In 2021, issues surrounding diversity and equality in the arts have had an increasingly prevalent voice in the media. I am personally pleased to hear about the amount of global and UK based initiatives that are continuously supporting women in the music industry, such as The F-List and She Is The Music, to name a few.

However, recent statistics still show that women are underrepresented in many areas of the music industry. Results from the 2019 USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative showed that amongst the top songs of the year, women made up 2.6% of credited producers, 2.6% of engineers/mixers, 12.5% of songwriters and 21.7% of artists. In addition, the UK Music Diversity Report 2020 reported a steady decline in female representation as the career levels increased in seniority. I myself am a Black female artist and I have seen first-hand the fears and struggles that can come with navigating the music industry as a woman.

Nonetheless, I am grateful that my role as Youth Music Officer at London College of Creative Media (LCCM) has allowed me to assess and challenge how we manage diversity at the college in order to make it a safe and inclusive environment for each of our students.

Equality of opportunity

Through student feedback, we recognised an opportunity to address the needs of our female population and ensure that our curriculum and student experience included equality of opportunity, while also meeting the needs of individuals and groups of students. This resonates with the shift happening across the music industry and the wider creative arts, a call to remove barriers for upcoming female music professionals and to show greater support of female artists’ current successes. It was out of these sentiments that the LCCM Women in Music Initiative was launched in October 2020.

One largely important factor for me is that the LCCM Women in Music Initiative is led by the voices of the students, as opposed to the opinions of one woman. We spent October to December 2020 listening to female students’ thoughts and ideas about how they would like to move forward and be further supported. The initiative started with constant communication with students and staff on how we could make short-term and long-term improvements, increasing opportunities to promote female students in our social media content and increasing their involvement in college activities, as well as working towards a flagship event in March 2021 that would coincide with Women’s History Month.

The main aim of the Women in Music event is to celebrate and promote women in the LCCM community and beyond. It will also create a space for thought provoking discussions that challenge the UK music industry’s current progress surrounding gender diversity. Throughout the event, we are fortunate to be working with women who represent a variety of backgrounds and intersectionalities within the music industry. We have organised two panels designed to cover both the artist and business side of the industry, keeping in mind the students across our degree courses who have a range of career goals.

Continuous feedback fuels growth

Vick Bain, Curator of The F-List, has been a huge support throughout the planning process, and we are very excited to have directors of The F-List featuring on both of our panels. We also wanted to include guests from different areas of our LCCM community, such as LCCM tutor, Nadine Lee, alumna Andrea Rocha, and Suzanna Dee who works with LCCM as an advisory consultant. We are looking forward to hosting live performances from current female LCCM students at our Music Box venue in a season where opportunities for artists to perform are limited.

The central segment of the event will be a production workshop with triple threat Singer/Songwriter, Producer and DJ, Emmavie. It is important that such an event is not only inspiring and engaging but can also provide attendees with information that they can apply to their own music careers.

Our Women in Music event takes place on Saturday 20^th March 2021, and I hope that it will be a highlight in the LCCM calendar. Our work with the initiative, however, will continue long after March, with plans to work with female students more closely in terms of access to mentorship and industry role models as they transition into full-time employment. We are also aware that receiving continual feedback from our students will be an essential part of ensuring that the Women in Music Initiative grows in strength.