Experiences and Perceptions of Gender in the Australian Music Industry

[PB 20.1 (2019) 8-39] Perfect Beat (print) ISSN 1038-2909 https://doi.org/10.1558/prbt.39800 Perfect Beat (online) ISSN 1836-0343 Hannah Fairlamb Bianca Fileborn Experiences and perceptions of gender in the Australian music industry Hannah Fairlamb is an Adelaide musician and University of Adelaide researcher, currently working on Kaurna coun- North Terrace try in State Government gender policy. She Adelaide SA 5000 is co-founder and co-director of youth music Australia mentoring project Girls Rock! Adelaide, and is [email protected] working towards solidifying this not-for-profit organization in the music industry landscape in South Australia. Dr Bianca Fileborn is a Lecturer in Criminology Room W606, John Medley Building and DECRA ARC Fellow in the School of Social and School of Social and Political Sciences Political Sciences, University of Melbourne. Her Faculty of Arts current work focuses on public harassment and University of Melbourne victim-centred justice, sexual violence and safety Parkville VIC 3010 at music festivals, and safety and harassment of Australia users of taxi and ride share services. [email protected] Abstract This article reports results from an online survey (n=207) about experiences and perceptions of gender from those working in the Australian music industry. Taking a feminist approach, theory on gender and hegemonic masculinity is used to discuss power in a gendered context in this industry. Literature shows women and girls experience a range of difficulties in the music industry worldwide, such as negative assumptions about their skill levels. The small body of research on gender and the Australian music industry has discussed topics such as the forget- ting of women in Australian popular music history. Results reported in this article show that women’s worst experiences most often related to sexual violence or unwanted sexual advances; and men’s most often related to money. Findings contribute to the field by providing gendered analysis of self-reported data in an under-researched industry. Keywords: music; gender; sexual harassment; Australia; music industry; popular music © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2020, Office 415, The Workstation, 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield S1 2BX. Experiences and perceptions of gender 9 Introduction In December 2017, off the back of the global #MeToo anti-sexual violence movement and in the shadow of Australian female punk band Camp Cope’s #ItTakesOne campaign seeking to end sexual harassment at music gigs, Australian musicians and industry leaders launched #meNOmore. Signed by high-profile women, LGBTQIA+ people, Indigenous people, and people of colour in the Australian music industry, the open letter said ‘no more’ to the ‘uncountable discrimination, harassment, violence, and the general menace of sexist jargon’ all-too-commonly encountered by these groups (The Brag 2017). While gender inequality is an issue spanning many different industries (Australian Human Rights Commission 2018)—some- thing lucidly illustrated by the #MeToo movement—the #meNOmore campaign, together with emerging research (Cooper, Coles and Hanna-Osborne 2017; Throsby and Petetskaya 2017), illustrates that gender inequality is rife within the Australian music industry. Despite this burgeoning attention to the issues of gender inequality and harassment in the music industry, on the whole these issues remain under- examined within an Australian context: a disparity that this article seeks to address. In this article, we present findings from an online survey of 207 participants working in the Australian music industry which asked about experiences and perceptions of gender in relation to discrimination, inequality and exclusion in this industry. Based on the experiences and perceptions of participants, we argue that gender inequality is perpetuated within the Australian music industry through the presence of sexual harassment and violence, and through the reinforcement of gendered norms that privilege and support men—though these must also be understood as situated within broader societal regimes of gender inequality. There were also notable differences in the extent and nature of negative experiences of the music industry for male and female participants, and we unpack these findings and their implications. Key findings in this space include that the Australian music industry is characterized as a negative place for women and an exclusion- ary ‘boys’ club’; that women are less positive about their experiences in this industry; and that women felt they were treated differently and had missed out on opportunities because of their gender. Significantly, women reported a much more negative experience than men, and related accounts of multiple levels of disadvan- tage and discrimination including high levels of sexual harassment and sexual violence. These findings are significant because they add quantitative and qualitative evidence from both men and women which confirms previous findings that the music industry is a privileged space for men, while demonstrating that there are multiple barriers to success in this industry for those that do not identify as male. Providing a clearer picture of the experiences and perceptions of those working within the Australian music industry will add to the limited research in this area © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2020. 10 Perfect Beat and increase understandings of the ways in which gender shapes lived experiences of this industry. We move on now to situate this project within existing research on gender, inequality and the music industry before providing an overview of the research methods. We then examine findings from the mixed-methods online survey. In closing, we consider the implications of this research for addressing the ongoing issues of gender inequality, discrimination and sexual harassment within the music industry. What do we know about gender and the music industry? This work is informed by theoretical contributions on gender and critical mascu- linities (Budgeon 2014; Bach 2012; Connell 2005; Risman 2004). Gender is a multi- faceted concept, with this term encapsulating social structure and organization, relations of power, and personal identity (Butler 1990; Connell 2005; Risman 2004). We draw on critical and post-structural conceptions of gender in the approach underpinning this work. While we follow a post-structuralist approach that views gender as performative and fluid, we also recognize that gendered performance is both situated within, and actively reconstitutes, structures of power (Connell 2005). Connell’s (2005) work on hegemonic masculinity is instructive here, with this work illustrating that while there are multiple and fluid concepts of what it means to ‘be a man’, hegemonic masculinity is the version of masculinity most revered (and, thus, associated with power and access to resources) in a particular social and cultural context. This last point is a particularly relevant one, as it suggests the need to consider how masculinity operates in a context-specific way. As such, we turn now to examine the literature on gender in the Australian and other Western music industries. Specifically, we consider the gendered organization of music industries in relation to access to power and tangible resources, and the symbolic and cultural construc- tion of gender and reification of particular forms of masculinity. Access to power and resources Research illustrates that men systematically enjoy greater access to positions of power and other resources within the music industry than women (and likely also LGBTQIA+ people, First Nations people, and people of colour). A recent report released by the Women, Work and Leadership Research Group at the University of Sydney (Cooper et al. 2017) noted that although 45% of qualified musicians and half of those studying music are women, women constitute only one in five song- writers and composers registered with the Australasian Performing Rights Asso- ciation (APRA). The report also stated that © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2020. Experiences and perceptions of gender 11 women receive less airplay on Australian radio and are consistently outnum- bered by men on Triple J’s annual countdown of the 100 most popular songs and albums; music festival line-ups are dominated (sometimes entirely) by male artists and male-lead acts; women are significantly less likely to be hon- oured in the music industry’s most prestigious awards including the ARIAs, ‘J’ and AIR awards; women hold only 28 percent of senior and strategic roles in key industry organizations; and there are no women on the boards of ARIA or AIR and women are underrepresented on the boards of all other national music industry peak bodies (Cooper et al. 2017: 2). The segregation of job roles by gender provides a case in point, with similar pat- terns observed across other male-dominated industries (Corcoran-Nantes and Roberts 1995; Jones 2017; Denissen 2010; Manhertz 2016; Cech 2013). Roles associated with power, authority, decision-making and creativity are more frequently filled by men, leaving women predominantly in what are regarded as feminized roles (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2015). This phenomenon is entrenched in the music industry and has been observed extensively in literature (Cooper et al. 2017; Frith and McRobbie 1991 [1978]; Gaar 1992; Raphael 1995; Whiteley 2000; Leon- ard 2007; Donze 2016). Mayhew (2001) noted that producers, managers, recording engineers, record management have all been dominated by men, while women are

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