Throughout history, there has been a rather noticeable lack of documentation of women who have contributed to the music industry. A great quote that truly captures this message is as follows: “Just as recording engineers use the processing tool known as noise gate to mute audible signals below a defined threshold of volume… arbitrary thresholds have often silenced women’s work in historical accounts” (Reddington 2021, 96). Due to this, many women who possess some interest in entering musical production professions do not have many role models to look up to for guidance. A great deal of the process of entering any profession lies within following parallel journeys of those who came before you. On account of the minimal presence of female representation within musical production history, many of these women don’t have access to a professional framework for entering these professions as a woman.
The minimal documentation we do have of women in the music industry details significant gender discrimination throughout the business, characterized by female artists having little control over their work. Pop stars like Cyndi Lauper and Madonna had to find ways to maneuver the barriers set out to stop their artistic creativity. Lauper, for her hit song “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” (1983), traded official songwriting credit for the ability to significantly alter the lyrics and make the record her own (Lewis 1990, 96). Lauper decided that official recognition was worth losing if it allowed her to have control in such a male-dominated field. Madonna, on the other hand, took the opposite approach. She frequently negotiated ways to be credited on collaborations to build a strong track record that eventually led her to be credited as a producer. In an interview, Madonna reveals that it wasn’t until the making of her second album, Like a Virgin, that she had the confidence to speak out, take control of her work, and believe that she was capable of running the show (Lewis 1990, 107). Fast-forwarding from the 1980s to the early 2000s, women still saw gender discrimination permeate every aspect of the music industry. Women who wanted to have a role in the business, whether as songwriters, producers, artists, or critics, were stopped at the door of the impenetrable “boys club.”
This characterization of the music production profession as a “boys club” is largely rooted within the gendered expectations that outline which career options are appropriate for each gender. According to Wolfe (2012), as the music industry has continued to develop, women have always been expected to ‘just a singer’, and this expectations stems from the belief that women are less suited to attain mastery and proficiency within the sectors of instrumental and music production. Wolfe (2012) then went on to state that the perceived ‘natural’ and ‘artless’ nature of being ‘just a singer’ has been utilized to further justify this rather sextist ideology. The discrepancy of this argument lies in the fact that women were often not even afforded the opportunity to “prove” to men that they were just as capable, if not more, of becoming proficient within the music production industry. Prior to the creation of modern technologies, like the computer, a vast array of these educational tools could only be accessed within recording studios, which women rarely had access to (Wolfe 2012).
According to Reddington (2021), “The definition of men as cerebral creatures and women as their supporters and muses has been in evidence since the Industrial Revolution” (p.95). Essentially, women were never characterized as intellectual beings but instead were seen as intellectually inferior to men. Because of this, it was not common for women to enter these musical spaces and play leading roles in the recording and manipulation of vocal performances and instruments. Consequently, while men and their skillsets benefited immensely from the advent of notable musical technologies, like autotune, women were not provided with many opportunities to develop the same skills and proficiencies.