Women account for less than 5 percent of producers and engineers — but maybe not for long
From the Nashville Scene | June 3, 2010
by STEVE HARUCH

Steve Haruch interviews several successful female producers for a cover story in the Nashville Scene including Lari White, Gail Davies, Jonell Polanskly, KK Profitt, & Trina Shoemaker. selections from the cover story below, full article available at NashvilleScene.com

Women are as visible as ever in music — between them, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and Lady Gaga have sold over 22 million records since 2008. But look closer at the credits on those albums, and women's names are few and far between. What about producing and engineering? Who's guiding the sound and leading the recording process, and doing the work in the studio that takes the sound waves, electrical impulses and digitized bits of sonic information and shapes them into the music we hear? Those roles are almost all filled by men. Beyoncé was a producer on I Am ... Sasha Fierce, but she is a rare specimen. By most estimates, women represent less than 5 percent of producers and engineers industry-wide...

...Lari White, who co-produced Toby Keith's White Trash With Money, among many other albums, recalls when she had just finished producing her own R&B record, Green Eyed Soul. It was her first completely solo production — from top to bottom, from choosing songs to hiring players and overseeing recording sessions. She and her husband, Chuck Cannon, also a songwriter and musician, brought it to "a friend who's a very successful producer," not to pitch or promote it, but just to let him hear.

"As soon as he finished listening to it," she says, "he turned to my husband and said, 'Yeah, man, that sounds great!' " White laughs when she recounts the story, but she also acknowledges, "That kind of stuff can kind of wear on you after a while. I totally get the desire to get ... angry [laughs], but it's pointless."

..."It's very hard not to create your own filters in your own head of, 'I have something to overcome, I have to prove myself twice as much, I have to be twice as good,' " White says. "It's a bit of a tricky psychological tightrope for a woman, with all of our historical baggage, just to find a way to be in charge completely, and without any doubt that at the end of the day the buck stops right here — without ... well, just in the right way. In the way that's honest for you as a woman and as a musician, and all those other things that figure into it."

Or maybe it's just that women feel like they're walking that tightrope, but men don't. After giving a speech at Berklee College of Music, she asked how many of the women in the audience wanted to be producers or engineers, and a lot of hands went up. "Now I'm going to tell you a secret, y'all," she told them. "All these boys sitting around you, they don't know any more than you do. They just fake it better."

The factor that comes up most often when discussing gender disparities in traditionally male fields, especially anything technical, is socialization. From a young age, girls are taught to defer, to be mild — to be Sasha Nice, not Sasha Fierce.