Friday, March 18, 2011

Shitty things about the women in rock panel

We only caught the last 10 minutes, Q&A.

- No diversity. In color or age.
- a lady with a band asked for advice on getting her band covered by female music journalists that have influence. Their advice was "cream rises." I won't pretend I have influence, but hello, I was in the room. The flipside of the way technology has democratize music production is that it has also democratized music journalism. We should all be musician journalists and we should all promote.
- a young lady asked for advice about breaking in to the industry (making connections, etc) and they told her to get an internship and not to cry. Then one of the panelists talked about how her granddaughter has an internship with Jack White. Wow inspiring! I don't begrudge using what you've got to get where you need to go, but it wasn't really an appropriate answer.
- a young lady sound engineer asked about getting harsh attention from a professor, and then sort of revealed he's trying to mentor her. She was really asking about walking the line between the various ways she's being singled out as a woman. In my experience, in small fields, mentoring plays a huge role in maintaining the boys club, and it sounds like this guy might be trying to help change that? Even if he's doing a shit job? The panel's advice was to get him fired.

There is so much nuance involved when you're talking about gender and balance and careers and art. I think we're beyond the point where we can mechanically toss out "equal treatment" rhetoric and expect to have a productive conversation. Especially in an industry which singles out the talent.

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