ShivIn its simplest form, International Women’s Day is aimed at highlighting the unequal treatment of women as well as being an occasion to shine a light on the many amazing achievements by females worldwide.
Across a huge variety of industries and facets of life, including dance music, there is a huge disparity between the recognition and representation of women versus men. It’s an incredibly nuanced issue as to how this arises and while we’ve seen an improvement in recent years, there is still a long way to go.
Through running events, and the magazine, we encounter this issue on a daily basis. As this year’s theme is ‘Choose To Challenge‘ we’d like to take the opportunity to encourage female artists to send us in their music and mixes. To make this an easy process we’ve set up a dedicated application form to reach us directly as being a small team, a lot can naturally get lost in the huge amount of mail we receive daily.
Although we often ask people to share and tag producers online, it’s not always the best format for people who prefer avoiding the public eye. This is a safe space to share your music, mixes, or ideas for the dance music community at Four Four Mag.
We’ve previously hesitated on doing a call-out as we felt the music industry was becoming more representative of female DJs and producers, with many getting the attention and credit they deserve. We thought the change in our content would happen naturally as more female artists released music and mixes, but unfortunately, in our experience, this hasn’t always been the case.
We also hesitated as we didn’t feel particularly comfortable asking specifically for female involvement as we never want to perpetuate the problem. To us, a good DJ or producer is just that, despite gender. But the stats speak for themselves, there is less recognition for female DJs, producers and even general event and music industry staff, which has inspired us to encourage anyone who is working on electronic music, DJing or electronic music focused events to reach out to us on the form linked here.
WOMEN MAKE UP LESS THAN 3% OF TECHNICAL AND
PRODUCTION ROLES IN THE MUSIC INDUSTRY.
– ANNENBERG INSTITUTE
Change is born through supporting the community, supporting each other and acknowledging where change needs to happen. We see this as a small change that we can make on our side and we hope you join us on this journey to represent the rich and diverse talent we have on our island.
