Training the intersectional vision: the r-evolution of women in the music industry and communities fighting for their visibility and rights.

We are in a process of return, forced or not, to the (more than necessary) concept of "community". The fragmentation imposed on us by the COVID19 pandemic, due to isolation in micro-groups, is what has surely triggered an acceleration in the increasingly solid and active formation of communities, online or offline, representing like-minded humans, sharing ethical, spiritual, material or cultural values. The movements of change that are taking place in today's society also respond to the impact that these unions of people have on contemporary discourse.

Moreover, the generation that has the right of possession of the 21st century uses a key word to define itself: "fluid". A word that admits many interpretations, but which conveys a feeling of acceptance of change, of the non-permanent, of non-violent subversion of the established. 

Are we then facing a third sexual revolution? 

The 21st century is the century I want to live in. Technology allows us to be in contact with the world. It is also technology that allowed Andreea Magdalina in 2014 to create the group shesaid.so, which at the time started by connecting women in the music world from London, where it was established at the time, through a Google Group. I joined the group in 2014 and have been part of the board committee ever since. Joining shesaid.so was a paradigm shift in my life and made me a mentor, role model and workforce, with all the responsibilities that these roles required. 

The story of shesaid.so is exemplary. shesaid.so is a global independent community of women and gender minorities in the music industry, which since its inception has evolved into the largest independent communities in the music business. 

The shesaid.so community is made up of women and gender minorities from all sectors of the music industry: from record labels, artist management companies and booking agencies, to tech platforms, creative agencies, songwriters, artists and more. Headquartered in London and Los Angeles, shesaid.so has many global chapters, including Spain, New York, France, Italy, Mumbai and South Africa, as well as micro-chapters in several other cities, and over 20,000 members worldwide.

Intersectionality is paramount to the community, which recognises the compounded challenges faced by other marginalised or minority groups, in addition to their gender, due to race, sexuality and/or sexual identity, cultural nuance, or faith.

At the Ibiza Music Summit in 2019, shesaid.so presented the talk "Investigating Intersectionality" with the following introduction: "...the term "intersectionality" was coined by UCLA Law professor and critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 to refer to the relationship between race and gender in light of US-born feminism and its impact on black women, in particular. It has since developed a multitude of meanings, some more accurate than others, to refer to the additional layers of discrimination faced by other marginalised community groups in addition to gender: race, age, sexual orientation, economic class and background, disability, etc.". These intersections need to be explored to highlight that diversity extends beyond gender.

The website "periferica" further clarifies that "intersectionalities should be a non-negotiable part of the human rights discourse and specifically, of the struggles for women's rights. The emergence of the term intersectionality in fact coincides in time with the rise of the movements of the Third Wave of feminism, which took off in the 1990s, and both feed back and enrich each other".

In 2015 shesaid.so Barcelona was created. It was a milestone to be able to start working on the field, where I live, and to transfer the conversations that were growing on the network to physical events, boosting the meeting with local realities that wanted to be affiliated with these principles. Even then, with Carmen Zapata and Celia Carrillo, great professionals and veterans of the industry in Spain, synergetic debates were generated. This led to the creation of MIM, Women in the Music Industry, a strong community centralised in the Spanish territory that was born as an association in September 2016 during the 28th edition of the Mercat de Música Viva de Vic, an event that coincidentally offered the most female programme in the history of the Mercat. 

With more than 100 members at present, and objectives more aligned with the pressure on institutions and politics, and developing a great fieldwork for the investigation of these inequalities, both from a quantitative and qualitative point of view, MIM also declares "...our ultimate goal is our dissolution. We wish with all our strength that the day will come when there will be no need for our association, nor for our website, or that our website and association will become "Music Industry Professionals" where men and women will have the same treatment, the same salaries, the same opportunities, and the same possibilities".

In the thread of this chronology of the birth of what we can call "the Third Wave of feminism" in the music industry, Keychange also emerged in the same year as MIM in the UK. Keychange was initiated by Vanessa Reed, then CEO of the PRS Foundation (the English SGAE) and now President of New Music in the US, and is being launched in 2017 across Europe. 

The Keychange Commitment to equal representation in the line-ups of international and national events was proposed by the original Keychange festival partners, who wanted to demonstrate that they were serious about their commitment to gender equality, as well as providing showcase opportunities for under-represented talent. 

In addition, they set themselves up as a platform where they could offer these talents, mentoring and selecting them for artistic growth. Supported by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, Keychange is a global network and movement working for a total restructuring of the music industry. In one of its latest articles on its website, it has also highlighted a European study of profound impact for the Post-Covid era: "Plan de trabajo para la cultura 2019-2022: hacia la igualdad de género en el sector cultural y creativo” published by the European Union in June this year, a must-read to understand the current situation of imbalance and evolution in the aspired conquest of equality.

FemNoise and We Are Equals join this historical vision of the movements that have arisen in the century we live in.

We are Equals is the brainchild of Ludovic Assémat, head of the arts department at the British Council in Spain. This platform of the British institution for gender equality and diversity in electronic music seeks to identify the future leaders of this industry in order to create a positive change with the help of the main organisations and companies in this sector. We are Equals collaborates with shesaid.so and Keychange, joining forces to drive change in the industry. And finally, Femnoise, created and led by Natalia San Juan. The platform has an independent network, also very strong in Latin America, which promotes projects that offer technological solutions for the generation of new business opportunities for women, trans and non-binary people, mainly focused on strengthening their careers, fostering global synergies and facilitating the creation of new referents, and works on the active role of women and dissidents in the Sustainable Development Goals promoted by the United Nations.

The plurality of voices and representation of intersectional realities in Spain and Spanish speaking countries is real, active and is taking giant steps forward. And the synergy between all these realities is necessary to offer maximum opportunities to those who have not had access to professional growth in the world of music and the arts. The mentoring programmes launched this year 2021, as well as the announcement of the first meeting of all these platforms at BIME, in Bilbao, in October 2021, are milestones that will surely mark a generation. But in addition, using the concept of "fluid" mentioned above, naturally, all the individual manifestos of each of the communities converge in a great common goal: to correct the inequality of opportunities, the abuse of power, and to offer a more ethical, more egalitarian, fairer industry. 

We are facing a very important challenge, as the impact of Covid19 has meant a regression of women's rights in the world of work, not only related to maternity, but also to the reduction of jobs. It is the responsibility of governments, of institutions and not only of platforms of struggle created by citizens, to finance, encourage and ensure that this "fluidity" is respected and fulfilled. 

The concept of diversity is a right, it is a fact and it is far from everything that is established. The pandemic forces us to be resilient, but also to accept that the established can be "disestablished". 

The r-evolution is here. The only way forward is forward.

Thank you all for reading. This article was originally published in Spanish for Revista Protocolo and the BIME guide 2021. Special thanks to Delia Garnier for the translation.