@TwitterAU headquarters with Zela Margossian
I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve been invited to the Australian Women in Music Awards (AWMA) at the Powerhouse in Brisbane this year as an SSI delegate (Settlement Services International). Last week, Twitter Australia partnered with AWMA and SSI to focus on female leadership and cultural diversity in the music industry at their exclusive #setthestandard event.
Twitter’s highly successful series #setthestandard has been empowering women to communicate fearlessly on Twitter since 2017, bringing together influential women who “Set The Standard” when it comes to campaigning for gender equality.
Kween G, Australian hip hop artist and cultural leader, facilitated a panel of four influential women in entertainment (pictured above). It featured AWMAs’ founder Vicki Gordon alongside Kiri Koubaroulis, creative producer at Campbelltown Arts Centre, hip hop artist Nardean and City Recital Hall’s CEO Elaine Chia.
3 things I learned from listening to the panel were:
1. Women are grossly under-represented on both music boards and festival line ups according to Vicki Gordon. Therefore, mandatory quotas (requiring a certain number of women to be included) can help equalise numbers. The idea that board members or acts should be chosen on ‘merit’ and not gender is not justified when ‘merit’ is often the result of opportunity/privilege.
2. We need to empower the men to support the women – so that male fronted bands and festivals themselves feel inspired to stand for fairer representation of women.
3. It’s also crucial to represent women of colour within the industry and thanks to AWMAs partnering with Settlement Services International, multicultural voices are being heard. To quote Kween G from last year’s panel “We should normalise hearing music of different languages on a mainstream platform, we should normalise seeing women of colour, women with different abilities. We should be focusing on quality and normalising that.”