On January 26, 2017 LGL`s community centre held the workshop ‘You’re pretty good… for a girl.’, where around 20 people gathered to learn and discuss about feminism and sexism in the context of music industry. You may be thinking… do we really need to talk about this? It’s 2017, we’re over this! And the short answer is: unfortunately, yes.

As a warm up we had a very lively discussion in which we discussed what we understand for ‘sexism’ in which many of the attendees (including the awesome all-female punk band Crucial Features, researchers on sexism and women who faced the situation to be one of the very few females in their fields, such as civil engineering) shared their personal experiences and how they cope with disparity and sexism, from simply trying to be the best at your job, expressing injustice through music to opting for not participating in male dominated fields.

In the second part of the workshop, we presented some key facts and statistics about the current situation in the music industry. For instance, did you know that women make 50% of the audience in the main USA festivals but groups with female members only 22% percent (including mixed-gender bands)? But, since the main purpose of the workshop was to get the conversation started and, most importantly, trying to find how to make things better, we also focused on initiatives showing that quite a lot of female workers in the music industry are fighting this, with examples ranging from the music magazine She Shreds, focused on female musicians, to the icon Beyonce, who is an open feminist activist.

To sum up, it was a very interactive an interesting conversation in which we had the opportunity to learn a bit more about misogyny in the music industry and discuss different points of view, share experiences and, in short, to figure out what can we do now to make things better.

If you would like to get an idea about what was discussed, you can check out our Prezi here. And if you want to talk about feminism with us, come to our next Book Club on the very appropriate date February 14 in which we will discuss one of the essential feminist books: ‘Myth of Beauty’.

LGL is carrying out the 10-month project “Heading Towards Visibility and Equality” under the Erasmus+ program EVS (European Voluntary Service).