As we celebrate International Women's Day 2020, Abbey Road Studios’ Managing Director Isabel Garvey outlines our ambitions as a studio to help inspire and engage more young women to consider a path in production and engineering. This begins today with the launch of our Abbey Road Equalise programme and the free, introductory Music Production Masterclass in conjuction with Abbey Road Institute.

As another International Women’s Day rolls around, my focus is razor sharp on the fact that women continue to represent less that 6% of music producers and engineers. I have spent the last couple of years asking myself “why is that?” and trying to understand the issues. Is the system working? Are women aware of music production as a career path? Do we talk about the many successful female producers and engineers enough? The answer to all of these questions is a categoric “NO”.

Over the course of 2019, we invited the female producers and engineers in our network, as well as colleagues from other London recording studios, into Abbey Road for a series of meeting of minds and networking sessions. It was wonderful to be in a room full of such talented women who are brimming with ideas on how to shift the paradigm. However, it was eye opening how relatively small the group was initially. As the year went on, the network grew and we now have a 50 strong group of women who try to meet more regularly – and we hope that group continues to grow in strength. What I love about the conversations and idea sharing sessions is that not one woman in the room was playing the ‘blame game’. All of them are tenacious self-starters and have been helped and supported by women and men through their careers. The group’s main focus was about how we encourage more girls into music production careers, how we make the industry network more approachable and how we all support and elevate each other. These women are talented, inclusive, ambitious and engaging – who wouldn’t want to work with them?

Looking directly at Abbey Road Studios we have two women on our engineering staff, which simply isn’t enough. We have offered more engineering positions to brilliant women over the past year, but they have turned down the roles, opting instead for a more flexible employment option – which potentially points to another structural issue or broken system. I am, however, buoyed by the new generation of female audio professionals starting to come through in much higher proportions in the Diploma course offered by our own Abbey Road Institute. I am also proud of how engaged our engineering and studios team is about creating a more diverse and inclusive workplace at the Studios now. That’s why we focused on making engineering and production careers more accessible with online content and production masterclasses at BBC Introducing Live last year, as well as setting up our network of talented women in production.

In 2020 we want to take it a step further and use the Abbey Road Equalise programme to highlight the talented women in the UK music production business, create an approachable introduction to a potential production career path for young women and create a network that is actively driving equality in the control room, writing room and production studio. It’s a tall order and we will only get there by working with our own engineering staff at Abbey Road, the many artists, producers & songwriters who want to see change, our broader industry network, our friends at Universal Music and our colleagues who run other studios. Together I hope we can move the needle a little more in 2020. I’m looking forward to an exciting year of growing the network, working with the many other organisations pushing for the same change and creating moments of real impact big and small.