important is as faculty, we are all approachable, and I don’t think that’s the same at every school,” Haviland says. “We want students across all types to feel like they can ask us a question, to feel included, and to never feel uncomfortable about wanting to learn something they don’t know, because that’s how we are all going to grow.”
While this may be the case, there is still an undeniable difference between the female and non-binary production majors and their teachers, the majority of whom are white men. According to the studio production page on Purchase’s website, all ten of the listed professors are men. The students interviewed for this story maintain that none of their teachers have made them uncomfortable or highlighted their differences in any negative way. Nevertheless, they also point out that there is no dialogue about the gender disparity, or how their experiences differ from their predominantly white-male peers.
Zianni Orange, a junior studio production major, feels this difference despite identifying as non-binary and physically presenting more masculine.
“It definitely feels weird, though. Like every time you are in the hallways of the studios or whatever, it’s more often that you will see another man,” Orange says. “It just feels different when a man is talking to you as a woman or someone who is female, versus how they talk to another man. I just feel like the disparity is felt pretty often, at least for me.”
Peter Deneberg, the department chair of studio production, noted three women taught classes to production students, including Haviland, Alba Torremocha, and Vira Byramji. While this may be the case, neither Dike nor Russell nor Orange identified having a female teacher for a production class. Notably, it is Dike and Orange’s first year as production students, and there is a lot of overlap for studio production and composition classes, at times making it hard to discern which is which. Ultimately, however, the three students said they’ve had all-male teachers in their academic experience.
“We have had an increase in the number of female and nonbinary applicants, and so we have more students than we did even five years ago. It’s not where it needs to be, which ideally, we would have a 50/50 split as far as I’m concerned,” says Jenny Undercofler, the director for the Conservatory of Music. “My kind of 50-feet above perception of it is that it is changing, and we are seeing more applicants. We who are running the program are aware of it, with female and non-binary applicants, that we are taking them to the next step with the application process in an attempt to try and balance things.”
Denenberg noted the lack of female and non-binary applicants for the program, though he claimed there is still more than previously. There are also more non-male students in general since he started teaching at the school ten, fifteen years ago.
“It’s embarrassing because I don’t really think about it,” he says, “other than when they are coming through and I’m like, ‘Oh cool, a girl is doing it, that’s neat, we don’t get many of those.’ We are thrilled about it, and happy about it, and supportive about it, but on the other hand, I don’t know number one, what to do about it or, number two, I don’t really sort of track it. I’m just happy to have people who want to learn what we do.”
While Purchase may seem behind the times when it comes to lessening the gender disparity in music production, the music industry at large is no better, in fact it may even appear worse.
According to a recent study conducted by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, which assesses the gender and racial breakdowns for artists, songwriters, and producers, only 2.6% of producers appearing on the Billboard Hot 100 Year End Charts were women from a select six-year sample between 2012 and 2020.
The report, titled “Inclusion in the Recording Studio?” also notes that, there were 38 males for every female producer. Out of the 23 individual female producers that worked across this sample, only seven were women of color. That made the ratio of male producers to underrepresented women producers across the six-year sample 125 to one.
While the number of female students in Purchase’s studio production program are much better than those of the industry at 14.4% (there is no data for non-binary or “other” students), it is hard to say what is keeping that number from being higher, whether it be a lack of representation, lack of applicants, or lack of outreach.
Byramji, a Purchase alumna who was hired this past semester to teach production masterclasses after working as an engineer for a decade, notes that while these numbers are similar, the reality of being a student and a member of the workforce are very different.
“I had a group of people, both students and professors, at Purchase who didn’t treat me differently,” she says. “When you’re with people your age it’s like you’re all kind of in a similar boat and you guys can have a similar mindset without thinking about it. But then entering the workforce, where there are people who have been doing it for decades before you got there, that’s when I started to feel the disparity.”
Byramji says there are still moments where she catches herself being surprised if she walks into a session and there is a non-male engineer, or if she goes to a show with a non-male front-of-house manager. As a woman working in the industry since graduating in 2011, she still finds it uncommon to see another non-male person doing what she does.
One thing Haviland, Undercofler, and Denenberg agreed on was a need to promote non-male production alumni and provide examples of role models to their students, the hiring of Byramji being an example of this effort.
“Each [class] needs to be supported and understand who came before them, and, you know, especially people who are in the minority, whatever minority it is, need some role models,” Dennenberg says. “I am able to sit here on my couch and sort of remember them, but I need to make sure that I communicate them to the kids, I realize.”
While the Purchase music and technology faculty have this issue on their radar, there are a number of online resources and programs working to aid and motivate women in sound engineering and production. Sites like SoundGirls, Music Production for Women, and Women’s Audio Mission aim to promote female and non-male producers, as well as provide various resources like workshops, networking opportunities, and professional guidance.
Byramji says that if she has one piece of advice from her experience it is to look out for yourself first.
“Being good is not just knowing what compression does,” she says, referring to the process of reducing the dynamic range of a sound. “Good is having people skills, being of service to the music, being humble, and then it is being, like, technically good,” she says. “All those things matter, but don’t mistake that for beating yourself up, or putting yourself last, or letting yourself get treated badly. It’s a balance between knowing you are going to get grunt work, that you are going to be at the bottom of the totem pole for a while, but also, you have to decide for yourself what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior, as well as boundaries.”
Byramji notes how she once walked into a big studio in Atlanta, holding a lot of gear because they were switching studios, and the rapper she was working for said to her, “Do you know how to plug in those wires all by yourself?” Beyond the plainly condescending experiences, she describes the reality of having to turn down opportunities to work with great people because they had just wanted to hookup with her, as well as the process of keeping a professional distance so as to not invite unwanted attention.
With the development of personal technology, both in terms of internet resources and the accessibility of digital audio workspaces (DAW) from the comfort of one’s bedroom, there appears to be a real potential benefit for non-male individuals pursuing production. Dike, Russell, and Orange all came to production by playing around on their computers and experimenting with DAWS, indicating a time where anyone can learn about production without the fear of judgment.
Overall, Dike, Russell, and Orange all felt like their non-male identities gave them an edge, one that if nurtured and developed properly, could end up being a huge advantage in their professional careers.
“There are a lot of women who do great things,” Dike says. “That just means I have to be one of them.”
