261 The Female Music Producer
Lauren reflects that to gain entrance to the field she needed to provide
effervescence, especially in her contact with men. She hints at the way
sexual undercurrents underpin interactions between young female neo-
phytes to the business and established males; women in positions similar
to Lauren must negotiate how their need to engage in the “economy of
smiles” is sexually interpreted. Lauren is in her twenties but says she
looks younger: “People do think I’m sixteen, which is, whatever, their
issue”. This statement acknowledges the negative side of the gendered
nurturing economy, a “dark side” that is documented in other research
(Ward and McMurray, 2016). At the same time as relying on the abil-
ity to provide emotional labor, Lauren must manage the male gaze that
constructs her as object, even as she seeks to develop subjectivity in the
industry.
Lauren describes this process as “crucial” to establishing herself
because she is unable to benefit from the tacit fraternity to which men
have access. For a woman to resist the “economy of smiles” may stymie
a fledgling career. But, to balance this dark side to emotional labor, there
is also the positive side, where women can use the gendered nurturing
economy to their advantage, and this becomes part of their approach to
music production, the crux of the leveraging of perceptions of feminin-
ity. We might describe this as a “difference dividend”; the expectation
that a female producer will be aligned to the relational is fully embraced
by Aubrey and Lauren and, we suggest, this has a significant impact on
their business success, but also may change the production process and
the music product.
Partaking in the nurturing economy and being willing to undertake sig-
nificant amounts of emotional labor means that both Lauren and Aubrey
become visible as female music producers. They are both seeking to bring
something different and valuable to the role in ways that they perceive men
are less inclined or less equipped to do. This is a more positive approach
to the nurturing economy that seems to pay off, entrepreneurially. In other
male-dominated professions, the emotional labor that women are expected
to undertake is often devalued, invisible, and certainly unlikely to be mar-
ketable (Bagilhole, 2002).
4
Both Lauren and Aubrey see their gender dif-
ference as a way of standing out from the male crowd, contrasting with the
context of the denigration of relational, pastoral, and emotional labor in
other industries. Women in music production can capitalize on difference,
on the idealized feminine relational skills.
Lauren senses and experiences the difference in approach to emotional
labor in the studio in gendered ways amongst her clients. Whilst she is
uneasy about feeding gendered stereotypes, nevertheless, there is in her
experience a different dynamic with male clients and female clients:
before any session I do with female artists, we literally will spend an
hour or two talking. . . . Male artists are like “I know what I want. Let’s
go”. I’ll start recording in the rst ve minutes with a male artist . . .
that was a hundred percent of the time. I can’t deny it, . . . but I think a
lot of the time it’s just that the guys aren’t taught to talk a lot.
262 Sharon Jagger and Helen Turner
The difference is not naturalized or essentialized by Lauren, but she under-
stands tendencies to engage in talk as learned behaviors that accord with
notions of masculinity and femininity. The ability and willingness to listen
to the artist is framed as an opportunity to leverage perceptions that a
female producer and engineer is likely to have a sensibility that changes
the dynamic of the process, and therefore the sound of the product. Com-
menting on how mixing recorded and live music is influenced by gender,
Sandstrom (2000) argues that female engineers respond more sensitively to
what is asked of them by the artist, which is how both Lauren and Aubrey
explain their approach. Reflecting on this phenomenon more deeply, we
suggest this is a two-way process and that female artists may also under-
take emotional labor in return; women working with women are able to
leverage this dynamic, a process that becomes anchored in the relational.
The emotional labor offered by female music producers is something
that Aubrey sees as the appeal for artists, and again sees a difference
between the male and female client and their expectations:
The majority of them will say, “this is great, I’ve been looking for a fe-
male producer, I spotted you working with a male producer and I wanted
to work with [a female producer]”. The girls say that more than the men.
The notion that male and female artists may sometimes be seeking differ-
ent experiences from music producers is coupled with the understanding
that women producers are better equipped – or perhaps more willing – to
deliver the emotional labor sought. Both Aubrey and Lauren spend time
talking and getting to know their clients, and in some cases they develop
friendships. Significantly, Aubrey sees her work as enhanced by traits that
are perceived as feminine:
There’s been a lot of stories that with men, they can’t connect with the
producer that well. So, they’re not getting what they want musically,
they don’t feel comfortable. So, I think a woman may be more empa-
thetic and will take the time to get to know them and build a relation-
ship. I think that’s the feedback I seem to have had.
It is the explicitly feminine (if constructed) ability to undertake emotional
labor that becomes the basis of how both Aubrey and Lauren leverage
gender difference, not only to genuinely nurture the artist through the pro-
cess for the sake of musicality, but also to establish themselves as female
producers, standing out against the male crowd.
“BEST OF THE GIRLS”: THE LEVERAGING OF
DIFFERENCE
Sandstrom (2000), a music engineer herself, suggests that in some cases
when women enter a male-dominated world, such as music technology,
there is a suspension of gender. The stories of Aubrey and Lauren suggest,
however, that far from dissolving gendered distinctions, their identity as
263 The Female Music Producer
music producers relies heavily on their femaleness and on perceptions of
feminine nurturing traits. This is leveraging a strategic difference, and
both Aubrey and Lauren understand their femininity as marketable. In
whatever terms difference is couched, Aubrey seeks to elevate her female-
ness to establish space in which difference is positive. On her website, she
writes:
I am also proud to be one of the very few successful female Record
Producers from the UK and I do all I can to promote the important role
of women in music by teaching Music Production at colleges, run-
ning monthly online masterclass sessions and oering an internship
scheme specically for female students.
(Whitfield, 2019)
Aubrey believes that being female in the male-dominated music produc-
tion industry does not require her to be the honorary male, but that her dif-
ference, manifested through those traits of relationality that are perceived
to be feminine, is a boon to her career. She is not seeking to belong in the
same way as the male producer but is rather elevating the feminine and
moreover encouraging other women to do the same; promoting female-
ness is connected to a political sisterhood that will encourage more women
to call themselves music producers through the construction of creden-
tials that are tailored to women. Aubrey is consciously carving out female
space in the industry.
Aubrey’s taxonomical choice – calling herself a “female producer” – is
subversive. Aubrey is troubling the notion that the female negative seman-
tic space must always be overcome (Spender, 1985; Weatherall, 2002).
5
In other words, rather than attempting to rehabilitate the title of “music
producer” to incorporate the female, she makes herself visible in being
entitled as a “female music producer”, which capitalizes on the currency
she generates by acting out the positive gender difference in the studio.
She is also eschewing the idea of being the same as the male, declaring
difference as a positive attribute rather than aping the male producer. We
see this in paradigmatic terms; Aubrey is establishing a feminine approach
to music production, one she believes some artists seek out, and is pro-
foundly affective because emotional labor is affective (see Ahmed, 2004;
Liljeström, 2016).
6
In other words, the emotional is an intrinsic part of the
production process that is given currency using attributes accorded to the
feminine.
Leveraging difference through language makes Aubrey highly visible,
but this is a strategy that may only pay dividends whilst women are in a
significant minority. Both Aubrey and Lauren, however, are committed
to trailblazing to draw more women to the industry. For the time being,
though, emphasizing gender difference allows women who are producers
to distinguish themselves in a competitive field. Aubrey is ambitious, but
she couches her definition of success in gendered terms: “My goals are
kind of high ones, you know, to be one of the biggest female producers
of all time” (italics ours). When we asked whether this was a deliberate
264 Sharon Jagger and Helen Turner
choice of differentiating language, she was taken aback at her own uncon-
scious use of the term “female producer”. As we discussed this use of
language, Aubrey theorizes why she carries the prefix, and this reveals a
profound sense of separation because of her sex:
Ok, that’s interesting that you’ve picked up on that. Because in my
head, God, if I had any ambition it would be to be the best record
producer in this country, but in my head that’s completely out of reach
because it’s so competitive. So, the next best option is kind of best of
the girls [laughs]. But if you think about it, you are, there are some
really successful female producers at the moment, not a huge amount,
but one or two. But it’s still an open playing eld. For there to be
someone, if you think of the huge producers . . . they’re just as famous
as artists. You know, we know who they are. But there’s no female
producer you can say they’re as big as an artist. So, there’s no huge
role model. I just think it’s so important to ll that space, to help en-
courage people.
For Aubrey, entering a field that is dominated by men means the space
at the top is already crowded with well-known male producers. The feel-
ing that there is no room for the female in this elite circle indicates that
Aubrey perceives women as ‘outsiders’ in music production. To miti-
gate the inability to penetrate the field on male terms, Aubrey can see the
emerging space ready to be occupied by the female; it is “an open playing
field.” That Aubrey sees success as measured against the male elite as
unreachable raises several questions about how women see themselves
in the music production and engineering field. The benefit of seeing the
figurative space in separated and gendered terms is that women become
visible, and this is important to Aubrey, who has a passion for being a role
model to other aspiring women producers and engineers; seeing the indus-
try as carved into gendered spaces may help women raise their profile as
women and on their own terms. This is a positive visibility that contrasts
the out-of-place visibility that both Aubrey and Lauren have experienced;
in this perceptual context they are visible as producers.
CONCLUSION: THE EMOTION OF PRODUCTION
During this research process, we have been affected by the idea that work-
ing with women producers may profoundly alter the experience of the
music-making process. Reflecting on our own experiences in the studio,
we speculate whether the product has an appreciably different quality
under the production of a woman who values the relational and who is
willing to not only listen but also to engage in emotional labor to make
the artist feel good, feel understood. The culturally feminine attention
to nurture and emotion is part of an affective process that we suggest
can change the final recorded product. As recording artists, we find this
proposition extremely attractive, and it seems to us, having listened to the
stories of Aubrey and Lauren as well as drawing on our own experience,
265 The Female Music Producer
that producing recorded music is as much an emotional process as it is a
technical one.
We have shown that visibility for women in music production is
double-edged; they can be out of place, becoming visible because they are
transgressing gendered expectations and because of their minority status.
We have argued that women as music producers are at times constructed
as “bodies out of place” (Ahmed, 2000; Puwar, 2004), being required to
adapt to a masculinized space and to overcome perceptions that they do
not look like a (male) music producer. But visibility is also marketable
for women; Lauren and Aubrey have a genuinely nurturing attitude and
harnessing traits that women are expected to possess, their approach to
the production process is sought out by artists (especially female artists).
However, there remains a cost to differentiation for women in music pro-
duction, which is not entirely mitigated by the attempts to elevate a femi-
nine approach. Entry points may be gendered, and Lauren’s story suggests
a heavy reliance on accruing social capital through gendered (and some-
times sexualized) emotional labor. Moreover, there remain historically
pre-existing binary alignments between gender and technology that frame
the female engineer as transgressive.
Ultimately, the success stories of Aubrey and Lauren are about leverag-
ing strategic difference to carve out space that allows women to flourish as
producers without being required to compete with, or be the same as, male
producers. Of course, this leveraging of strategic difference is not sim-
ply an entrepreneurial quirk, but a way of troubling binaries that are con-
structed as part of a masculine paradigm that leave women alienated from
technology and production. This troubling is appealing to us, as it seems
to be to many other artists who wish to elevate the emotional contribution
to the process of making music. As we have explored this subject, we have
understood more clearly the gendered nature of our own studio experi-
ences. Perhaps one day we will record our next album on a London indus-
trial estate where the toilets are not labeled as exclusively male and where
music is produced in an environment that supports female belonging.
NOTES
1. We focus here on women who are professional music producers, rather than
women who self-produce as artists (see Wolfe, 2012).
2. We separate the terms sex and gender to emphasize that sex is the biological
dierence and gender is the constructed set of characteristics given to femi-
nine and masculine. This separation of sex and gender has been an important
feature of feminist thought, given early prominence in Simone de Beauvoir’s
The Second Sex (1949 [2009]).
3. ‘Cultural capital’ is a term coined by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1984
[2010]) and describes the accumulation of specialized knowledge that enables
a person to maintain distinction and belonging in a particular eld.
4. Bagilhole’s discussion of non-traditional occupations includes the priest-
hood, where pastoral skills are often seen as feminine, but also marginal-
ized, juxtaposed against leadership qualities that are aligned to the masculine.
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