"Pitifully low" numbers of women and non-binary people in audio production and engineering roles, report finds
Less than three percent of music producers credited on the Billboard Hot 100 were women, according to the Fix The Mix Report
A new report has found that women and non-binary people are heavily underrepresented in the audio production and engineering sector.
Published earlier this week, the first Fix The Mix Report included the alarming revelation that only 2.8% of music producers credited across 1,100 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 Year-End Charts from 2012 to 2022 were women. Another statistic featured in the report was that just 16 of the 240 credited producers and engineers for the top ten streamed tracks of 2022 were women or non-binary.
Of the 14 genre categories assessed by the team behind the report, electronic music was the one that had the highest representation of women and non-binary people taking production and engineering roles. That figure was still only 17.6% though.
"We've got such a long way to go to reach parity in the studio, but I know we can get there," said Fix The Mix's Brandi Carlile. "This is a systemic problem in the recording industry that we cannot ignore any longer.
"I'm not sure everyone knows exactly where to start, but it begins with the courage to take a chance on someone who may not be getting recognised regularly in the field. We have to start somewhere."
Fix The Mix is a project set up by non-profit We Are Moving The Needle and Jaxsta, an official music credits database. With the backing of organisations like shesaid.so, Women In Music and Equalize Her, it aims to increase diversity across the music industry.
You can read the first Fix The Mix Report in full here.
Last month, UK DJ Jaguar examined gender disparities in UK dance music in a documentary podcast, which followed on from Jaguar publishing a groundbreaking report on gender disparities across UK dance music last year.
